All partitions became one while installing windows?

Question

I was trying install windows 8.1 on my laptop which had win 10 before.

I couldn't because there was an error like windows can't be installed on this drive.

so I googled it and found a video which made me do the following:

Shift+F10

diskpart

list disk

select disk 

list volume

select volume (the fs of the volume I selected was RAW)

clean

create part pri

active

format fs=NTFS  label=PartDriveC quick

assign letter=C

exit

And after it was done I still could not click next when choosing that specific drive I had in mind and wanted to delete it again so it might work and when I clicked delete while that particular partition was selected, an error poped up and when I clicked ok  all of my partitions we gone and there was a single partition left with combined size of all of them and it was empty.

How did this happen and why did I lose all of my files?

Answer 1

sounds like you either have a bad drive or bad cable. time to try replacing things.

Answer 2

Because the commands that you ran

1) deleted all the partitions on the drive ("clean"

2) created a new partition using the whole drive

3) made it active.

It did exactly what you told it to do.

What you should have done is simply run the set up for Windows 8.  It would have shown you all the partitions on the hard drive as part of the install.  

You could then have selected only the primary partition and got rid of it using the easy interface

Then using the interface told it to use that space to create a new partition and install Windows 10 into it.