Why is win 8.1 erasing my second disk?

To make long story short I just bought MSI GE60 with Win 8.1 on standard 1TB HDD. Since I had SSD laying around, I took out original HD and put SSD on which I installed Win 7 (since I really dislike Win 8, or rather metro part of it.). After setting everything up and installing all my programs I decided to make my laptop dual boot and purchased Msata drive. I copied image of Win7 ssd into Msata and all was fine. Then I put my original HDD with Win 8 into drive slot, with msata having Win7, to have dual boot by changing BIOS boot order. That worked fine under Win 7, but as soon as I boot up into Win 8, my whole Msata drive with Win 7 on it was wiped completely clean. I had full back up on my SSD, so I restored msata again and all was fine until again I decided to boot into Win 8, which again promptly erased whole msata disk. Both copies of Windows are legit and registered to my laptop, so what is going on? Seems I just added another reason, why now I literally hate Win 8.

 

it doesn't sound like you ever actually booted W7 from the mSATA. how'd you verify your SSD-to-mSATA clone (both times)?

 

of course I boot up from msata, bios set to legacy, i boot up few times in Win7, was checking and updating drivers, no problem, then decided to see how the camera and mike works under Win 8, since they didn't work too well under Win 7, so I switched BIOS to that UFO mode, booted Win 8 and see my msata is empty, switched back to legacy, no boot up drive. Reloaded msata again, this time I disabled fast boot up and hibernation in Win8, thinking maybe Win 8 didn't see msata on shutdown, waking up from hibernation, just corrupted the drive, but that didn't change anything, Msata was erased as soon as I booted win 8, so I'm pretty sure Win8 is erasing the whole disk on purpose. I'm posting this from msata win7, win 8 is on HDD, but only in case I need to return the laptop to factory or something, otherwise I'm done with this Win8 garbage. I really wish Linux people got their act together, one distro for everybody, concentrate on drives, even start charging and watch MS dissapear into sunset. I already replaced MS office with Open Office many yrs ago and couldn't be happier, wish I could do same with OS.

 

well aside from the daunting myriad distro choices you mention, there's always OS X too. (i personally use Arch and Debian/Raspbian if you're interested in recommendations.) you don't seem to be too excited for W10 either...

so i don't know much else to suggest except it's likely not W8 that's formatting your mSATA. the switch from UEFI to legacy and back sounds suspect, but it could've been various things during the somewhat convoluted process you describe. sorry i can't be of more help.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

Thanks for response.
My process is not convoluted, i've been doing this since Win ME, after virus disabled my computer and I had no way to get back in, even if I knew what and how to fix it.
It's MS dual boot process that is convoluted, if you loose boot drive, you loose both Windows at the same time in dual boot system, the way I set it up, with 2 independent boot up drives, no matter which disk fails, you still have fully working computer and since I was intending to use Win 8 only on rare ocasions and at some point get rid of it altogether, it is much easier to just reformat Win 8 drive (using my method), than going thru the nightmare of transferring boot from Win8 drive to Win7 without reinstalling everything a new. Also this is how I set up Linux dual boot. I copy bootable image of Linux into memory stick, choose boot up drive in BIOS and it works even with triple boot (Linux, Win7 and Win8) except for Win8 erasing my Win7 disk (it doesn't touch my Linux drive) and I would love to know why. But at this point it's all academic, I think I'm done with Win8 and don't want to touch it with 8 foot pole.

 

What if... Win8 thinks msata drive is an ssd cache and removes all the useless stuff at boot?

 

Good point by @KLF.
@pete962 In your Windows 8 installation, do you have IRST (Intel Rapid Storage Technology) installed?
If you do, open it, and from the Status tab or navigate to the Accelerate tab (if available) check if acceleration is enabled and on what device. You can also choose to disable it from there and see if your mSATA drive still gets erased.

 

I do have IRST installed, it's pretty much factory setup, maybe I revisit and try this again, but I'm thinking it's some kind of idiotic attempt by MS to fight software piracy, that doesn't do anything to combat piracy, but makes legit user's life miserable. The reason I think this is the case is that first 2 attempts to install Win7 on msata I did with Win8 HDD taken out of system, just simple SSD win7 boot and copy from SSD to msata. Each time Win 8 erased whole msata disk on first bootup, when I reinstalled it's disk. Third time I did boot up in Win8 and transfer Win7 files from USB to msata, to make win 8 aware of msata drive having files and this time Win8 didn't erase my disk, but on next boot it made msata nonbootable and therefore useless for my dual boot purpose.
Thanks for suggestions.

 

are you booting legacy mode (BIOS) or UEFI, and/or at what point are you switching back-and-forth between the two? interesting thought by @KLF.

if you're able to get W7 copied over from SSD to mSATA and then boot into it without the W8 HDD present, then try connecting the W8 HDD via dock/external USB enclosure while booted into W7 via mSATA -- and format the W8 HDD (after copying over whatever you need) however you need to from there.

 

It works fine booting from msata into Win7, even with Win8 HDD present (needs legacy BIOS settings of course), once I change BIOS to UEFI, it boots up fine in Win 8 as well, no problem, but my msata with Win7 on it, is erased and at that point I can no longer boot back to Win 7 again. The reason I need to keep Win 8 for now is comparison: for example I just noticed that in Win 7 under full load my laptop is being current limited, so I need to boot up into Win 8 and see if this happens in factory settings as well, if it's not I may be missing driver that draws current from battery to supplement power supply, if it does the same under Win8, I would assume poor design and not waste time looking for new drivers.
As far as @KLF suggestion, I have not tested it yet, I don't have time to do full back, get it erased and restoring it again.

 

To put some closure to this thread, after disabling fast boot in BIOS, disabling hibernation, moving HDD with Win 8 to CD caddy (for different reason) and making numerous other changes I can't even remember, everything seems to work fine: I can boot to Win 7, then change BIOS boot order, to boot Win 8 and then back to Win7 without data loss or boot sector erase on either drive. So to sum it up: I have no idea why this disk erase was happening and I have no clue what fixed it, but it's working fine ATM.