Yes, except online exams. The online spyware they make you install for those is designed not to work on a VM or anything like that. I had to keep a barebones windows partition around just for that.

You’re welcome! I’ve had to do that exact process more than once, so I had a sneaking suspicion you weren’t quite up shit’s creek yet.

Live boot Linux, install testdisk in there, and try to see if it can find it. It’s probably still there.

Either windows’ or windows’s is correct, actually. The reason is because of exactly words like “Windows”, if you use the former, it sounds like it’s a possessive of more than one window, but it’s a possessive of a proper noun, Windows. The latter is more correct in this case because of that. (it’s also pronounced that way!)

Yup. All of that is true. It also protects you from yourself by preventing you from making changes outside of the home directory so you can’t hose your system accidentally. It’s intentional.