Drive Shows as "RAW"
A drive reporting as "RAW" hasn't lost its data — Windows has simply lost track of what file system is supposed to be there, and that's a narrower, usually more fixable problem than it sounds.
What's actually happening
An operating system identifies a file system by reading a small set of signature bytes at a fixed location — the boot sector for NTFS or FAT, the superblock for ext-family file systems. If those specific bytes are zeroed, corrupted, or simply unrecognized — due to power loss during a file system operation, certain malware, or a mismatched partition type — Windows falls back to labeling the entire volume "RAW." That label really means "unable to identify this," not a description of what actually happened underneath.
How recoverable this really is
It depends on how much of the deeper file system metadata survived beyond just that initial signature. Often, only the very first structure — the boot sector itself — is damaged, while the rest of the file system's internal tables are intact; in that case, restoring just that entry point brings back full, normal access with original names and folders. If the damage goes deeper than that, recovery falls back to the same signature-based file carving used elsewhere in this catalog, with the same limitation: content comes back, but original names and folder structure usually don't.
The general approach
Recovery tools look for the file system's true type using secondary signatures elsewhere on the disk, even when the primary one is gone. Some file systems keep a backup copy of their entry-point structure in a known location — NTFS, for instance, keeps a backup boot sector near the end of the volume — and where that backup is intact, it can sometimes be used to restore full original access almost immediately, without any actual data recovery being necessary.
Don't click "Format disk" when Windows prompts it. That prompt is, quite literally, offering to do the thing described in the accidental formatting scenario on top of an already-confused file system — and it's the single most common way a fully recoverable RAW drive turns into a harder one.
Practical, step-by-step guides for specific recovery software will be added here as separate linked articles.
This page describes the general situation, not a guaranteed fix for your specific case. If you'd rather have someone experienced take a look before you try anything, see what a hands-on evaluation looks like.