Windows 10: Problem with a Windows 10 partition that has been hidden and format changed to FAT32 vice NTFS

I am looking for some assistance with the partitioned Windows 10 hard drive on a friends laptop. Unfortunately, she was tricked into letting a scammer complete a remote connection to her laptop to remove "malware and viruses" from her laptop. I realize this is an ongoing story, but they succeeded in causing major problems with her laptop. She was told she would have to pay $300 to make the repairs and when she refused, she was left with a laptop that had the password changed and she could no longer log into it. She then contacted HP technical support and paid for a service agreement in order to get assistance with problem.


HP tech support tried to reboot the laptop with a flash drive that had a bootable Windows 10 media installed. Unfortunately, after several hours online they were not able to get the Windows 10 reinstall or repair. The laptop would reboot from the flash drive and go through the entire install process, but when it got to the HP logo, it would go back to the install menu.


I decided to take look at the DISKPART and found something I thought was a bit strange:


Volume 0 is the Recovery Partition and the status reads healthy,Volume 1 is the System partition C: and it reads healthy, Volume 3 is the Removeable USB and it reads healthy also. What I found to be strange was the Volume 2 Partition. I don't understand why this partition is formated in FAT32 or why it would be hidden. Is this something that would stop Windows 10 from being reinstalled from a boot flash drive. Any assistance that anyone could provide would be helpful. Thank you


Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info

---------------- ---- ------------- ----- ------------- ---------- ----------- ------------

Volume 0 Recovery NTFS Partition 529 MB Healthy

Volume 1 C NTFS Partition 930 GB Healthy

Volume 2 FAT32 Partition 100 MB Healthy Hidden

Volume 3 D ESD-USB FAT32 Removable 29 GB Healthy

:)

 

what is the difference in fat32 and NTFS HDD formating???

No, FAT32 partitions are limited to about 8 terabytes.

Built-in Windows XP tool will let you format FAT32 but only @ 32GB or less. Another Microsoft tactic to force people to use NTFS. Much like Vista and Directx 10. With third-party tools you can go above 32GB easily.

 

FAT32 formatting

If you can plug the drive into a XP system you can partition and format to FAT32 through Drive Configuration. Heres the steps

1. Click Start and go to your control panel

2. Go into Administrative Tools and then open up Computer Management

3. Now click on Disk Management that is located under Storage.

On the right you should see your drive that you want to format to FAT32. Just right click the drive, select format, and switch partition to Fat32. You may need to delete the volume if it will not let you change to Fat32 and then repartition. I have used this many times.

 

what is the difference in fat32 and NTFS HDD formating???

Pretty accurate listing Silverel.

I personally prefer FAT32. It IS faster than NTFS (there is a small but benchmarkable difference) and also it is much easier to recover from disastrous OS-induced and/or hardware disk crashes simply due to availability of more robust tools and the evident FAT32 approachability.

NTFS's alternate data streams (ADS) is something I find distasteful and an obvious security risk. In fact, if file system security matters to you, or data security in general, you might want to skip Windows operating systems completely and go straight into Unix territory. Seriously, when someone implies NTFS over any other file system (usually FAT32) on the basis of data security I can’t help but laugh.

Primary issue with FAT32 is the file size limit. So if you work with large video files and such I recommend an NTFS partition. (As a supplement of course.)