what would cause a windows 10 reset to remove a large no. of application software?

Happy Hopping

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a client (that only has basic knowledge on PC) got a HTML file on the desktop, presumably created by windows that is titled "Lost Apps", and it is a 1 page HTML file that shows almost all the applications, along w/ some intel USB 3 driver, along w/ Visual C++ library, etc. all erased. And the mesg. said something like the following program has been removed after windows reset.

a bug in win 10?
 
they did a windows reset, the file is normal.
1604757293867.png
 
I know for the fact that person does not know how to do a windows reset. But if that's the only explanation, then she must have click the wrong thing. Unless the above pops up by itself

regardless, could the above cause personal files to corrupt? as I try to backup that SSD's pictures files to a flash drive. It stucks after 10%.
 
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I know for the fact that person does not know how to do a windows reset. But if that's the only explanation, then she must have click the wrong thing. Unless the above pops up by itself

regardless, could the above cause personal files to corrupt? as I try to backup that SSD's pictures files to a flash drive. It stucks after 10%.
maybe a bad drive caused her to attempt a reset.
 
Sounds like they got lucky only losing a few programs.

In my expericene Windows 10 blanks the hard drive except for the bootloader so it goes in to an endless recovery loop.
 
Sounds like they got lucky only losing a few programs.

In my expericene Windows 10 blanks the hard drive except for the bootloader so it goes in to an endless recovery loop.
That only happens if the bootloader exists on a secondary disk as far as I know, the recovery can't figure out where to do the recovery to. Usually the recovery just wipes all the user data clean and reinstalls Windows.
 
That only happens if the bootloader exists on a secondary disk as far as I know, the recovery can't figure out where to do the recovery to. Usually the recovery just wipes all the user data clean and reinstalls Windows.
but all the data files are intact. Bottom line: do you people thinks the SSD is dying? It's a Intel Sata SSD c/w 5 yr. warranty. the user is a casual user that use the PC for email / browsing approx. an hr. to a few hr. per day, and goes on vacation for months at a time at least once a year. So the PC is not used often.
 
but all the data files are intact. Bottom line: do you people thinks the SSD is dying? It's a Intel Sata SSD c/w 5 yr. warranty. the user is a casual user that use the PC for email / browsing approx. an hr. to a few hr. per day, and goes on vacation for months at a time at least once a year. So the PC is not used often.
Probably not. Sounds like what happened is they did a refresh and kept user data (basically everything in the home directory; desktop, documents, pics, vids, etc.). This uninstalls ALL programs, cleans the registry, etc.. Think it removes everything in the Program Files directory too, but not sure.

Anyway, it wipes everything except user data, and creates a list of programs that were installed before so you can reinstall them in case you forgot exactly what was installed before.

If the ssd was failing, then files would corrupt, images would load wrong or not at all, may show as zero bytes in size, text files would contain random garbage data (not necessarily the whole file). Programs would still be installed, but might crash for no apparent reason. The drive might "disappear" from the system entirely, or get remounted read-only (so you can see the data but not modify it).
 
I've seen this happen before in relation to a few of my clients. No idea why the user was prompted to 'reset their PC', the PC wasn't in any way old and only running one SSD.
 
I know for the fact that person does not know how to do a windows reset. But if that's the only explanation, then she must have click the wrong thing. Unless the above pops up by itself

regardless, could the above cause personal files to corrupt? as I try to backup that SSD's pictures files to a flash drive. It stucks after 10%.

Could be the drive needs a chkdsk /f run at an admin command prompt. Could be a corrupted FAT or incorrect free space being reported. Either of those will majorly screw up file system activity.

Also may want to disable "cache contents as well as file names" for the drive under the drive properties. If the cache gets corrupted it can cause this as well.

As far as that list.. exactly what others have said.

Either the client did a refresh or did an upgrade to a newer version somehow and told it to keep the user data but not the applications. Only way that that would have happened.

Are the chipset drivers installed for the motherboard?

Have you tried a different USB stick? A lot of them suck so much that they are not worth using.
 
Are the chipset drivers installed for the motherboard?

Have you tried a different USB stick? A lot of them suck so much that they are not worth using.

that was my next task when I see her this coming week. It's a very good Verbatim drive w/ lifetime warranty, I never seen one that fails before. At the time, I only have 1 USB stick, but I got another new one today, so when I drop by, and test it on the 2nd stick, if it still fails, then we can try the chkdsk trick.

Come to think it , I do have a new question: the PC was running win 7 back last year. And w/ win 7, I have to install the Intel USB 3 driver. The reset erase USB 3 Intel drivers. But win 10 must have intel USB 3 driver. Could this cause the file transfer to stop 10% of the way? Because at device manager, there is no error (no red / yellow warning), so since win 10 can see the flash drive and was able to copy about 10% of the data, it shouldn't be the removal of the old intel usb 3 driver being a problem. What do you think?
 
Usb 3 should be fine then. Guess is that there is something wrong with the file system.
 
update: did the chkdsk on the drive, there is some error. After fixing the error, I did manage to copy 2K files, but it stuck after. And those stuck pictures files can't even open. So it looks like file corruption after all
but I need to copy those files first before I can kill or re-format the SSD

the SSD is a Intel 5 yr. warranty SATA 600 Drive
 
update: did the chkdsk on the drive, there is some error. After fixing the error, I did manage to copy 2K files, but it stuck after. And those stuck pictures files can't even open. So it looks like file corruption after all
but I need to copy those files first before I can kill or re-format the SSD

the SSD is a Intel 5 yr. warranty SATA 600 Drive
Try disabling indexing for the drive and the run a defrag on the same drive from the command line. Then try again.
 
Try disabling indexing for the drive and the run a defrag on the same drive from the command line. Then try again.
That's the best advice I could give anyone who wants to permanently corrupt the rest of the data.
What he should do is stop using the drive immediately and run a tool like R-Tools or other forensic data resque tool to recover the data.
Any writing will potentially destroy more data.

If the disk is a boot disk, unplug it immediately and replace it with a new one, new install of Windows and run a data resque tool on the old disk.
 
That's the best advice I could give anyone who wants to permanently corrupt the rest of the data.
What he should do is stop using the drive immediately and run a tool like R-Tools or other forensic data resque tool to recover the data.
Any writing will potentially destroy more data.

If the disk is a boot disk, unplug it immediately and replace it with a new one, new install of Windows and run a data resque tool on the old disk.
Yeah, that works as well... but if the files can't be copied as is, then it is either a permissions issue, the file system is too fragmented, or the index is corrupted.

At least that has been my experience with not being able to copy files off an SSD. Usually when they go bad they either just disappear all together or start going super slow due to the cache dying.
 
the client doesn't know much about PC. The only thing that was very odd last year, is that some how, the boot up BIOS switch to French. The owner is French, maybe she manges to screw around. Defrag is by default turn off by me, as it's a SSD.

anyhoo, here's the details:

1) on day 1 when I arrive at the client's house, I back up a lot and when it gets to that picture folder, it hangs as I state above
2) do the chkdsk as per you guys' suggestion, after the chkdsk, a good no. of the above directories, such as document, becomes empty, so it's a good thing that I copied those on day 1
3) the chkdsk was done as a slave drive on a test bed PC (different PC)
 
the client doesn't know much about PC. The only thing that was very odd last year, is that some how, the boot up BIOS switch to French. The owner is French, maybe she manges to screw around. Defrag is by default turn off by me, as it's a SSD.

anyhoo, here's the details:

1) on day 1 when I arrive at the client's house, I back up a lot and when it gets to that picture folder, it hangs as I state above
2) do the chkdsk as per you guys' suggestion, after the chkdsk, a good no. of the above directories, such as document, becomes empty, so it's a good thing that I copied those on day 1
3) the chkdsk was done as a slave drive on a test bed PC (different PC)
Like I said, doing chkdisk and defrag is the best way to destroy whatever data is remaining when a disk is corrupt.
 
I agree. Defrag only improves speed, it can't fix this.
On an SSD it doesn't even improve speed. It only consumes write cycles for nothing. Windows needs to defrag also SSDs because NTFS can't handle the amount of file descriptors required. Otherwise defrag wouldn't be required because unlike with a spinner disk, ssd has no seek penalty.
 
On an SSD it doesn't even improve speed. It only consumes write cycles for nothing. Windows needs to defrag also SSDs because NTFS can't handle the amount of file descriptors required. Otherwise defrag wouldn't be required because unlike with a spinner disk, ssd has no seek penalty.
Apparently you've never seen the weird crap that can start happening around the 30-40% fragmented state on an SSD. Around that amount is even worse on an HDD.

Just because the SSD supposedly doesn't care about it, Windows file system at least starts screwing up. It can also slow down access as instead of a few concurrent reads or writes, Windows file system still has to use different addresses on random reads and writes.

And concurrent reads and writes are still faster than random reads and writes on an SSD.
 
Anyway... Maybe do a bit to bit mirror of the drive to another drive and then try to get the other files off.

If the file system is screwed up how is copying corrupted data off going to help anyway? If the file system is not pointing to the correct data, no matter what you use to copy it off is not going to fix that.

You could always use something like getdataback to try to use different file allocation tables, but if none of them are correct it isn't going to help.

As for the files disappearing out of folders, if it did that, it should have recovered those files to a found folder somewhere with a bunch of .chk files in it.
 
In the end, I notice the Picture folder reported a total of 69GB, but after the chkdsk, it says 39GB, and only 2 to 3 sub folders are missing / gone, and there is no way those 2 to 3 has 30gb of photos.
Apparently you've never seen the weird crap that can start happening around the 30-40% fragmented state on an SSD. Around that amount is even worse on an HDD.

Just because the SSD supposedly doesn't care about it, Windows file system at least starts screwing up. It can also slow down access as instead of a few concurrent reads or writes, Windows file system still has to use different addresses on random reads and writes.

And concurrent reads and writes are still faster than random reads and writes on an SSD.
but I thought if you defrag a SSD, it damages a SSD. So when i said defrag above, I'm more referring to hard drive in general

how can concurrent R/W faster than Random R/W? SSD is a chip, there is no moving parts, we'll retieving the data from some NAND location. The retrieval speed should be the same. Now, my problem does match your description on a 6 yr. old SSD though, it sure looks like file corruption, but I don't believe it's due to lack of defrag. How do you defrag a chip anyway? Defrag exists for hard drive to re-arrange the sectors to move them to the inner most ring, and as such, to reduce movement of the head, and reduces the no. of movement of the R/W head
 
A windows update can also cause the issue discribed a program that was on your pc that worked fine if it is detected as incompatible windows will dump it and move on without telling you
 
Apparently you've never seen the weird crap that can start happening around the 30-40% fragmented state on an SSD. Around that amount is even worse on an HDD.

Just because the SSD supposedly doesn't care about it, Windows file system at least starts screwing up. It can also slow down access as instead of a few concurrent reads or writes, Windows file system still has to use different addresses on random reads and writes.

And concurrent reads and writes are still faster than random reads and writes on an SSD.
Like I said NTFS is not built to handle SSDs.
 
A windows update can also cause the issue discribed a program that was on your pc that worked fine if it is detected as incompatible windows will dump it and move on without telling you
now, that's a serious problem in win 10 that win 7 does not have.
 
But it isnt a microsoft program so it doesn't matter right.
With what logic it doesn't matter? There's a danger that MS will start blocking all free software and allow distribution only through their application store. Lack of competition lets them do whatever they want with the customers computers. Not that I care but anyway.
 
Yeah, that works as well... but if the files can't be copied as is, then it is either a permissions issue, the file system is too fragmented, or the index is corrupted.

At least that has been my experience with not being able to copy files off an SSD. Usually when they go bad they either just disappear all together or start going super slow due to the cache dying.
Once the filesystem is corrupt your only option is either a forensic software that can recover the files using non-conventional methods or have a backup.
 
With what logic it doesn't matter? There's a danger that MS will start blocking all free software and allow distribution only through their application store. Lack of competition lets them do whatever they want with the customers computers. Not that I care but anyway.
Sounds like another platform...
 
Sounds like another platform...
I haven't seen Apple remove yet any of my applications without a warning. Support for 32-bit apps was stopped but there were warnings for a year before that.
 
On an SSD it doesn't even improve speed. It only consumes write cycles for nothing. Windows needs to defrag also SSDs because NTFS can't handle the amount of file descriptors required. Otherwise defrag wouldn't be required because unlike with a spinner disk, ssd has no seek penalty.
Win10 does not defrag SSDs, it issues a TRIM commmand.
 
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