Risk of data loss at boot?

Good evening,

Everyone is right... if that's the reason for your question.

-- It all depends on the content of the USB stick and what you do with it...

-- I suppose there's an operating system on this stick that allows you to boot your PC in a way other than Windows..??

-- So based on this assumption, it would be you who might execute dangerous commands regarding the content of the hard drive... but it's not the fact of having inserted a USB stick... anyone can make mistakes...

-- If it's to test another OS, you can unplug your hard drive, this way it won't be at risk...

-- However, if your hard drive doesn't work under Windows anymore, you'll be very glad to use a bootable USB stick to recover the data from your hard drive... as long as you know what you're doing..

Here's the dilemma of wrong and right... this is not a courtroom.

Hello
There are many possible risk factors for the data. Of course, user errors are the most common. Not all risks occur during booting, but by booting from this USB stick, the user can incorporate them into their "possibles."

Yes, in a recent post, the internet user wanted to repair Windows; they needed the Windows files on a USB stick. By mistake, they created a bootable USB stick containing the Windows installer, and their hard drive was formatted and windows was installed. The post aimed to recover personal data from this completely erased disk, if possible.

Numerous live USB sticks bootable with Linux distributions exist. Their behaviors differ. They can boot even if you have Windows installed on the hard drive, of course.
Some allow you not to use the hard drive at all, while others use the hard drive normally without data destruction by creating a folder on the existing file system.
Some allow the installation of the distribution on the hard drive, which can lead to accidental deletion of partitions, formatting, partial or total data loss, or data overwriting.
A Linux on a USB stick contains all the tools for managing disks, partitions, file systems, files, reading and writing, so you can accidentally destroy data just as well as recover it from a disk where the operating system no longer boots without even installing Linux on the disk.

The confusion of partitions is exacerbated by the fact that in Linux and Windows, partitions do not have the same names. Thus, one can accidentally write to the internal hard drive instead of an external hard drive or a USB stick.

Depending on the operations performed on the data of the hard drive by the USB stick, cache systems in memory can lead to data loss in the event of an unexpected disconnection of the stick.

A bootable USB stick, or even a non-bootable one, can also be infected; the infection can destroy the data on the hard drive or modify them to infect them in turn. In this case, there’s no need to make a mistake; there’s a risk to the data.
Destruction, modification, creation of an internet connection allowing data theft.

The list of possibles is certainly longer.

Probabilities depend a lot on people, systems, backups and protections (or lack thereof), uses and software, computers through which the stick passes, and even the potential value of the data for a targeted attack by infection.

Certainly, in my opinion, a lot more people post on these forums to complain about issues with Windows updates than about data problems when inserting a bootable USB stick. With such a comparison, the risk is indeed low.

So everyone is right; the fact that the risk exists does not contradict the probability being low.