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SD card asking to be formatted, or showing as RAW?

You plug in the card and Windows says “You need to format the disk in drive E: before you can use it.” Or the card shows up as RAW, 0 bytes, or “The volume does not contain a recognized file system.” Click Cancel. Your videos are almost always still on the card.

What the message actually means

Every card has a small area at the start that works like a table of contents: the file system. It tells the computer which files exist and where each one lives. If that area gets damaged, Windows has no idea what’s on the card, so it calls the card RAW and offers to format it.

The videos themselves live in a different, much bigger part of the card. Damage to the table of contents usually leaves them untouched. They just have no list pointing to them anymore.

Common causes

• The card was pulled out, or the camera or drone lost power, while it was writing.
• The card was removed from a PC without ejecting it.
• A camera or phone wrote to it in a format Windows doesn’t understand.
• The card is starting to fail. Cheap and very old cards do this more often.

What not to do

1. Don’t click Format, in Windows or in the camera. Even a quick format replaces the damaged list with an empty one, and a full format erases everything.
2. Don’t run CHKDSK or “Scan and fix”. They write to the card while trying to repair it, and can make recovery harder.
3. Don’t keep plugging it in and out if it’s behaving strangely. If the card is failing, every read counts.
4. Don’t put it back in the camera. Many cameras offer to format an unreadable card, and it’s easy to accept by accident.

Getting the videos off with Keepsake

Keepsake doesn’t need the card’s file system. It reads the card underneath it, finds each video by its own index (the moov inside every MP4 and MOV file), and checks every frame. It works on cards Windows calls RAW, and it only ever reads from the card.

1. Connect the card to a Windows 10 or 11 PC with a card reader. When Windows offers to format it, click Cancel.
2. Download Keepsake and open it. Allow the administrator prompt; it’s needed to read the card directly.
3. Pick the card. It shows up even though Windows can’t open it.
4. If the card is slow or disconnects, tick Make a safety copy first. Keepsake copies the card once to a file on another drive and works from the copy, so a dying card is read as little as possible.
5. Scan, preview the videos for free, and save the ones you want to a different drive. A license is $49 once.

Once your videos are safe, it’s fine to format the card. If it keeps going RAW afterwards, it’s failing: replace it.