SOLVED Woke up this morning and everything is gone!

[doragon92]

As the title says, I woke up this morning and all my stuff is gone. There are a few random programs and files that are still there, but all my music (a few weeks worth), games (20+ games on and off Steam), pictures, and the vast majority of programs I had on it are gone. It's like the computer went back to factory or something. The first thing my computer did when I woke it up was start updating the drivers to my video card. I thought about doing a system restore but there's only two save points. One from when I woke the computer up and another at about 3am for a "Critical Windows Update." Considering I've had this computer for a year and a half, it should have way more than that. I can't say what kind of computer it is but I built it on iBuyPower and at the time it had some top of the line components in it. I'm also running Windows 7 (a legitimate copy of it).

If anyone has any tips or advice or anything, I'd love to hear it!

 

[TrainableMan]

There is a little check box to "show more restore points" however if your reserved space for restore points is small or if you run software to free up space on your computer then older points may have been deleted. But restore points have nothing to do with your data so it's not like they could bring back your music/pictures/etc.

If your computer is a build then for drivers you would need the make / model of the motherboard. But again drivers aren't going to fix your missing stuff.

The first thing to determine is if your hard drive is failing.

Having you been getting any SMARTDRIVE warnings when you boot your machine? If so this was the computer warning you your hard drive was going bad.

Either way you can scan the drive for bad sectors. Start an administrator command prompt (right-click and Run as Administrator) and type:
CHKDSK /R
It will ask if you want it to run on next boot and you tell it yes. Then reboot.
Tell us the results.

If your hard drive is bad but still seems to be functioning it may be possible to recovery the data with paid recovery software so avoid writing files to the drive, as this can overwrite files you wish to recover.

If the problem is not your hard drive then it could be a virus, hopefully just hiding your files. I suggest you create a Windows Defender Offline CD on another working computer and then boot this computer with the CD and have it scan for viruses. Another virus scan method is to use several programs as explained at the beginning of my post HERE

 

[doragon92]

I ran the CHKDSK /R and after it booted back up, everything was back! I have no idea what happened but everything seems to be fine now. Thanks for the help!!!

 

[TrainableMan]

I'm glad it is back. I would encourage you to get a backup hard drive or large flash drive and start creating regular back-ups of your data so any future issues that might occur will not be as potentially disastrous.