Huh? What just happened? My PC restarted from 'new'

[allblack]

So I got home and turned on my PC, and I get the set-up process I got when I first bought it and turned it on for the first time.

Just spent the last hour setting up the PC like a brand new one, but it's a bit different because it asked me to restore some things from my previous usage, that being this morning when everything was fine.

I thought it was maybe a MS Windows update, but why would that put me right back to the intial setup process?

And I've lost Pictures, Videos and most of my Documents from Explorer. A MS update wouldn't do that, I assume.

Anyone got any explanation for me? Is this just a me thing? 

I'm assuming the PC downloaded something when I was using it this morning and when I turned it back on it did something ...

[king1]

someone did a factory reset or refresh, never heard of an update doing that, borking systems yes, but not wiping all data...

If you've lost data you are better off turning the machine off, extracting the drive, and using another PC or at least windows installation to run some data recovery software on it. The longer you use it as is the more data will get overwritten...

But also have a look in the users folder for an extra/old profile folder, in case the profile shit itself and you now have a new or temporary profile
If it was from a major update you might also have a windows.old folder on the C:\ drive that could have some data in it

[allblack]

4.06am the following day...

Turned PC on and everything is back to how it was. Have my photos back, documents, Steam games, desktop photo.

Have no idea what happened, but we're back. In all my years of having a PC that was the weirdest shit ever ...

[king1]

so that can happen if your default user profile failed to load, windows can then load a temporary profile to get windows started.

you might see evidence of that in the C:\users folder if there are extra profile folders present.

Often but not always this can be a sign of hardware / HDD issues, so might be prudent to
a. check the system drive with HDSentinel or similar and
b. Backup your data

[allblack]

Thanks for the input. My Users show 'Default', 'Public' and my User name. Unfortunately I don't know what was there before, so this may be normal. The 'Public' has a last modified date of March this year, so it seems that's been around a while.

I was premature at 4.06am. It's still full of problems and Settings wants me to download every update since 1972.

So bizzare ...

[Agent_24]

From what I've seen, stuff like this is often faulty memory or dying hard drive. Or maybe a virus.