I really hate that Windows does this. Which is why when I decide to switch a machine to Linux it's the only OS allowed to boot to bare metal. Windows can go in a VM and suck it.
Not sure why, but your comment made me think about the first machine I switched to Linux. It was a laptop who's fan eventually had a bad bearing and needed to be replaced. Luckily it was still under warranty, so I sent the laptop in to get the fan replaced, and received my laptop back with Windows installed on it... I was so livid.
I was mostly being snarky. Windows only comes preinstalled if you buy a full setup. All my stuff is either Mac laptops or custom towers so I always have to acquire a new windows license when I setup a new build for myself or my partner
Had something similar happen to me. Something unrelated to the OS or hard drive and they reformatted my drive and I lost everything. I was ballistic when I found that one out.
Just install windows on a physically separate disk. It doesn't eat other disks, but might take a bite of other partitions on the same disk (if NTFS is corrupted or misaligned).
Depending on your configuration, you can pass a gpu to your Windows VM so you don’t even lose any performance if you use Windows for gaming. All you need is an iGPU and a few extra cores/ram to handle the host overhead.