Lost most everything on hard drive

[Mamacat104]

I have an HP Pavillion.. it is running Windows 10 .. I logged in this morning and all was fine... I had a program that was not working so at times when it gives me issues, I do a reboot of the computer and it will work right... I was going to use the program and it wasn't working so did a reboot.. When the laptop came up, everything on the desktop was gone, nothing was working... my desktop image was gone.. pics I had in the picture folder gone, documents gone, etc.. gone.. my programs not working that I use all the time... All my desktop folders I was using are gone..
I tried to reboot again and still did not come back. IF I go into "This PC" and choose Local Disk C and go to Users>Owner> I can see all the desktop folders, the shortcuts to programs I use everyday... but if I click on them.. the programs show to not be installed anymore.. they are all gone... certain programs are still installed but most are not showing installed anymore..
I don't know what to do to get them back working... Thank goodness I save all my pictures, my work, most documents to an external drive... but there are times when I download something, create something and it will be on the Disk C til I move to the external..
ANY idea what I can do to get my hard drive back like it was?? am I going to have to totally installed all my programs again?? At this point I'm totally lost... when it rebooted the first time when all was gone ... it said I had to sign out of some app.. no clue what it was ... If I bring up the start menu, it is totally changed, all the programs I had on the start for quick clicking on, are gone.. I can look at the list of programs on the start menu list and I can see some programs there in name only...
I'm lost and sure hope someone can help me...

thanks
Barbara

[IPR512]

Ok I'll take a stab at this, and I'm hoping it will help.
See if there is a restore point that will take you back to when it was running normally.

How to recover using System Restore on Windows 10

Open Start.
Search for Create a restore point, and click the top result to open the System Properties experience.
Click the System Restore button.
Click the Next button.
Select the restore point that you want to use on your computer.

[Mamacat104]

No restore point.. I was looking at everything I could find with this issue... I had no idea what happened.. I even went into the area of accounts... My computer has always had an account set up because I was required to have it secured in order to work from home from by job... when I went into that area, I found that my account profile was showing as temporary.. not as a regular account.. it showed that I was administrator and that my account was password protected... So, I started digging online for information on an account showing temporary...
I found a video that said to fix the temporary issue.. to go to the registry, which I don't mess with often unless I have clear instructions on what to do.. I know what can happen if you mess up something in it.. I found the Profilelist in HKEY-LOCAL-MACHINE and found the SID for my account had one that had .bak at the end.. when I looked at each SID, one without the .bak showed "Temporary" and the one with .bak showd "owner" which is how my account is listed in the computer (not sure why it isn't my name but that's beside the point..) the video said to delete the SID that showed as "Temp" and remove the .bak off the SID that is my account. I did this and rebooted the computer... when it came back up... all was working and back as it was before I did that first reboot that created the Temp profile.. WHY it did it, I have no clue... But sure am glad it is back working...
So, if anyone has this type of an issue.. if they have an account profile set up on the computer, have them check their profile to see if it is showing "Temporary" ... It could be the issue

thanks for your reply...

[IPR512]

Good job on getting it figured out. Now that you have had a problem like that you may want to consider creating a backup image of the drive just in case.

[The Dude]

Im glad ya got things corrected


No one likes having problems..... (uugghh)

[baniju8v]

It's great that you got all your data back.
i encountered the same issue in windows 10 where all the data on hard disk was formatted but got it recovered after spending hours on it using software application like Recuva and Disk Drill