Windows 10: What the devil is mstf data?

When scrolling through my internal drives on a live partitioning disc, I noticed that both of my internal storage-only hard drives had their main partitions clipped off from the beginning with some sort of dark, unidentifiable partition with Microsoft's name on it, regardless of the data of my own that it was displacing, some of which has been corrupted. To make matters worse, even after wiping one of those drives to be restored from my backup, the new ntfs partition over the entire drive had a "mstf" flag added to it from the get-go with almost 300 mb of "mstf data" already there, and persistent against formatting.


What is this invasive data? How was it inflicted upon my personal storage space? and How can I get rid of it?

:)

 

Edge Search Does Not Permit Change of Region


I got these suggestions from the Microsoft Community forum.No. 1 worked for me:

Thank you for posting the query on Microsoft Community. I am glad to assist you on this.
We have reproduce the issue here and we are able to access non-regional search for google using Microsoft Edge.
I would suggest you to try the below steps and check if it helps.
Step 1:
Clear browsing data option of Microsoft Edge and check if you face the issue. To do so perform the steps below.

1. Click on the More actions icon next to the feedback icon present on top right corner of the Project Spartan homepage.
2. Select Settings and click on Choose what to clear.
3. Check the boxes Browsing history, Cookies and saved website data and Cached data and files and click on Clear.

Step 2:
I suggest you to create a new user account and check if the issue occurs.

1. Go to Settings.
2. Choose Accounts and then select Family and other users.
3. Select add someone else on this PC.
4. Enter a user name and hit next.
5. Click on Finish.
6. Sign out from the current Account and Log into the new account.

Step 3:
It could also happen because of network issue. I suggest you to try with different network connection and check if it helps.

 

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

 

A devil worshiper is editing the app reviews!

Your logic makes no sense. "Virgin" is masked to protect your posts from the devil worshippers. The devil worshippers, trolling for virgins for sacred rituals, will simply pass by your review because they are hidden with "****". They won't
stop and feel compelled to edit them and destroy the sanctity of your idea or opinion. But in the interim I would definitely go with USVI, as Joel mentioned, since it is the common acronym for the region.