An increase in HDD's becomming formatted to RAW.

Had this happen today after the 14926 update. Went to save the .esd to my 2TB WD hard drive and received an error that the HDD was no longer there. Disc management revealed it was now formatted to RAW, all my data is gone. I see others are having similar occurrences of this so, what is causing such a disaster? My Green drive is 13 months old, is is currently passing all of WD's Data Lifeguard diagnostics although not completely finished. Is it W10 doing this? Why doesn't W10 warn the user it is about to reformat your drive? Is it WD? If I go the RMA route, and get a replacement, and it happens again? Comments appreciated.

Build 14926 is essentially a beta (Insider) build and is therefore subject to having bugs. I would not use the Insider builds with drives containing data that I cannot afford to lose. I have not seen your particular problem with any of the Insider builds however.

Well, first of all, it's not actually formatting your disk. Windows says it's RAW when it no longer recognizes that there is a format there. That doesn't mean that your data is necessarily gone, or that the drive has been reformatted at all. The important thing is to NOT try to recover this drive, or you could actually damage it. Try plugging it into another computer first to see if everything is good.

Second, there was a problem identified shortly after the anniversary update was first released, but I thought this was fixed in one of the patches (I never had the problem, so maybe not).

Finally, failure to safely remove disks can cause this problem as well. Essentially, if you unplug the drive when it's in the middle of a cache flush, it can corrupt the drive. So always make sure you safely remove the drive before unplugging it.

I was informed last week this serious bug isn't fixed yet. I'm not upgrading my Desktop PC until it is fixed. See Is the Anniversary Update Missing Drives Problem Solved?

Raw means it's lost the partition table you need partition recovery software there are lots of free ones in most cases it will recover in mins with all data intact. Do not try file recovery software files are not deleted just the table gone

OK Tx for that. So W10 can no longer read the partition table, or has become unformated. Disk was hardwired inside to MB.
What caused it to show as RAW or become scrambled?
There seems to have been a bug that MS tried to fix?
Anything remotely linked to UEFI or GPT?

I did take the drive and mount it on my W7 machine. In its original configuration, it was 1 partition for the entire 2TB. When connected to W7, disk management tool, it showed 4 partitions?

meebers said:

OK Tx for that. So W10 can no longer read the partition table, or has become unformated. Disk was hardwired inside to MB.
What caused it to show as RAW or become scrambled?
There seems to have been a bug that MS tried to fix?
Anything remotely linked to UEFI or GPT?

I did take the drive and mount it on my W7 machine. In its original configuration, it was 1 partition for the entire 2TB. When connected to W7, disk management tool, it showed 4 partitions?

This serious bug was reported after the AU and MS still hasn't fixed it. I'm unsure why you have only just been affected.

Steve C said:

This serious bug was reported after the AU and MS still hasn't fixed it. I'm unsure why you have only just been affected.

It must have to do with different HW configs? Others report problems with various things but I don't see the same issue's. YMMV . If you go to feedback and search for RAW, there have been a lot of submissions.

UPDATE:
Got a replacement from WD, installed it (D: data) and it worked for 3 days. Today during a Macrium imageof C:>D:, it threw up an error during validation. Attempted to just redo and discovered that the D: was no longer showing up in file explorer or disk manager. Several restarts/cable checks etc it appeared dead. Took it out and plugged it into the old reliable W7 machine, it showed there but indicated that it needed a repair. Did the repair, about 15 seconds, and it now appears back to normal. Cannot believe that I am having this much trouble with HDD's and don't know what to do in an attempt to stop this behavior. Suggestions appreciated..