New here. I've taken a look around and this seems to be outside of the scope of the typical discussion that takes place here. But I figured it couldn't hurt to ask.
I have a nine year old 2tb Hitachi SATA drive that just went RAW. Does not show up in Windows Explorer, takes a while to show up in device manager. The drive is in RAW mode. Since I am a digital hoarder I have a lot of experience with this. Usually I just hit the problem drive with RecoverMyFiles and everything is fine. With a couple of exceptions, this being one of them. When I run the software it finds no files. I know for a fact it was full or nearly full.
I ran a File List Generator.bat on it back in May when it was working so I know exactly what is on it. I would like to recover the data, but not badly enough to pay a data recovery pro. Not even one of the cheap $300 ones. The only thing I can think of is to format the drive and then run data recovery software. Is this a terrible idea? As far as I can tell I have no other play here. Will this destroy any chance of retaining file and folder structure? Just make a bad situation worse? I mean, I have nothing to lose at this point. Is there any chance of this working at all?

As far as I know there is no physical damage to the drive. It's not making any strange noises, hasn't been dropped, etc.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

It's possible that the controller or the SATA port on the motherboard is having problems, and the issue might not be with the drive itself.
Also look check if the SATA connector is loose, or the cable has any cuts in its insulation.
One time I had a SATA controller burn itself out after too much data transfer.
Apparently the chips they use in SATA controllers are nowhere near "everlasting" -- the data on the drive was fine,
the symptom I was having looked a lot like drive failure until I tried the drive in a different machine.

There are USB docking stations that allow you to plug in a SATA drive over USB,
they're a convenient way to test hard drives.

If you intend to retrieve data from the drive, it's generally safer to try to make a complete raw copy of the drive while it's still letting
you read data from it, just in case the old drive is about to fail, and then perform the filesystem recovery work on a copy of that drive.
I haven't studied filesystem recovery personally, but I'd imagine if you were using something like NTFS there would be tools to get
the metadata back to where the filesystem would be recognized the operating system.

First of all clone the drive and then run software on the clone...R-Studio should work ok for you

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

yes, it is. Why would one do that?

as said, clone it and try recovering it from the clone.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery