1484
Windows eats partitions
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
1484 points (95.9% liked)
linuxmemes
21280 readers
1259 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I unplug physicals disks when installing windows. Learned the hard way when windows placed the boot partition on a device it could not detect the filsystem of. It destroyed my RAID disks (a little but my fault, because I messed up the recovery).
This is what Windows installer saw (going by memory, this was 8 years ago)
What did it to? It created a new partition table and wrote data to a new boot partition it made on one of the 8TB disks, no questions asked.
So, to the people who answered you that windows installer cannot do this. Maybe they fixed it. But it certainly could, and it cetianly did. I remember very carefully going through the installer because I was concerned about this happening. I thought about unplugging them, but was lazy. Because "it would be insane for windows to write on a disk it cannot identify the file system of".
Lessons learned:
Edit: I found post on this way back when, but leaving what I wrote as is.
https://superuser.com/questions/758854/mdadm-win7-install-created-a-boot-partition-on-one-of-my-raid6-drives-how-to-r#1243636
I had remembered some details wrong. I had unplugged the Linux SSD, and it wad raid 6 not 5, and it was 2TB disks.
Windows couldn't even use its own system image to restore my system when a botched Windows update messed everything up. I still don't know what was wrong but I think it did something like try to apply them as GPT instead of MBR on my BIOS system.
Fixed or not this is good to know. I use a separate device for RAID storage and I think I'll keep it that way. Sorry you had to deal with that. I know if my main storage got wiped by windows installer my reaction would probably make national news.
Will proceed with caution and saved drive images!