does creating a windows 10 "boot from usb" clear everything else on the usb

[BowmanDiesel]

So one of my computers crashed while trying to reset windows 10 so I created a "boot from usb drive" with an external hard drive. I never saw anything about reformatting the hard drive during this process, but all that I see on it is that software. Did I just lose all of the information that was on this drive? If not, how do I find it again?

 

[Finstar]

Yes, the windows media creation tool does format the drive it installs windows boot media into. And no, there's no way of getting anything back.

 

[USAFRet]

So one of my computers crashed while trying to reset windows 10 so I created a "boot from usb drive" with an external hard drive. I never saw anything about reformatting the hard drive during this process, but all that I see on it is that software. Did I just lose all of the information that was on this drive? If not, how do I find it again?

Yes.
It wipes the drive.
It warns you of this at the Win 10 page to start the process, and then again on the dialog box when you start to actually create the USB.

 

[USAFRet]

Possibly recover with TestDisk.
You'll need a whole different drive to recover to, if it works.

In future, use a $5 USB stick instead of the actual USB HDD.

 

[BowmanDiesel]

Thanks for the feedback. It also reformatted my 2tb hard drive into a 30gb drive. Can I undo that? I don't recall seeing any warnings, but I am known for not reading such things. Fortunately that is not the only place I had that info backed up. I knew that I didn't need anything that big, but the only other one that I had was 1gb so I just used this one.

 

[Finstar]

Thanks for the feedback. It also reformatted my 2tb hard drive into a 30gb drive. Can I undo that? I don't recall seeing any warnings, but I am known for not reading such things. Fortunately that is not the only place I had that info backed up. I knew that I didn't need anything that big, but the only other one that I had was 1gb so I just used this one.

http://www.windowscentral.com/how-clean-and-format-storage-drive-using-diskpart-windows-10

 

[USAFRet]

Thanks for the feedback. It also reformatted my 2tb hard drive into a 30gb drive. Can I undo that? I don't recall seeing any warnings, but I am known for not reading such things. Fortunately that is not the only place I had that info backed up. I knew that I didn't need anything that big, but the only other one that I had was 1gb so I just used this one.

The above linked application, maybe.

So you did this with the 1TB drive, and it wiped everything.
Then you did it again with the 2TB drive? Were you expecting something different to happen?

Yes, it reformatted it, and wiped all the data and partitions. Like it told you it was going to do.

 

[BowmanDiesel]

Thanks for the feedback. It also reformatted my 2tb hard drive into a 30gb drive. Can I undo that? I don't recall seeing any warnings, but I am known for not reading such things. Fortunately that is not the only place I had that info backed up. I knew that I didn't need anything that big, but the only other one that I had was 1gb so I just used this one.

The above linked application, maybe.

So you did this with the 1TB drive, and it wiped everything.
Then you did it again with the 2TB drive? Were you expecting something different to happen?

Yes, it reformatted it, and wiped all the data and partitions. Like it told you it was going to do.

Not sure where you got the idea that I did it with a 1 TB drive, I don't even have one. No, I did it once, with a 2 TB drive. I think I will spend a little bit more time looking things over in the future. I just scanned for warnings, but that notification is not very noticeable and I just skipped over it. Fortunately almost everything was backed up elsewhere.