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When the file index is damaged

Start here if your drive is failing · Why a drive turns RAW after a power cut or unplug, why your files are usually still there, and how they're recovered.

boot ✓ firstrecords ✗ the rest of the index ✓ (most files) file contents ✓ (untouched) points here: unreadable ✗ The records that describe the index itself, the top folder and the free-space map are gone, so Windows can't mount the volume (RAW). ✓ Every other record is self-contained. A scan finds them by signature and rebuilds the folder tree. ~ Files whose own records were in the bad patch lose their names; their contents can often be found by file type (carving).

This is the most common reason a drive suddenly shows as RAW after a power cut, a forced reboot or an unplug during copying: the writes that were in flight were to the index, so the index is what's half-written. The file contents are usually untouched. Recovery means reading the surviving index records directly (and, for the missing ones, finding files by their content type).

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Start here if your drive is failing

How drives work

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