[SOLVED] Can a non-OS drive be corrupted by an OS drive having corruption issues?

[Yeldur]

Hi all,

Tad strange question, but I wanted to ask and find out whether I need to take my rig apart and disconnected this SSD before I continue triaging.

Long story short, my rig has issues and the most recent ones appear to have corrupted files, I'm not sure how extensive this is, but I know the stuff I tried to access on the OS drive was inaccessible in safe mode (I tried to open a video file, run an SFC, run a DISM, do a system restore, etc etc. - all of which failed)

I didn't try anything on my D:\ drive, but I need to make sure that nothing on this drive could be impacted by the OS having issues, so, my question... Can it? Do I need to disconnect this SSD to prevent it being corrupted by whatever is wrong with my computer?

Thanks for any/all help offered.

In case it's relevant, I'm running Windows 10 on the rig.

 

[BFG-9000]

Windows 10 likes to touch every drive attached to the system. Unfortunately its version of NTFS is slightly different than Windows 7 or XP so people who double or triple-boot to other Windows on the same computer are used to disabling the bootup chkdsk on those, because just about every time you boot to Windows 10 those volumes will get remarked as unclean.

I would say though that unless you have programs installed to the D drive, that it should usually be fixable with a simple chkdsk. If your system is unstable (overclocked too far, bad PSU or SATA cables) then every time the system writes to that disk you risk corrupting it, so get it fixed ASAP

Note though that if you installed Windows while this D disk was installed, the system boot partition may have been installed on it making Windows unbootable if that disk is disconnected.

 

[Yeldur]

Windows 10 likes to touch every drive attached to the system. Unfortunately its version of NTFS is slightly different than Windows 7 or XP so people who double or triple-boot to other Windows on the same computer are used to disabling the bootup chkdsk on those, because just about every time you boot to Windows 10 those volumes will get remarked as unclean.

I would say though that unless you have programs installed to the D drive, that it should usually be fixable with a simple chkdsk. If your system is unstable (overclocked too far, bad PSU or SATA cables) then every time the system writes to that disk you risk corrupting it, so get it fixed ASAP

Note though that if you installed Windows while this D disk was installed, the system boot partition may have been installed on it making Windows unbootable if that disk is disconnected.

Thanks for this BFG, appreciated heavily. I don't believe I did set up windows with the D:\ drive installed so I think I'll be okay, but it sounds like the thing to do is to remove it anyways, grab anything I can off of it and then reinstall it and test with it if needs be.

I do have some programs installed to the drive (mostly video games, etc etc) but nothing that I can't reinstall, programs aren't really the issue, mostly just the data located on the SSD.

I'm not too sure on root cause right now, it could be PSU, it could be RAM, it could be the SSD's themselves, so I'm going to proceed as if proceeding could cause the disk to lose that data.

 

[Karadjgne]

Breadboarding is the diagnostic process of removing everything from the pc except the absolute bare minimums of cpu, 1 ram stick, cpu cooler and 2 power plugs. Most of the reason for that is to exempt any drives or outside appliances like mice or keyboard from the test. If your D drive is good, and C drive is busted, it's not going to hurt (other than as stated by BFG above) to unplug the data cable to D. That does 2 things. First, protects D from any corruption or maliciousness from C, and second protects C from any maliciousness (D could contain malware, trojans or other malicious software) from D.

If it turns out that you'd need to reinstall Windows on C in order to repair the damage, you'd be well advised to remove D from the equation anyways.

Me, I'd unplug D until C is sorted out. No point in taking any risk in either direction.

 

[Yeldur]

Breadboarding is the diagnostic process of removing everything from the pc except the absolute bare minimums of cpu, 1 ram stick, cpu cooler and 2 power plugs. Most of the reason for that is to exempt any drives or outside appliances like mice or keyboard from the test. If your D drive is good, and C drive is busted, it's not going to hurt (other than as stated by BFG above) to unplug the data cable to D. That does 2 things. First, protects D from any corruption or maliciousness from C, and second protects C from any maliciousness (D could contain malware, trojans or other malicious software) from D.

If it turns out that you'd need to reinstall Windows on C in order to repair the damage, you'd be well advised to remove D from the equation anyways.

Me, I'd unplug D until C is sorted out. No point in taking any risk in either direction.

It sounds like doing this would be the best idea overall; though I'd need to keep the GPU in place as I'm running AMD which doesn't have integrated graphics (Or at least, not if you don't buy their CPU's that have integrated graphics.

I'd have to fully remove the D:\ drive regardless as it's NVMe so plugs straight into the motherboard.

But yeah, breadboarding sounds like the way to go here to see where I get from there; though I'm still going to try data recovery first to my other rig, that way I can at least try to save some of the data that might be lost if I need to reinstall Windows.