WD Elements RAW in Disk Management due to MS bug in Anniversary Update to 1607

[Tony_126]

I have been troubleshooting an access problem to my WD Elements external hard drive. Windows Explorer will not open the drive even though a drive letter is assigned. Disk Management shows the drive system as RAW. This occurred right after installing the Win 10 anniversary update ver 1607. I have been searching for a solution and came across this forum. As information to this community I discovered that this is a known problem by Microsoft with the 1607 Win 10 Anniversary update. Basically, MS recommends reverting back to the previous Win 10 version and waiting for a patch to become available via Win Update. MS does not recommend formatting or using recovery software, etc. If you are past the 10 days after update and cannot go back to the previous version. MS tells you to wait for a patch but not do do anything to the drive in the meantime. Before I became aware of this bug, I reverted to the previous version of Windows and my drive reappeared and behaved normally. I did the update/rollback several times and it recovered each time. Waiting for the patch.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the TH community, @Tony!

Unfortunately, this Windows Anniversary update has its cons. However, there's not much we can do about it, except waiting for them to fix the bug. The best thing you can do is back up all the data from your external devices somewhere else as well. Having multiple copies of it will help you avoid the headaches of data loss. I believe you shouldn't have any issues accessing your WD Elements from another Windows version computer, but still, better be safe than sorry.

Cheers,
SuperSoph_WD