I am not really sure WHY this happened, but I am so upset right now. On my development machine, I installed the Windows 8.1 release from the Windows Store on a machine that had the Windows 8.1 preview installed.
It's bad enough that much to my surprise, the installation was not an upgrade at all but rather a new Windows installation that migrated most of my user profile but none of my apps. I wasn't looking forward to the 2 days or so it would take to reinstall everything the way I had it before.
But even worse is that I went to look in the Windows.old folder for several MSSQL databases that I expected to find in their default location under Program Files only to find that they were nowhere to be found! The .MDF and .LDF files are gone! Yet the master, tempdb, etc are right where I'd expect them to be. I managed to find traces of these files with an undelete application but they are unrecoverable.
Because these weren't production databases, I have no backups of course. I have files where the data originally came from, but the stored procedures, table schemas, etc. are all gone. Naturally there's nothing that can be done about it at this point but I just need to understand WHY did Windows 8.1 selectively blow away my MSSQL databases while seemingly moving everything else to Windows.old???
