Windows 10 deleted entire Manjaro on a separate drive

I had dual booting Manjaro UEFI and Windows 10 UEFI. Manjaro was on a separate drive (Drive 1) with no separate esp partition and no separate Home partition. Grub 2 bootloader on this drive (drive 1) was able to boot both Manjaro and Windows. Windows 10 was on a separate drive (Drive 2) with Windows bootloader on that Drive 2.

One fine day, suddenly the system booted in Windows. Windows while booting entered (perhaps) in disc checking mode and silently deleted the entire Manjaro on Drive 1 including all my data.

Now when I open a luve USB of Manjaro, my partition table for Drive 1 shows nothing (no Ext4/ FAT 32 or no any other partition! It shows this drive as unformatted.

I have never heard or read or experienced this. I have read and experienced in past about Windows killing the bootloader Grub 2 etc. But here, entire of Manjaro with my data is gone. What’s this?

  1. Is it possible for Windows to delete all of Manjaro and its data when all of it sits on ANOTHER DRIVE?

  2. If so, will installing the Grub2 in a separate esp partition on Drive 1 and creating a separate home partition in Manjaro help protect data?

  3. Is there any other solution to at least protect my data and Manjaro install (Grub2 may be deleted, I can fix it)

Please help.

Next time, follow this tutorial and you should be fine.

With two separate drives giving Linux its own EFI partition during installation is safer. Using only Windows’ EFI partition for both OSes defeats one of the purposes of having separate drives. If Manjaro’s installer auto selects Windows’ EFI you’ll want to intervene and select the Linux drive for /boot/efi.

I didn’t think so until now. It’s common for Windows Update (I doubt chkdsk or some other disk routine was involved) to wipe out Linux boot entries whenever both Windows and Linux share the same EFI partition on the Windows drive. But I’ve never heard of all other Linux partitions disappearing when this happens and the EFI partition is usually repairable to get Linux booting again.

Thank you for the replies.

I followed the suggestion to install separate efi partition on the Linux own hard drive and reinstalled Manjaro. I also changed the boot order to point to Linux drive.

Unfortunately, the system still booted in Win 10, the Win 10 before booting did that cruel activity. (The black screen before booting with circular revolving white dots for a long time) deleted all my Linux partitions including ext4 and efi.

I accept what has been mentioned in your reply and it is consistent with my past experience that Win 10 doesn’t delete ext4 positions, but here and now I can see it happening live, already twice.

Either it is a new Microsoft trick which others will soon experience and report, or something is seriously wrong with my computer due to which is happening only with me. Either way, I think for now, the only solution left is to completely remove one of the OS and live with the other exclusively.

Any other better way out? Thanks in advance.

That seems really unlikely that Windows deletes an entire other disk and its partitions by itself. Your setup seemed OK to me I wouldn’t have made otherwise, each OS and their respective boot loader on their own drive.

You may try forensic tools to try to check the disk for maybe restorable partitions or files if needed.

But I would probably also check Windows to see if nothing weird there, like malware/virus, I doubt Windows by itself would delete all partitions of another disk without reason. Look if there are logs of what happened on that boot where you think windows deleted your disk partitions.

Maybe your disk just failed too, that’s a possibility I think.

//EDIT: thread has been closed, my post marked as solution, but what the hell was going on and what was the solution? @SPP

//EDIT2: I removed the solution, as my post was absolutely not a solution, and the reply after it doesn’t explain anything at all.

Thanks for your reply. I’ll check these and revert soon.

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.