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2486
August 26th, 2021 17:00
15 R3, Alienware deleted my Windows folder
I have a Alienware 15 R3 laptop with a sata hard drive, recently I bought a 2tb m.2 ssd drive that I was planning to dual boot with while keeping my old sata drive as a secondary as I was not ready to completely start over yet. I thought I could keep my old set up on the sata while having a fresh install of windows 10 on the new M.2 SSD drive.
It was working good for a few days, but last thing I did was boot into my old Windows to work on some projects, then I shut down and went to bed. I woke up this morning and it automatically booted into my M.2 ssd, when I logged in it suddenly started flashing a white screen and I couldn't open anything.
I restarted and it showed a message that it was automatically repairing something, then it would just shows a black screen.
I tried switching to my old sata and it showed it was scanning the disk and it might take hours. After about 10 minutes it went into a black screen as well.
Now both my hard drives have a black screen. I spent a few hours searching for a solution to no avail so I decided to reinstall windows on the m2 ssd drive since i didn’t really have anything on there yet, after it finished I looked at the contents of my sata drive and it shows my Windows folder as a blank Windows file with 0 KB.
What the heck, they should have measures to prevent deleting the Windows folder.
I think it had something to do with me dualbooting where I switched from one Windows 10 to another and it checked the drive for consistency.
But it deleted windows on both drives so I don’t see how it’s a damaged hard drive issue when I just got the m2 and it was a fresh install.
Screenshot:
Is there anyway to recover the Windows folder?
crimsom
9 Technologist
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6.1K Posts
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August 30th, 2021 01:00
Hi @ponlork thank you for sharing update.
The dual boot window on different volumes is intriguing. Windows 10 has been installed twice, in a dual boot configuration, there are two copies of Windows 10 and the computer's boot manager wants to know which instance of Windows 10 to boot.
Please create and share an image of your Disk Management, so that community users can also see how your dual boot window system has been created. Please move transition upwards until all Disks are shown, see image. There should be an OS(C:) and an OS(D:), or something similar. Thank you.
You could use virtual machine software instead of setting up a dual-boot system, but a dual-boot system lets you actually use both operating systems on your hardware at full, native speed. You don’t have to deal with the overhead of a virtual machine, which is especially bad when it comes to 3D graphics. The downside is you can only use one of your installed operating systems at a time.
A51-06
7 Practitioner
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3.1K Posts
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13.7K Points
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August 30th, 2021 04:00
To me it seems all good! Honestly right now I would say this is a case closed but just monitor it for now and use your computer like you normally would ok? Have a great day and please if any questions need to be answered just PM me or Reply/Mention me so I get the Notfication?
ponlork
1 Rookie
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10 Posts
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August 30th, 2021 05:00
Yeah I think it's working smooth right now. I was nervous when I installed the Windows update where it requires restarting a few times. It restarted to complete the installation without showing the Dual boot screen. It appears when we run a Windows update, it'll move that current OS as the default boot OS.
Oh and another thing about Virtual machines, I remember a few years ago there was news about a upcoming Jailbreak for iphones called checkra1n, and there were these youtubers who were making videos in preparation for the release. And they were showing how to install MacOS with Virtualbox.
Then when the jailbreak released, many users bricked their iphones because it didn't work with Virtualbox because it required this hyper-v thing and some IOMMU Pass through. But yeah sometimes it's just better to do things on real hardware.
Hopefully tomorrow my laptop will be fully updated and everything working properly on both HDDs. Thanks everybody for reading my PC struggles
crimsom
9 Technologist
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6.1K Posts
1
August 30th, 2021 06:00
Hi @ponlork thank you for sharing updates on your experimentation to get the type of dual boot that you are happy with. Hope that this type of dual boot is indeed a stable solution for you. You have provided very interesting commentary complete with images. Thank you.