Weirdest thing I've seen in my 27 years of computing - any ideas?

I have a 2nd boot HD in my Win 10 setup. When I want to use it, I shut down and I disconnect the data cable from my main boot HD and connect that to my alternate boot HD. I then boot and choose F11 to select the boot HD. I did this today and when my alternate boot HD was fully booted,

I opened the folder of files I was working on and saw that instead of the latest date being today 4/9/19 it was 3/15/19. I did a search for all files on that drive with the .CWP extension I was using and the latest one was 3/15. All my data is on a separate E HD, not C. All my files form 3/16 to 4/9 vanished.


I shut down and reconnected my main HD and when I booted it all the files were on my data HD up to 4/9. How could they be hidden when I booted from the alternate boot HD? After I backed up everything, I shut down again and connect my alternate boot HD and the boot up seemed to take longer, but this time all the files were there. It turns out that the last time I used my alternate Boot HD was on 3/15. This must be a clue as to what happened


I'm using Win 10 How could this happen?

So you have:
Main boot HDD
2nd boot HDD
data on E - HDD or partition on one of the above?

Suggest you grab a screenshot of Disk Management (rt-click start button) so we can see what is what, eg:
see below !
As the issue seems resolved (for now), we may never know what happened, but a clearer understanding of what drives & partitions you have may help for the future.

If you have two or more hard disk each Windows version affects the data, this is normal.

Here's my setup above. The HD's not shown are all 1 partition data HDs. I never have 2 HD's booted up with an OS at the same time. Years ago I used dual boot fairly often, but because of Win 10's different ways of handling it, now the only way I do it is like I outlined in my first post.


I have a feeling Spapakons may have a good explanation. I'd like to know more how Win 10 interacts with other HD's, that may have caused this. I have 2 USB HD's connected and on 3/15 I likely had only 1 USB connected, possibly none.


This was very unnerving and I'd love to get an impression of what happened, so I won't be so alarmed next time and just reboot. I guess the main thing I hope that I never permanently lose data because of dual boot.

bro67 said:

You really need a hot swap bay. Plugging and unplugging cable will cause them to wear out and break eventually.

If I used dual boot more often I would - good point to consider

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Has anyone ever seen this sort of behavior?

In a dual boot set-up it is important to have unchecked fast start-up in the power settings (default it is enabled). Leaving it on, it might give unexpected results when changing boot medium.

I've heard that most SATA cables have a 50 cycle limit. Broken my share of SATA plugs...

PiKo said:

In a dual boot set-up it is important to have unchecked fast start-up in the power settings (default it is enabled). Leaving it on, it might give unexpected results when changing boot medium.

I tried Fast boot and it was too fast since I have a SSD boot drive. So it's been disabled for years.

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sgtaylor5 said:

I've heard that most SATA cables have a 50 cycle limit. Broken my share of SATA plugs...

So is a 50 cycle limit referring to everytime I unplug in and plug that's 1 cycle? If so can the SATA cable cause the weird occurrence I had with data being hidden?