Windows 10: Corrupted Partition

Needing to reinstall a fresh copy of windows, I created a partition for the windows 10 installation media on the external SSD I use for backups. The installation went fine, but the backup portion of the drive disappeared afterwards. Neither the installation media partition nor the device as a whole changed size, but the backup portion is now marked as "Unallocated". I tried assigning a letter to it without formatting, but windows explorer says it contains an unrecognized file system.


I do not want to format it as it contains important data. Should I format it anyways and then try and recover the data with third-party software?

:)

 

W7 Hard drive partition issue

to get rid of that 100 meg windows partition that setup creates for you on a new install on a blank hdd:

- press shift+f10 when on the partition management screen in setup <-- this opens a command prompt
- diskpart <-- start the windows command line partition management tool
- list disk <--- list the installed hdds in this computer for the next step
- select disk 0 <- might have to replace 0 with the number of the correct disk
- clean <-- this will erase all data on the disk you selected one step up- dont use the wrong disk!
- create partition primary <- creates a primary partition taking up all space on the drive, adjust the command if necessary
- exit, exit to exit diskpart and the command prompt
- click refresh in partition manager and select your newly created partition and install to that

 

Programs not working

In post 26 there were steps listed to fix the operating system corruption.
Are you able to follow them?
In post 29 was the suggested dism repair command.

 

Windows 10 updates are corrupting my C:\ partition

Hello, better describing what was explained above:

I don't know if there were any error messages during the update because Windows was set to reboot in the middle of the night.

When booting Windows starts an automatic repair (every time), the repair will fail and it will go to the Advanced Startup.

Inside Troubleshoot option of Advanced Startup:

• System Restore: It cannot find any restore point (likely because partition is corrupted)
  
• System Image Recovery: It cannot restore the system without using a Windows 10 image burned to a USB Stick or DVD (looks like the Restore partition was damaged by the update)
  

Inside Command Prompt:

• I cannot 'cd' to Windows partition, it appears corrupted
• I can 'cd' to Restore partition just fine
• I can use chkdsk to fix the Windows partition (it says the primary MFT is corrupted and it recovers the backup MFT), but only to recover my personal files, because if I reboot the computer, Windows tries to automatically repair the system and ends up corrupting
  the partition again.

The only viable solution is to fix the partition, recover my files while in Command Prompt, download a Windows 10 image using another OS / computer and reinstall Windows manually.

It happened when updating to Anniversary (solved by manually reinstalling Windows) and again when updating to Creators.