Secondary drive wiped clean on factory reset

[Vincemy82]

I screwed up my desktop installation and had to do a factory reset. All my apps were in the primary drive and non-apps such as photos, music, documents were in my secondary harddisk. As a precaution I unplugged the secondary drive before I did the factory reset. After the factory reset the desktop successfully booted up. Then I shut it down and plugged back the secondary drive but to my horror on 2nd boot up my secondary drive had been wiped clean and all my non-apps disappeared. I don't understand.

What have I done wrong?

[Karthik · Accepted solution]

I do not think anything went wrong.

The new OS is not reading the secondary drive completly as the file system might be different.

Assign a drive to secondary drive. Hit Windows+R, type deskmgmt.msc and hit enter. In here you would see a drive or drive space which would be unassigned. Right click on the drive and assign a drive.

or

Insert the secondary drive into a external drive casing and connect as an external drive and you should find the content.

if you have disconnected the secondary drive there is no way the new OS will erase the content unless you asked it to.

[Vincemy82]

Hi Karthik, thank you.

It is a painful lesson for me as my downloaded apps were in my secondary drive and I spent hours downloading them again. I suppose it is too late to assign the drive now.

Cheers.