RAW is what Windows prints when it opens a volume and recognises nothing at the front of it. Your files are almost always exactly where you left them. What has failed is the small set of structures saying where everything starts, and the one thing that turns a recoverable drive into a difficult one is accepting the offer to format.
Do not format it. One hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT after a free diagnostic that takes 2 working days from arrival — logical RAW faults are covered by no fix, no fee.
RAW is a fallback, not a diagnosis. It means only that nothing recognisable was found where a file system ought to begin, and half a dozen quite separate faults end at that one message.
The prompt arrives the moment you double-click the drive, and the only button that looks helpful is the wrong one. Answering yes writes a new and empty file system over a damaged one that could have been repaired. Close the box, unplug the drive, and go no further than that.
The first sector of an NTFS volume records the cluster size, the sector count and where the file table begins. Corrupt those few hundred bytes and Windows has no idea what it is looking at. NTFS keeps a duplicate at the far end of the volume, which makes this one of the more straightforward faults to put right.
Every file and folder on an NTFS volume has a record in the master file table. Bad sectors landing in that region, or a write cut off partway, take out the index rather than the contents. Records are rebuilt one at a time from the mirror, and whatever cannot be rebuilt is carved out of the image by signature.
exFAT keeps no journal, so a card or portable drive removed while it was still writing can be left with an allocation table and a directory that flatly disagree. Windows gives up and calls the volume RAW. Cameras, drones and dashcams supply most of these.
A drive encrypted by Windows and then moved to another machine reads as RAW in a good many tools. That is not damage at all. With the recovery key to hand it decrypts and mounts as it always did, and BitLocker work has its own band at £400 + VAT. Without the key, nobody can help you.
Sometimes nothing is wrong with the file system. The drive cannot deliver the sectors that hold it, so the computer sees nothing and falls back on RAW. Clicking, long pauses, a capacity that keeps changing and a drive that vanishes after ten minutes all point this way, and it stops being a software problem at that moment.
Windows works out what a volume is by reading its first sector and checking what it finds against a short list of things it knows: NTFS, exFAT, FAT32, ReFS. It looks for a signature, the name of whatever formatted the volume, and a block of parameters describing cluster size and layout. If those parameters are missing, contradictory or unreadable there is no negotiation — the volume is labelled RAW and turns up in Explorer with no capacity and no contents. The label describes a check that failed. It says nothing whatever about the state of your files, which sit further into the volume, untouched by any of it.
The offer to format is the most expensive click in this trade. A quick format on NTFS writes a new boot sector, a new and nearly empty master file table, and a fresh bitmap declaring the whole volume free. Your old file records are usually still on the platters afterwards, but the drive is now advertising every cluster as available, so anything the machine writes next can land squarely on top of real data. A full format on a current version of Windows is worse again, since it will happily write zeroes across the lot. The correct response to that dialogue box is to close it and pull the cable out.
Work starts with an image. The drive goes onto a hardware imager, read-only, with control over how long the equipment waits on a stubborn sector before it gives up and returns to it later. A weak drive is read in passes so the healthy regions are captured first, while it is still willing to give them up. Everything after that happens on the copy: the backup boot sector is located at the end of the volume and checked against what the front should have said, the file table mirror is walked record by record, cluster size and starting offset are confirmed rather than assumed, and the volume is mounted read-only once it makes sense. If a theory proves wrong, the image is still exactly as it was and the next theory costs nothing. That is the whole difference between a lab and a utility running on the poorly drive itself.
Occasionally the structures cannot be rebuilt, either because a format has already overwritten them or because they sit in a region the drive refuses to read. The fallback then is signature carving, which scans the image for the recognisable openings and endings of file types and lifts them out whole. It works well for photographs, video and office documents, and it comes at a price: names, folders and dates all live in the metadata you have lost, so what returns is sorted by type rather than by the arrangement you had. Better to know that at the start than to be surprised by it at the end.
Where RAW turns out to be a mechanical fault, the job stops being logical. Head and motor repairs, board work and anything at chip level take 50% of the quoted price upfront. The rule is published as it stands: No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. A RAW volume on a healthy drive stays under no fix, no fee.
Say no to the format. Take the drive out of use, which for an external means unplugging it and for an internal disk means shutting the machine down rather than leaving it idling on the desktop. And do not run chkdsk. It is a file system repair tool, not a recovery tool: on a volume Windows has already labelled RAW it will usually refuse to run at all, and when it is forced it writes its corrections into the very structures a lab would have worked from, dropping orphaned material into a folder of numbered files with no names on them.
Drives are examined at the lab in Manchester, Peter House, Oxford Street, M1 5AN, about 35 miles along the M62 and a single working day by tracked post. There is no collection service and no shop counter to visit, so everything arrives in the post, packed so it cannot shift about — from Wirral addresses across the water, from the university quarter, from Warrington, Widnes and everywhere between. The free diagnostic finishes 2 working days after the drive arrives, the price is fixed in writing before anything begins, and a completed logical recovery takes from 2-4 working days at the quickest. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT; the freephone number is 0800 689 0668 if you want to describe the symptom first.
If the drive never appears in Explorer at all, drive not showing up is the closer match. If the volume vanished rather than went RAW, that is partition recovery. If somebody has already pressed format, go to formatted drive recovery, and if the drive is reporting read errors as well, cyclic redundancy check covers that. The hardware pages are hard drive recovery and external drive recovery, with every band listed on data recovery cost.
Refuse the format, unplug the drive, post it tracked. The fault is named inside 2 working days and priced before any work.
Nearly everything on this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a failing drive, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside is normally on the bench the next working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.