Help! My Cloned HDD Says ‘Device is Not Ready’

I ran `chkdsk` on the drive, but it said 'CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.' This might mean that the filesystem on the new drive is unrecognized or corrupted.

I had a similar issue where my cloned drive showed up as having free space but no data. My cloning process hit an error at the end, and even though it looked like it transferred almost everything, it didn’t actually clone the data properly. You might want to check if the cloning software transferred everything correctly, especially since you mentioned an error during the clone.

First, I recommend checking Disk Management. Sometimes after you clone a drive, the partition can exist without being properly mounted by Windows. See if your new drive shows up there, and check if the partition is marked as healthy and has a drive letter assigned. If it doesn’t have a letter, you can manually assign one. If it does have a letter but still isn’t working, try running `chkdsk` from the command prompt (like `chkdsk D: /f`). Sometimes cloning from a malfunctioning drive can bring over filesystem errors, which may cause the 'device is not ready' error. Also, make sure your cloning software got all the necessary hidden/system partitions, especially if your source drive was already problematic.