Windows 10: Why does upgrading to Windows 11 remove the E: drive partition ?

On two separate machines - after upgrading from Windows 10 latest version to Windows 11, the E: drive partition was removed.First time, I thought it was a fluke, otherwise I would have backed up files I needed from that partition.Second machine, after upgrading to Windows 11 and rebooting, the partition vanished. That was today, 1/10/24. The other one was in November 2023Both machines were Windows 10, Asus motherboards with AMD Ryzen chips.In both cases, E: was a NTFS GPT sole partition on a drive that was not the system drive.

:)

 

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

 

Installing windows off of a USB stick

Step By Step from vista:
From admin cmd prompt

1. diskpart
1a. list disk
2. select disk 1 (replace 1 with your usb drive)
3. clean
4. create partition primary
5. select partition 1 (replace 1 with your usb drive)
6. active
7. format fs=fat32
8. assign
9. exit

Copy Windows Vista's DVD ROM content to the Flash Drive

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\ (d being your vista cd and e being your usb stick)

And that's it, boot off your usb disk

 

Any way to format a drive and remove all the partitions

Okay so if you want to dualboot, do what I suggested earlier, but with a few changes.

Instead of just formatting a new partition of the full drive size, calculate how many GB's you want for each installation, and create two partitions. Install W7 to the one you want it to go to.

After you install 7, with your options, you're going to want to install XP on the other partition first, then upgrade it to Vista. That should allow you to dualboot Vista and Windows 7.

If you need a walkthrough, let me know.