Computer Reset?!?!

So my family has no clue how my dad's computer got reset. Was it an update? A virus? All we know is everything on our C Drive was as if someone clean installed the computer. No programs or files. It had me go through a menu of items Whats your country, keyboard type, wifi connection, etc. I have only seen these on clean installs of the sort. We didn't have things backed up, so we know that is at a loss. It seems to have installed the new creative update for windows. Could this be it?

A major upgrade (8-10 for example) was installed, or the computer was manually reset and someone picked to make a clean upgrade/reset and wont admit it because they know how dumb they are.

What is the most simplest explanation is almost always true.

In any case, you've learned a valuable lesson on backups. Congratulations. :fireworks:

Now its time to consider whats important to you data wise, and consider what would be a good option to keep it backed up this time round.

As for your reset computer, in my opinion there's no point worrying over it or wasting time on it. The only exception being if you have data on there you absolutely must have, in which case turn the computer off now and take it to a professional who can recover data.

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I'm not certain what caused it, but you should be able to save a lot of missing files. I have a USB stick with Linux on it and use the TestDisk utility to recover data when it has been deleted or the partition is deleted or corrupted. You should be able to find data that wasn't overwritten and back that up to another drive for safe keeping. Having a backup is very important to save important data, but just because something was 'deleted' doesn't mean it was actually removed from the drive.

The link above should have links explaining how to use the utility, and there are numerous options on which Linux distribution that would be good candidates to use for diagnosing and repairing computer issues, which is also mentioned in the link. Good luck!

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