ReFS volume appears RAW (version doesn't match expected value) after Windows Update

With all respect, thepierce I don't think that ReFSUtil is the solution to the problem discussed in this thread, which boils down to a ReFS version incompatibility. ReFSUtil won't do a major in-place ReFS version upgrade.

The best way I found to solve the problem is to copy (e.g. with RoboCopy) all data from the old ReFS volume to a newly formatted ReFS volume (i.e. newer ReFS version), using an operating system where the old ReFS version is still supported.

It is of course regrettable that this issue came upon us with no checks or warnings and that the workaround requires new disks, and even more so that some people were led to believe that their data was lost, and that some managed to corrupt the data in the attempt of "recovering" it.

ReFS is a good file system, and because it is fairly new (compared to NTFS) I can understand that features are sometimes added that require a newly formatted ReFS volume. These constant breaking changes may even be a reason why they pulled it from mainstream Windows 10/11, though I see work being done to bring it back. What is less understandable is the fact that the deprecation of older ReFS versions comes with no warnings upon a simple Windows Update or upgrade. This happened in 2022 with KB5009557, KB5009624, etc. on the Windows Server side, and then again on some client systems who were prompted to update their Windows 10 to Windows 11. These are perfectly recognizable situations. If a dialog appeared telling the user what they need to do before a volume disappears, we would not be spending so much time on these threads 🙂

Please, Microsoft, give ReFS the same love you gave NTFS, which in its days had in-place conversion support, while never suffering from breaking changes that (without warning) required copying entire volumes just to keep accessing the data.