Pen drive showing RAW format and asking to format: how to fix?

Plugged in my 32GB USB pen drive and Windows is saying it needs to be formatted before I can use it. File system shows as RAW in Disk Management.

I haven't formatted it. It was working fine yesterday. Has important client documents on it. Do not want to format and lose everything.

Do not click Format. That will make recovery much harder.

RAW means Windows can't read the file system. The partition table or file system header got corrupted. The data itself is most likely still there.

1

Try a different USB port first. Sometimes it's a connection issue, not corruption.

2

If still RAW, use SysTools Pen Drive Recovery. It scans at sector level and bypasses the file system entirely to pull your files.

3

Save recovered files to a different drive, not back to the pen drive.

4

After recovery, you can format the pen drive to fix it. Get a new one for important data going forward.

Different port made no difference. Running the recovery tool now. It found 847 files in the preview. All the client folders look intact.

All recovered. 847 files, all readable. Formatted the pen drive and it's working again. Ordered a new one for the important stuff. Marking solved, thanks Kerry.