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General discussion

SNAFU

Aug 8, 2018 3:14PM PDT

I have no idea what happened. My laptop was working fine just a few days ago. And then 2 days ago, I booted up and I'd lost everything on my desktop, search doesn't work, the start menu doesn't work, troubleshooting doesn't work, settings doesn't work. I thought maybe I'd accidentally put it in tablet mode but I can't get to anywhere to check or change it back.

Discussion is locked

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Did you make the win 10 restore disc?
Aug 8, 2018 3:24PM PDT

And have you backups of your data? Looks like you need a reinstall of the OS.
Dafydd.

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When this happens
Aug 8, 2018 3:52PM PDT

I'm booting Safe Mode and trying my backup admin account. Since about Windows NT and XP you can't go without a spare admin account. Even though this has been so since about 1993, not many tutorials touch on this need.

Can you get to Safe Mode?
If not, the OS is damaged. But there's another way to make that account after the fact.
Read https://www.howtogeek.com/222262/how-to-reset-your-forgotten-password-in-windows-10/ since it covers how to create the W10 boot stick or DVD along with creating a new account using the Utilman.exe trick.

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Oh, well.
Aug 9, 2018 9:42AM PDT

Nothing worked to restore the laptop to where it was before the problem so I did a clean install of Windows 10. I have no idea what list from the desktop. But most of my documents were backed up to the cloud anyway, so I didn't lose much.

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For the Future...
Aug 10, 2018 7:31PM PDT

If you have another computer available, make a bootable thumbdrive or CD with a linux variant on it and boot the misbehaving system with that to get to the drive so you can pull data. There are tutorials and help files all over the net on how to do this, but the Mint distribution is one of the easiest.

This of course means nothing if you've bitlockered your hard drive, in which case you need the recovery password and an addon to linux (called dislocker iirc) to be able to even read the files.