Windows 10: How do I keep my data off my C: drive?

1: I've had a catastrophic disk failure on my Windows PC and had to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows 10 from scratch, so I now have "raw" Windows 10 on my C: drive and some other empty partitions. Every time I create a new file or document usually in an Office application, Windows wants to store it in my Windows folder on the C: drive. I don't want to clutter my system drive with every file I ever create, but rather have the default save location be an empty data partition or perhaps OneDrive. How do I set a different drive as the default storage location for my application s

:)

 

No C: but D: drive has all the data

Hi Austin,

To help you with your concern regarding the data on the drive C:, you're seeing the drive "C:" as the drive "D:" because you're booting your computer outside Windows. When booting your computer outside Windows, the system is reading the recovery partition
as drive C: and the data in the drive C: \ are listed on the drive D: \. Try to boot your computer and try to check again the data in the drive C: \ and see if the data are listed.

Regards.

 

Lost data from hard drive, what to do now?

Well, I'm sorry to hear that it's a WD My Passport that failed on you, @tomhenry ! *Frown
I'd recommend you to try using a different USB cable with it and see if that will help your system to detect it without it disconnecting.
I'd also suggest you to go to Disk Management and see how the drive is listed there. It won't hurt to check up on the health and SMART status of the HDD by running the QUICK and EXTENDED tests from the WD's Data LifeGuard Diagnostics. Here's a link to the available software: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=11ZOpD

Give these troubleshooting steps a try and keep us posted with the results!
SuperSoph_WD

 

GPT disk conversion for both data drives and C drive


Macrium Rescue disk can be used to convert from MBR to GPT and vice versa without doing a fresh install of Windows.

1. Download Rescue6.1.1081X64.iso - Google Drive and use Rufus to create a bootable USB disk. Skip this step if you've already created the Macrium Rescue disk.
2. Download: BootEFI_Only-00-00.zip - Google Drive . Unzip to an external or an internal HD
   NOTE: This is a copy of the first 3 partitions of my current Windows 10 x64 (450MB Recovery, 100MB EFI and 16MB MSR)
3. Boot up Macrium Rescue disk and create a backup of your current Windows to another internal/external HD. It serves 2 purposes: you'd have a backup of your current Windows in case things go wrong and then use it to restore the C drive on the next steps.
4. Next, switch the BIOS to UEFI and use Macrium to restore the first 3 partitions downloaded in step 2 to your current MBR Windows. No need to convert or Format, Macrium will do it.
5. Again with Macrium, select the backup image from step 3, and copy back the C drive after the 3 partitions.
   After this step, you should have: 450MB, 100MB, 16MB and C drive (GPT partition scheme)
6. From Macrium, click on Fix the Windows Boot Problems
7. Reboot. Your Windows should be in UEFI mode.