Sometimes a failing external drive will suddenly appear as "RAW" in Disk Management (no file system). Running chkdsk on a RAW drive is useless—it will simply say "The type of the file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives." In this case, do not run chkdsk ; use data recovery software first.
chkdsk X: /scan This performs an online scan without making changes. Then to apply only the necessary fixes: chkdsk external drive
After a repair, especially with /f , chkdsk often creates large folders named FOUND.000 , FOUND.001 , etc., containing FILE0000.chk files. These are recovered file fragments. They are not automatically renamed to their original extensions. Recovering meaningful data from .chk files requires third-party tools or manual hex inspection. Sometimes a failing external drive will suddenly appear
chkdsk X: /spotfix If you only want to know if the drive has physical issues without spending 10 hours: chkdsk X: /scan This performs an online scan