I've been stuck in this situation from a couple of hours and can't really find any solution to that issue.
Background:
- My friend's pc (an HP computer) (with windows 10 upgraded from windows 8.1) had an issue with the motherboard, so it was sent back to HP and repaired.
- After the repair, windows 10 resulted not activated EDIT: because, from the comments below, it may be an important detail, the pc came back with windows 10 professional instead of windows 10 home which is the reason why I had to go back to windows 8 first, because the OEM product key was a windows 8.1 home key , mostly because the activation code was changed (because it was an OEM windows 8.1).
30 days were already passed so we couldn't revert windows 10 to windows 8.1, hence we downloaded 8.1 through the microsoft wizard, built the USB drive with windows 8.1, backed up the important data (you never know what will happen in your file, so..), created a new partition where we saved some steam data (mostly steam games, about 100 GB in order to don't have to download these [bought] games once again) and installed windows 8.1 by flagging keep the userdata in the windows.old folder.
- After installing, we upgraded windows 8.1 to windows 10 (by first activating 8.1 with the new OEM key), installed the remaining drivers (just a few) but, surprisingly, the windows.old folder contains no data but windows data.
To be even clearer, the issue seems rather to be that all the folders exists (he mainly cared about program files to get back some saves and music), but they are empty.
What I've tried already:
- Powershell as administrator -> search for any known file in windows.old: no success, no files apparently found.
- Powershell: enabled administrator user and logged in as administrator. Files seems still to be missing.
- Tried with RECUVA: no .mp3 found to restore (which brings me to believe that they still exists).
- Tried to use the windows tool for recovering windows.old files: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/restore-files-upgrade-windows-old No success, the process says that the files are either protected or already recovered.
- Tried to check in any drive position if there was any file with the mp3 format: none found but the ones from the 22/02/2016 (today).
The windows.old folder weights about 14 GBs (which is not that much), while it should be more than 100-200 GBs, mostly because the STEAM folder was about 100GBs, so considering that there were about 56 GBs of pictures (luckily backupped on an external hard drive) it should be weighting way more than that.
Also, the windows.old folder, under %programfiles%, seems to be missing every user's installed software, it looks like they are either empty or just deleted for some unknown reasons.
Am I losing something or what? some seems to have experienced something similar here: http://forums.windowscentral.com/windows-10/373425-did-windows-10-upgrade-i-lost-all-my-data-files-music-pictures-documents-etc-how-can-i-get-them-back.html but none of the solutions provided here solved my problems.
Moreover, what a surprise, the windows partition weights 157 Gbs (after importing the STEAM folder with 100GBs of data from the backup), is windows hiding windows.old folder files or..?
Thanks.
