As some of you may know I just rebuilt my primary workstation/flight sim computer. Stats below.

As part of the build I needed to create a thumb drive installer for Windows 10, so I went to the MS page and downloaded their Windows 10 Media Creation Tool. In preparation for the clean install I had previously condensed all of my data, about 4TB to an external storage device. I normally keep two copies of my data on two separate drives, but I intended to wipe and re-format my two spinning drives for use in the new build.

The timeline:

I did the build and ran into some WHEA issues on the first Windows install, which I did from an older (outdated) but trusted thumb drive. While running this OS I did all of my prep to reinstall with the fresh Windows download. After confirming all of my data was safe on the external, I ran the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool and went through the menus, including selecting a USB thumb drive as the intended location for the Windows installer. The menu clearly showed the Kingston thumb drive, nothing else. I ran the tool and it proceeded to download Windows.

After the process ran, the tool formatted the thumb drive and finished. I went to check the thumb drive...it was empty. I went to my external drive and found that the tool had selected the external drive rather than the Kinston drive it was directed to. The tool then re-formatted my external drive that was the repository of my complete body of work. I've attached an image below.
As the image shows, the drive space not used by the tool was converted to un-allocated partitions.

As of today, 4TB of work representing approximately 52,000 man hours of my labor is now locked on those partitions and essentially lost. I understand that recovery is possible, but if the file structure is destroyed the data is useless. Imagine going into a law library and tearing every page from every volume and dropping them from the sky into a big pile. The pages are numbered 1,2,3...etc. to near infinity. To re-assemble the pages into volumes would be a staggering undertaking.

That is the status of my data...as I understand it.

At this point I must regretfully inform this community that all of my works in progress, both past and present are essentially lost and I will not be able to re-assemble the jigsaw puzzle. It would take years. This is a devastation to me and to my wife who has supported and tolerated my 100 hour work weeks for our entire married life. I will not subject her to that again. Along with the loss of my development work, nearly twenty years of research and documentation is destroyed. Photos and bitmaps are probably recoverable, but hundreds of geo data tiles are useless without a file structure that catalogs where they go along with the thousands of autogen files that are associated with specific files. Anyone who has done scenery development knows what I am referring to.

The same goes for aircraft modeling. Each part is associated to one or more hand painted bitmaps, which all use similar naming conventions. Sorting through hundreds and hundreds of bitmaps to re-assign to thousands of scattered model parts is unrealistic. The animations are another story entirely.

I would be most appreciative if any one of our technically brilliant members could point me toward a data recovery modality that can recover data, and file structure. Without that I'm cooked and permanently out of the development game.

In My Humble Opinion

I frankly find it outrageous that Microsoft does not have a simple safety feature built into it's Media Creation Tool that recognizes it has made a mistake and is on a huge storage device, not a thumb drive, and present a "Are you sure you want to format this drive?" message before wiping out a persons entire life work. Simply mind boggling.


Thank you for reading.
I am most sincerely sorry to disappoint you, my friends.

Best to you all,
Gordon