Almost clicked "Format" on a RAW drive. Glad I checked first

A few weeks ago, one of my old external drives suddenly showed up as RAW in Windows. When I tried to open it, Windows asked me to format it before using it.

I almost clicked Format, then stopped because I still needed the files.

So before doing anything to the drive, I checked a few things:

• Disk Management still showed the right capacity
• the drive was not making clicking or grinding sounds
• I did not already have another backup
• Windows was showing RAW instead of NTFS

After that, I decided not to touch the partition yet. I looked into recovery options and used a scan-first approach, just to see what files were still visible before making any changes.