If I format a drive C: partition will E: be affected too?

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Sailor R Thomas

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I have a dual-boot setup in which my first and primary OS is Win 10 Pro on my C: drive, and an E: partition was created and contains a different functional OS. I would like to format the Win 10 Pro OS and do a clean reinstall, but was wondering if I proceeded to do so will the E: partition and OS be adversely damaged and/or erased too?

All of these partitions are on a single Hard Drive.

Thank you for your time.
 
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WyomingKnott
I have two opposite answers to the question. The first is that the first partition won't affect the second, so go ahead. The second is "Is it worth the risk to you?"

If I were in your shoes, my feet would hurt because they are size 13. No, I mean that if I were in your shoes, I would do a complete disk backup to an external drive. With the right kind of backup (and be plenty sure that it is the right kind), if you destroy all of the partitions on the original drive you can restore the backup and go on your merry way with both OSes working again.

If you have a good backup and restore system, nothing can really ruin your system because you can always restore to a known point.

In the best case, the re-installation should leave the E...
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WyomingKnott

WyomingKnott

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I have two opposite answers to the question. The first is that the first partition won't affect the second, so go ahead. The second is "Is it worth the risk to you?"

If I were in your shoes, my feet would hurt because they are size 13. No, I mean that if I were in your shoes, I would do a complete disk backup to an external drive. With the right kind of backup (and be plenty sure that it is the right kind), if you destroy all of the partitions on the original drive you can restore the backup and go on your merry way with both OSes working again.

If you have a good backup and restore system, nothing can really ruin your system because you can always restore to a known point.

In the best case, the re-installation should leave the E partition functional, but it will not be in your boot menu since the Win10 installation will likely ignore it. You will either need to work with the BCDEDIT tool or install a separate boot manager. This _might_ not happen if you install Win10 directly over the C partition while said partition can still be booted - but won't work if you format the partition before doing the install.

Anyone out there have more recent experience with Win10 boot management than I do?
 
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Supahos

Supahos

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As he said the only way it'll effect the e partition is it will be lonely for a few mins being the only one with data, if everything goes right. Things never always work right so I would also suggest backing it up if you have anything if any importance to you on yhe e drive
 
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Sailor R Thomas

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Ok, thanks. Luckily, I purchased a WD My Book just a few days ago and backed up the files (not the OS, though) so I guess I'm off to a good start. I have the install Win 10 Pro install disk in the CD tray and was planning to do the re-install just shortly after the format and then restarting the computer.
 
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jsmithepa

jsmithepa

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With multi-boot controlled by BIOS, it can boot from different physical drives, but this is not your case, sounds like you have one physical drive with several partitions, that means that the first bootable partition on that drive (C?) contains the code to let you choose, at boot time, where to go, so reason follows, you must restore this code for multi-boot to function again.
 
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Sailor R Thomas

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Now that complicates things. How do I restore this 'code'?
 
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