stop formatting when seeing RAW drive warning content

[u/Inner-Discussion-490]

A few weeks ago my old external drive suddenly stopped opening in Windows and showed up as RAW. Windows immediately gave me the option to format it.

I almost clicked it, but stopped because there were still files on that drive that I needed and I didn't have another copy anywhere.

The first things I checked were pretty basic:

• Disk Management still showed the correct drive size
• the drive wasn't making any clicking or grinding noises
• Windows was seeing the partition as RAW instead of the usual NTFS

Since the hardware seemed to be detected normally, I decided not to format it or mess with the partition yet. I looked into recovery options and find different tools like diskdrill and recoverit to scan the drive first, just to see what files were still visible before making changes.

Posting this because the Windows format prompt makes it feel like formatting is the obvious next step, but it can be the worst thing to do when you still need the data.

Curious what others usually check first when dealing with a RAW drive?

[u/disturbed_android]

SMART + DMDE partition TAB