Cause of loss · a volume that has gone RAW
Don't agree to the format. Take the power away, wherever the drive is in Nottingham. Windows offers that box simply because offering it is all it can do: when a volume doesn't make sense to it, Windows' only answer is to replace it. The hardware is usually unharmed, and every file is where you left it. What has stopped adding up is the record kept of where they sit. More data is lost through someone saying yes to that box than through whatever put it on the screen. Cards and sticks start at £250 + VAT and a single drive is £300 + VAT, the assessment before either is free, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
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 can no longer be read, so Windows falls back to calling the volume RAW | Turn it down, then unplug it |
| Windows says CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives | CHKDSK will not run, since there is no file system left for it to work on | 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 case number is assigned when the item is received. Then an engineer works out what went wrong (no charge). At this point, you receive a basic summary of which parts are recoverable and which are not. You also receive a single written quote for the price of the recovery. Accept the quoted price or turn it down, and there is no obligation to pay anything.
No repairs take place until a full copy exists, taken sector by sector, with the slow areas noted and left till last. Mechanical wear and structural damage often turn up together, and the same copy handles both.
The partition table, boot sector and MFT are put back together on the copy. Your own disk is never written to. If something doesn't go well, it can always be backed out and repeated.
Even when the MFT is badly corrupted, the file data stays in the clusters it has occupied since the beginning. Each file is lifted out of the image by the signature its format starts with, and wherever the surviving records allow, the folder tree is built back around them.
A complete file list will be provided before any invoicing. Simply say "yes" or "no" to what we found: yes means it is billed, no means it is not, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. What we find is posted to you on media purchased specifically for your case, at no additional cost to you. We consider the process complete once you have opened those files yourself on your own computer.
One habit unites them all: CHKDSK, Disk Utility's First Aid, or some free RAW repair tool a forum is recommending this month. Each of them writes to the very disk it is trying to repair. On sound hardware you generally get away with it. On failing hardware, a job that would otherwise have come back complete comes back in pieces. Imaging takes a day. A free assessment will tell you what kind of disk you are dealing with, and it costs nothing to ask.
By morning, after a cable came out while the drive was writing, the only option Windows offered was a format. Before any repairs, an end-to-end image was taken of the 4TB, and every repair after that was done on that image: the boot sector first, then the damaged mirror of the MFT. The original drive was never written to. Fifteen years of client files came back with their folder tree the way it was.
Say no. Formatting cleans nothing; it lays a new file system directly on top of the damaged one, right on the records holding your folder names, your dates and the shape of the folder tree. Those records are the raw material any rebuild is made from.
That the structures defining the volume can no longer be read: the MFT, the boot sector, the partition table, or some combination of them. Everything those structures describe still sits exactly where it was written.
It cannot even start on a RAW volume, so there is no benefit whatsoever. There is a cost, though: each repair pass uses up a little more of whatever life is left in a worn disk. That work should happen on a copy.
Quite likely, and it is one of the more common ways people end up here. Interrupt a write and the index is left half-finished, still pointing at files the interrupted write never touched.
The look costs nothing. It gives you a file listing of what opened and what did not, along with the cost of finishing the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Do not switch the drive on until you have that listing.