Why can't Win installer show drive labels?!

[tddk25]

Can I please just ask why Microsoft didn't make the windows installer able to show drive labels? I just lost a tb of my family's life because of it!  The previous windows installation and the bios both showed the new 1tb ssd as drive 0 and the 1tb hdd with all my stuff on it as drive 1, but then the windows installer came along and said, "screw you, the ssd is drive 1 now and the hdd is drive 0."

[Crunchy Dragon]

I don't recall ever not seeing drive labels in the Windows Installer.

 

I also don't typically leave drives connected to the PC that aren't my boot drive when installing/reinstalling Windows.

[tddk25]

4 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I don't recall ever not seeing drive labels in the Windows Installer.

The installer only says 'Drive # Partition #' for each drive and partition. I wasn't able to tell the difference because both drives were 1tb. I had to leave both drives in during the install because Dell shipped their laptops weird and doesn't detect other internal drives unless you have them installed during the windows install for some reason.

[wONKEyeYEs]

37 minutes ago, tddk25 said:

The installer only says 'Drive # Partition #' for each drive and partition. I wasn't able to tell the difference because both drives were 1tb. I had to leave both drives in during the install because Dell shipped their laptops weird and doesn't detect other internal drives unless you have them installed during the windows install for some reason.

The boot drive will have extra partitions which the storage drive should not.

 

[GoodBytes]

Drive letter is a Windows concept (well, really DOS, if you want to be technical), not a system one. Windows isn't installed to use drive letter.

 

Windows set the drive letter it is installed onto as C. If you have 2 drives and a Windows on each. Both will show the drive they are installed on as C, and the other as D conflicting each other in terms of information to you. 

 

Normally, it works with drive number starting at 0 from the motherboard perspective, and partition number from the drive perspective, also starting from 0.

 

[tddk25]

2 hours ago, wONKEyeYEs said:

The boot drive will have extra partitions which the storage drive should not.

The storage drive was the boot drive in her old laptop.

[tddk25]

14 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Windows set the drive letter it is installed onto as C. If you have 2 drives and a Windows on each. Both will show the drive they are installed on as C, and the other as D.

Sorry what I meant was drive labels, like WD SN250 or something like that. Since the BIOS can see it, then why not the windows installer?

14 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Normally, it works with drive number starting at 0 from the motherboard perspective, and partition number from the drive perspective, also starting from 0.

Ya I'm just really confused because the motherboard has the ssd as the default drive (aka drive 0) and the hdd as the secondary drive. I'm just mad that the windows installer had them swap places. I'm wondering if, even with the weird bios config, windows might've been able to detect the drive if I had it disabled in the bios during installation.

Edited January 31, 2023 by tddk25
Missed last sentence.

[RiffTheRaff]

You can still try to get some files back if they are not overwritten by the new installation.

Try to use PhotoRec - CGSecurity

This tool will search the "free" file system space for old files not overwritten yet.

[tddk25]

Thanks. Last night I tried using Recuva to find the files, but the only ones it found were the files we were already able to see in file explorer. We're taking the hdd in to ubreakifix.