I have 2 drives in my PC. A 1 GB (Cheap brand) NVME drive where Windows 10 is installed, and a regular 18 GB hard drive used for storage.
When I installed Windows 11, I gotta new faster Western Digital Black NVME drive to install Windows 11 on. I also had to enable Secure Boot in my Bios since Windows 11 does not install without Secure Boot Enabled. When I installed Windows 11 on my new drive, somehow, my 18 gb hard drive used for storage got wiped.
No formatting took place. It was putting in a new NVME drive, enabling Secure Boot, and installing Windows 11. Luckily, I have some of my favorite scripts on my Rift.
If you guys plan to Install Windows 11 and need to enable Secure Boot, unplug your storage drive or back up the important files in your storage drive! I think my storage drive got converted into a format that is compatible with Secure Boot, which is the GPT format.
I’m sorry you had to deal with that. But yeah I never do a windows install without unplugging data drives. It has done this more than once to me on drives I never asked it to touch.
I’m so sorry that happened to you. Thank you though for posting about it here. I was about to upgrade tomorrow and I’ve made a backup of my C drive but not my other drives so you saved me.
If the old drive is unencrypted, you may be able to recover everything if you didn’t write anything over it. Recuva is an okay free software to try and recover the data.
Something else to mention. If it is a harddrive that is installed. After installing Windows, most of the times other drives are not automatically mounted again.
So you could check in Disk Management if the disk is there, but no letter assigned, or similar.
Windows has been behaving good recently in not touching any drives it shouldn’t touch.
But in the future, make sure to disconnect any media that you don’t want to have overwritten. Accidents can happen, and Windows is by no means perfect.
Recuva is a great suggestion, but that depends on the files not being overwritten, so don’t touch that drive!
Might be able to use some disk recovery tools to check your drive and get the files…
No affiliate link or anything here, but you can scan first and then decide to buy if the files are there and worth your effort. I think I got a lifetime key for like $30 or $60. They gave me some promotion link as I was using it.
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional 19.0 is what I used this past year.