What happened to my operating system

[amcneil98]

The other day I used my laptop (MSI GS60 Ghost 002) to surf the web while on the couch after this I turned the laptop off, sat it down on the table and plugged it in. Today, after not touching it since then it would not boot to Windows (BIOS loads fine) and was throwing the error of: "searching for media, no media found" which, after some research means a missing boot drive. I dug through the BIOS and as far as I can tell it is not seeing the boot drive as installed (however the BIOS is quite confusing and does not show things as clearly as my ROG board's BIOS that I have the most experience with). However I did not think that a missing/dead drive was the issue as I have never dropped the laptop and it was an SSD so even if I had dropped the device it should not have been physically damaged. I booted the laptop to my Win 10 install drive and sure enough my SSD that my operating system was installed to is now visible and an option to install a new copy of Win 10 to. However it is showing up as completely empty. This is as far as I have gone. If I reformat the drive and reinstall the operating system I don't lose anything as my laptop is not my main machine and everything of importance was backed up but it is a slight pain and I am not looking forward to re-downloading a bunch of programs because I have an internet data cap. Is there any way to get the old operating system back or am I SOL? Also what would cause such a massive loss of data? Lastly if my old operating system is gone and should I worry about this being a reoccurring issue when I go back to college (currently on summer break) and start relying on my laptop daily again.

 

[LukeFatwalker]

Sounds like OS is capoot, if you can't find any data it was likely wiped off when the drives disconnected.

You'll have to re-install the OS sadly.

In the future you should look into backups as a means of preserving your OS, especially if data caps are an issue. Programs like Macrium Reflect and Rollback Rx will work.