A Buffalo MiniStation portable drive stopped opening and began demanding a format, its contents showing as unreadable “RAW” space. The disk was mechanically fine — the file system that organises it had been corrupted mid-write. We imaged the drive and rebuilt those structures to get the files back.
The MiniStation had been working normally until it was unplugged without being ejected during a copy. From then on it would not open: the operating system reported the volume as RAW and offered only to format it. The files — work documents and media with no other copy — were still on the disk, but the map describing where they sat had been left half-written and inconsistent. The owner sensibly declined the format prompt and sent the drive in.
A file system keeps live structures — a boot record, allocation tables, a directory tree — that must stay consistent with one another. When a drive is pulled out mid-write, some of those structures are updated and others are not, and the mismatch leaves the volume unmountable. The operating system, unable to make sense of the head of the file system, falls back to calling the whole thing RAW. Crucially, the file data itself is untouched; only the organising layer is damaged, and that can usually be rebuilt from the redundant copies a file system keeps of its own key structures.
Because a drive that won't mount can be either logical or physical, the first job was to confirm which. The MiniStation spun up normally and read without difficulty, pointing squarely at logical corruption. It was then cloned sector by sector through a write blocker so that all repair work could be done on a copy, leaving the original untouched in case anything needed revisiting.
Working from the image, the damaged file system was analysed rather than blindly “repaired” by an automatic tool — automatic repairs can discard exactly the records a recovery depends on. The boot sector was rebuilt from its backup copy, the allocation tables reconciled, and the directory tree reconstructed by walking the surviving records and matching them to the real data on the disk. That reassembled the volume with its original folder structure and file names intact.
Files were opened across the recovered tree to confirm they were complete, then everything was written to a fresh drive and returned. We also explained the simple habit that prevents a repeat — ejecting a drive before unplugging it lets pending writes finish and the file system close cleanly — and that a second copy of anything important is always worth keeping.
Hardware imager with write blocker · manual file-system repair — boot-record, allocation-table and directory reconstruction from redundant structures. Read-only imaging, all work in-house in Belfast.
Send it to us for a free, no-obligation diagnostic. We’ll tell you what can be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts — and on most jobs, if we can’t get your data back, there’s nothing to pay. Post your device in, or drop it to us by appointment.
No. A format would write a new, empty file system over the data you're trying to save. The RAW message almost always means the file system is corrupted while the files are intact — send the drive in and it can usually be rebuilt without formatting.
Most often an interrupted write: unplugging without ejecting, a power cut, or a crash mid-copy leaves the file system's structures inconsistent. The data underneath is normally fine.
Yes, in the large majority of cases — provided the drive is mechanically healthy, which we confirm first. A free diagnostic will tell you what's recoverable before any chargeable work.