I Think Windows 8 Ruined my hard drives.

[kmach1ne]

Okay, so I have two SATA hard drives. One being my main drive with windows 7 64 bit ultimate. It's a a terabyte and it's almost filled up so tons of data on it. My second HDD is just a back/test drive for testing out linux distros or whatever. It is only 250gb. Both 7200rpm.

So today I decided to test out the latest Windows 8 build. So I went ahead and burned the disk and started the install process. When I got to the disk selection screen. I still had a linux distro installed on the 2nd drive so i went ahead and deleted it and made it into a new drive. (please note that the linux distro was working perfectly before I deleted it) I then selected 200GB out of the 38GB left (for using linux distros). *note I clearly picked my 2nd drive not the main drive with the terabyte.

I finish the windows 8 install and start browsing around for a bit and installed a few programs and nvidia drivers. I decided to go back to my windows 7. So just restart and change to my main drive in bios? Here's where it gets weird.

So I realized after the fact that after the installation of windows 8, when it restarted after installing, I technically should of started loading into windows 7 right? well it started loading into windows 8 but I didn't realize that until my problem was brought to light. So once I realized that my main drive is now loading windows 8 instead of windows 7. My heart stopped. For about a full minute. So I gathered myself and loaded up Gparted and looked at the information on my drives. It showed that windows 8 was installed on my 2nd drive with 38 gb unallocated on the end. So I thought ok, so whats the problem? I look at my terabyte drive and its painted black with a exclamation mark next to it saying its corrupted or unformatted. Nothing was installed on the main drive, nothing was even touched on the drive by the windows 8 process. Yet its now corrupted in some way.

Even in windows 8, It shows windows 8 as my 2nd drive. However, it says my main drive isn't formatted and I have to format it to use it. No, I haven't done that.

I mentioned that my linux distro worked just fine before all this. Now when I make my second drive to boot up first in bios, it boots up to a grub rescue prompt instead of what it should boot [windows 8].

I can't access my main drive in anyway and my computer thinks that windows 8 is installed my main drive even though Gparted and even windows 8 says its not. I'm at a loss. Confused and upset.

Could anyone shed any light?

 

[The_Prophecy]

First, I would pull your main drive out and plug it into another system (preferably running Windows 7). Make sure you can read the data from it there, and make a backup copy just in case.

Next, find the key to press to bring up the option to select which partition to boot from. Most systems allocate F2, F12, or Escape for this purpose. Pick the Windows 8 partition and see if the boot manager gives you both an option for Windows 8, and one for Linux (and possibly one for Windows 7 as well, but if the drive is disconnected, it won't work obviously). I'm betting all that has happened here is the boot managers have gotten confused. This is also why it is generally recommended to use separate physical hard drives for different operating systems if you INSIST on dual (or multi) booting. Even more so when you start dealing with both Windows and Linux (any distro) on the same computer.

Also for for future reference, it's considered much safer to install operating systems with only one drive present (as in physically disconnect all drives except the one you plan to install a given operating system to), then use the key on your system to toggle the boot selection menu and pick the specific hard drive you want to boot from. Having multiple entries in your boot manager's menu can get confusing, and I've seen it screw up WAY too many times.

 

[MidnightDistort]

I would only dual boot from a single hard drive only if doing clean installations. That way if you mess up you can restart the process but not lose any valuable OS or data. I'm unfamiliar with the proper installations with Linux and Windows, which is why i prefer just booting Linux from a cd or flash drive so it doesn't mess with the multi boot system.

 

[sscultima]

I had no issue with installing Win8 on a sperate hdd, but with my experience it had installed a dual boot so i would have to choose win7 after starting up win8 it would then reboot and load 7 off my other hard drive.

since then i have just migrated all my data and installs to win8 and have just been using that with ViStart for my start menu

 

[ChiJoDre]

Did you ever get this fixed?? If so please post. I have a similar problem.

I installed the consumer preview of Win8 on a separate drive stuck temporarily in my main machine. Shut off a 4-drive 0+1 Raid in BIOS to be safe. After a week or so of smooth running using office, etc., I decided to turn back on my Raid to be able to work on files on it. Ran fine for a few days, but then a dialogue came up saying windows needed to "adjust" my drives. After reboot neither my WinXP raid, nor the Win8 consumer preview would boot (I can select either drive to boot at BIOS). AND, my WD external drive also comes up corrupt and not readable on any machine.

I wiped the temp drive and installed WinXP. After updating I again turned on the raid. On boot it offered to "fix" the drive, which i ignored. After boot the partition is there, but blank. The raid says it is healthy.

Now I don't know what to do. Let WinXP try to fix my drive or load the full version of Win8Pro and try to fix the drive.

Any suggestions??

Jim

 

[Justin Poythress]

Same here. Windows 8 rendered my WD 500gb USB 3.0 external usless. I lost all my data on it. Cannot use it on any computer now. I have likewise, lost data when cut/copying data from a flash drive to pc. I now copy/paste ALWAYS.

 

[prbeck]

Okay, so I have two SATA hard drives. One being my main drive with windows 7 64 bit ultimate. It's a a terabyte and it's almost filled up so tons of data on it. My second HDD is just a back/test drive for testing out linux distros or whatever. It is only 250gb. Both 7200rpm.

So today I decided to test out the latest Windows 8 build. So I went ahead and burned the disk and started the install process. When I got to the disk selection screen. I still had a linux distro installed on the 2nd drive so i went ahead and deleted it and made it into a new drive. (please note that the linux distro was working perfectly before I deleted it) I then selected 200GB out of the 38GB left (for using linux distros). *note I clearly picked my 2nd drive not the main drive with the terabyte.

I finish the windows 8 install and start browsing around for a bit and installed a few programs and nvidia drivers. I decided to go back to my windows 7. So just restart and change to my main drive in bios? Here's where it gets weird.

So I realized after the fact that after the installation of windows 8, when it restarted after installing, I technically should of started loading into windows 7 right? well it started loading into windows 8 but I didn't realize that until my problem was brought to light. So once I realized that my main drive is now loading windows 8 instead of windows 7. My heart stopped. For about a full minute. So I gathered myself and loaded up Gparted and looked at the information on my drives. It showed that windows 8 was installed on my 2nd drive with 38 gb unallocated on the end. So I thought ok, so whats the problem? I look at my terabyte drive and its painted black with a exclamation mark next to it saying its corrupted or unformatted. Nothing was installed on the main drive, nothing was even touched on the drive by the windows 8 process. Yet its now corrupted in some way.

Even in windows 8, It shows windows 8 as my 2nd drive. However, it says my main drive isn't formatted and I have to format it to use it. No, I haven't done that.

I mentioned that my linux distro worked just fine before all this. Now when I make my second drive to boot up first in bios, it boots up to a grub rescue prompt instead of what it should boot [windows 8].

I can't access my main drive in anyway and my computer thinks that windows 8 is installed my main drive even though Gparted and even windows 8 says its not. I'm at a loss. Confused and upset.

Could anyone shed any light?

I had a SATA drive and loaded Windows8 on it. It crashed the second day. Several machines told me the drive was unrecoverable. I bought a new drive and unfortunately did the same thing on that drive. I now have 3 SATA drives (it virused my D; drive as well) that cannot be formatted, or even recognized by the three different machines I have put them on. I borrowed a copy of a professional hard drive repair program and it told me they were covered with 100Mb partitions, none of which could be formatted or deleted. The program was unable to repartition, format, or do anything with the three drives.
The only solution - avoid that giant Trojan program that Micro$oft calls Windows 8.

 

[Ijack]

Just to clear up one misconception. You may have installed Windows 8 on the second drive but the boot files are still on the first drive (as you had Windows 7 installed there). So not booting into 8 from the second drive is normal behaviour.