Now let me preface this by explaining something: My work laptop has an extra hardrive that was partitioned into a data drive and a windows recovery drive (450gb data as my D: drive and a 30gb Recovery partition designated as R due to the very small size of the primary SSD. Its never once given me any issues before and has worked perfectly up until the upgrade today.
I was very diligent about making sure my desktop was no longer in danger of being auto updated to Windows 10 but completely forgot to do the same on my work laptop. After 5 hours or so working away from my desk I sit back down to discover my laptop is now suddenly running windows 10. While annoyed I blame myself for not remembering to disable the update on my laptop.
Thinking the forced upgrade is naught but a mild inconvenience that can easily be remedied I go to load up my work for the week only to discover that my entire 500gb Data drive has now been formatted as a Windows Recovery drive which has resulted in the loss of literally years of work. While I have a back up it is over a year old and was not a full back up of the entire drive due to storage constraints on the network storage here at my place of work Funnily enough it was an issue I was planning to remedy with a archived back up to my Desktop this past weekend only to accidentally forget my laptop at work over the weekend. Go figure right.
Fast forward to a day later and I have tried recovering to Windows 8.1 but the drive remained a single recovery partition and did not revert, I used Recuva to try and salvage my data but was greeted by a mass of corrupted files thanks to the vast majority being docx files which appear to have some kind of copy protection built in that prevents a full recovery. Not a single one of my docx files works but the handful of excel and regular .doc files seem to have restored perfectly. The program also seemed unable to retrieve the Rar archives I had made to transfer to my desktop as a back up. I also tried some recovery tools via an ubuntu install which necessitated a reformatting of my primary drive thanks to some bizarre HDD copy protection/encryption firmware installed on my laptop by Asus. Still no luck. All the essential files that were recovered are still tagged as corrupted when attempting to access them.
I am at a loss here folks. I've tried searching online and users reporting data loss are experiencing data loss in their primary drive without any mention of a reformatting occurring. It seems like the bespoke HDD encryption / protection firmware built into the laptop by Asus that also just so happens to block the installation and booting of Linux distros without a complete reformat of the main drive could also be partly to blame here but again before the update I had no issues with my Data partition whatsoever. Nevertheless regardless of the factors at play here. This reformatting has resulted in the loss of over 250gb of word, excel, and pdf documents representing years of my hard work and I have no foreseeable way of recovering it. I'm looking at months of man hours recreating my lost documents and supporting materials.
So,
I sincerely hope this saves others the misery this has caused me. Please, if you are running a Windows OS that is not Windows 10, for your sake, learn from mistakes and avoid such a devastating loss of data by backing up all your work ASAP.
I was very diligent about making sure my desktop was no longer in danger of being auto updated to Windows 10 but completely forgot to do the same on my work laptop. After 5 hours or so working away from my desk I sit back down to discover my laptop is now suddenly running windows 10. While annoyed I blame myself for not remembering to disable the update on my laptop.
Thinking the forced upgrade is naught but a mild inconvenience that can easily be remedied I go to load up my work for the week only to discover that my entire 500gb Data drive has now been formatted as a Windows Recovery drive which has resulted in the loss of literally years of work. While I have a back up it is over a year old and was not a full back up of the entire drive due to storage constraints on the network storage here at my place of work Funnily enough it was an issue I was planning to remedy with a archived back up to my Desktop this past weekend only to accidentally forget my laptop at work over the weekend. Go figure right.
Fast forward to a day later and I have tried recovering to Windows 8.1 but the drive remained a single recovery partition and did not revert, I used Recuva to try and salvage my data but was greeted by a mass of corrupted files thanks to the vast majority being docx files which appear to have some kind of copy protection built in that prevents a full recovery. Not a single one of my docx files works but the handful of excel and regular .doc files seem to have restored perfectly. The program also seemed unable to retrieve the Rar archives I had made to transfer to my desktop as a back up. I also tried some recovery tools via an ubuntu install which necessitated a reformatting of my primary drive thanks to some bizarre HDD copy protection/encryption firmware installed on my laptop by Asus. Still no luck. All the essential files that were recovered are still tagged as corrupted when attempting to access them.
I am at a loss here folks. I've tried searching online and users reporting data loss are experiencing data loss in their primary drive without any mention of a reformatting occurring. It seems like the bespoke HDD encryption / protection firmware built into the laptop by Asus that also just so happens to block the installation and booting of Linux distros without a complete reformat of the main drive could also be partly to blame here but again before the update I had no issues with my Data partition whatsoever. Nevertheless regardless of the factors at play here. This reformatting has resulted in the loss of over 250gb of word, excel, and pdf documents representing years of my hard work and I have no foreseeable way of recovering it. I'm looking at months of man hours recreating my lost documents and supporting materials.
So,
******************* WORD OF WARNING *******************
If your recovery partition is not on your main HDD Windows 10 can apparently decide to reformat whichever drive it is on during the auto update process.
If your recovery partition is not on your main HDD Windows 10 can apparently decide to reformat whichever drive it is on during the auto update process.
I sincerely hope this saves others the misery this has caused me. Please, if you are running a Windows OS that is not Windows 10, for your sake, learn from mistakes and avoid such a devastating loss of data by backing up all your work ASAP.