Cause of loss · a volume gone RAW
Give Windows a volume it cannot make sense of and it offers Format, because Format is all it has to offer. The hardware is right there, the same on a Hull bench as on yours. What is written on it has stopped adding up. More data goes to what people click on that box than to the corruption that put the box on screen.
An engineer will take the details
0800 6890668
| The symptoms | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| The disk in drive X: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? | Windows cannot parse the file system, so the volume is reported as RAW | Do not press Format |
| CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives. | CHKDSK will not start; it has no file system to work on | Take it off the computer |
| File or directory corrupted and unreadable (0x80070570) | MFT entries Windows can no longer read | Close it and stop looking around |
| Disk structure is corrupted and unreadable (0x80070571) | The partition table or the MFT is damaged | Copy it first, mend it after |
| The parameter is incorrect. X:\ is not accessible. | Damaged structures with bad sectors underneath | Assume hardware trouble as well |
| …does not contain a recognized file system | Nothing left to identify a file system | The contents have not moved |
| On a Mac: the disk you inserted was not readable | The same fault, worded by macOS. Initialize is the button not to press | Eject it; do not Initialize |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
No repair starts until a sector-by-sector copy exists, with every area that reads badly noted and left until last. Bad structures and failing hardware tend to come as a pair, and one image handles both.
The MFT, the boot sector and the partition table get put back together inside the image and not on your drive. A step that goes wrong can be rolled back and tried again.
Whatever state the MFT is in, the file contents are still in the clusters they always occupied. Each file is lifted from the image on its signature alone. Any folder structure the surviving records can support is rebuilt with them.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
These tools all share one habit: CHKDSK, First Aid in Disk Utility, whatever free RAW repairer a forum recommends — they all write to the very disk they are supposed to be fixing. Where the hardware underneath is sound, nothing is lost. Where it is not, a job that might have come back whole instead comes back in pieces. Caution costs you a day, waiting for an image.
Someone pulled the lead mid-write. By morning Windows would do nothing but offer to format the disk. A full image of the 4TB came off first, and every repair after that happened on the image: the boot sector put right, then the wrecked MFT mirror. The original was never written to. Fifteen years of client jobs came back, folder tree and all.
Refuse it. What Format does is write an empty file system across the damaged one. It lands squarely on the records that describe your folders, their names and their dates — and those records are what a rebuild is assembled from.
RAW means Windows can make no sense of the structures that describe the volume. The break is usually in the boot sector, the MFT or the partition table. Your files sit below all of that, unaffected.
There is no upside to it. On a RAW volume CHKDSK refuses to run at all, and if the hardware is tired, each repair pass it makes takes a little more out of it. Work of that sort belongs on a copy of the disk, never on the disk itself.
Probably, and you are in plenty of company. Pull the lead in the middle of a write and the index is left half finished, still pointing at files that are perfectly intact.
Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.