SSD was wiped

[Noob Builder]

So my girlfriend called me and her PC said that it couldn't detect the OS and to select the proper boot disk. Hours later I got a hold of the computer and I noticed in the BIOS that the operating system was not showing on the disk and when I went to re-install windows I noticed the entire drive was wiped before I had done anything. What could have caused this? I was thinking some form of malware but I am trying to figure out if anything else happend.

[Murasaki]

You mean like its been completely reformatted or? Haven't heard of malware that can wipe everything like that including the entire OS while said OS is running.

[Noob Builder]

11 minutes ago, Murasaki said:

You mean like its been completely reformatted or? Haven't heard of malware that can wipe everything like that including the entire OS while said OS is running.

Yes the entire disk was unallocated, she said that her computer crashed while playing league and then the screen came up saying it couldn't detect the os

[Jgj0UQdW]

16 minutes ago, Noob Builder said:

Yes the entire disk was unallocated, she said that her computer crashed while playing league and then the screen came up saying it couldn't detect the os

It's possible but rare for the bootloader or partition table to break from a system crash. I think that's more likely than malware. If that happened the data on the drive wasn't actually erased. It just lost an important bit of metadata. Sounds like you already reinstalled but it might have been possible to repair it with the recovery mode on the windows install media. No guarantee though.

[EggieIV]

8 hours ago, 1598032785 said:

It's possible but rare for the bootloader or partition table to break from a system crash. I think that's more likely than malware. If that happened the data on the drive wasn't actually erased. It just lost an important bit of metadata. Sounds like you already reinstalled but it might have been possible to repair it with the recovery mode on the windows install media. No guarantee though.

 

Had that happen to me, while i encountered an error when i compiled Java code on Linux like 3 times ... 

 

Check with Data recovery tools if you still see data on the drive or everything has been zero-d.

 

If this is the case you can recover the ehole drive including the necessary data structure to boot from it, with a Simple recovery Tool.