Cause of loss · a volume that has gone RAW
Refuse the format, then take the power off, whichever part of Nottingham the drive is in. Windows offers that box because offering it is all Windows can do: when a volume stops making sense to it, replacing that volume is the only remedy it knows. Meanwhile the hardware is usually unharmed and every file is where you left it — what has stopped adding up is the bookkeeping written across them. More data is destroyed by people saying yes to that box than by whatever put it on screen. Cards and sticks start at £250 + VAT and a single drive is £300 + VAT, the assessment before either is free, and there is no charge on most jobs where the data cannot be read back.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
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| What it looks like | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Drive not accessible, and Windows offers to format it | The file system no longer parses, so Windows falls back to calling the volume RAW | Turn it down, then unplug it |
| Windows says CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives | There is no file system left for CHKDSK to work on, so it refuses to run | Get it off the PC |
| 0x80070570 · file or directory corrupted and unreadable | MFT entries that will no longer read back | Close it, and stop opening folders |
| 0x80070571 · disk structure corrupted and unreadable | Damage in the partition table, or inside the MFT | Image it first, mend it after |
| X:\ not accessible — the parameter is incorrect. | Broken structures sitting above sectors that are failing | Assume a hardware fault as well |
| It reports: …does not contain a recognized file system | Nothing identifiable as a file system remains | Your files have not moved |
| The disk you inserted was not readable. | Identical fault, macOS wording. Whatever you do, decline Initialize | Unplug it, and refuse Initialize |
Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
Nothing gets repaired until a copy exists — taken sector by sector, with the slow areas noted and saved for last. A damaged structure and a tired mechanism usually turn up together, and one image handles both.
Partition table, boot sector and MFT are put back together on the copy. Your own disk is never written to, and any step that turns out badly can be undone and taken again.
However far gone the MFT may be, the contents of a file stay in the clusters they have always occupied. Each is lifted out of the image by the signature its format begins with, and whatever tree the surviving records can still support is built back around them.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
One habit unites them all: CHKDSK, Disk Utility's First Aid, whatever free RAW repairer a forum is recommending this month — each of them puts writes onto the disk it is meant to be mending. With sound hardware underneath you get away with it. With failing hardware, a job that would have come back complete comes back in pieces. Imaging takes a day. A free assessment tells you which sort of disk you are holding, and it costs nothing to ask.
A cable caught mid-write, and by morning the only thing Windows would offer was a format. Before anything else, an end-to-end image was taken of the 4TB, and every repair after that was done to that copy: boot sector, then the damaged mirror of the MFT. The original was never written to at all. Fifteen years of client files came back with the folder tree the way it was.
Say no. Formatting cleans nothing — it lays a fresh file system down on top of the damaged one, and where it lands is exactly on the records carrying your folder names, your dates and the shape of the tree. Those records are the raw material any rebuild is made out of.
That the structures describing the volume can no longer be read: the MFT, the boot sector, the partition table, or some combination. Everything those structures describe is still sitting exactly where it was written.
It cannot even start on a RAW volume, so the gain is nil. The cost is real, though: on a worn disk every repair pass spends a little more of what remains. That work belongs on a copy.
Quite possibly, and it is one of the commoner ways to end up here. Interrupt a write and the index is left half-finished, still pointing at files that were never touched by any of it.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.