The title of this post comes from a Windows message displayed during a update to Microsoft Windows 10. At the time @theardvaark posted this tweet voicing his distrust of the statement, I muttered to myself “Don’t be soft. Why on earth would a simple windows update move them?

Despite now having worked with the Evil Empire’s products for something like 27 years, and so being used to useless error messages (“An unexpected error has occurred”, for example) and being downright lied to (any message produced by Internet Explorer), I still get caught out at times, and one such thing gave me a nasty shock the other day.

Enter stage left a PC (a beast of a gaming PC, in size, with fans that looked more at home under the bonnet of a car). I’m looking at it as a favour for a friend. Reported symptoms are a blank screen, and that turns out to be true- a brief display of the BIOS, then blank screen, then, eventually, a reboot loop. Booting a Ubuntu live CD shows the hardware to be pretty much OK: the drive is readable, with lots of photos in c:\users\[name]\Pictures (hold that thought). It was Windows 10, upgraded from 7 (hold that thought too).

Obviously, it’s looking like the Windows installation was borked. It could have been duff hardware, but the fact Ubuntu was up and working suggests not. Time for a Windows repair.

Happily, you can now download a Windows ISO legally now. Unhappily, it seems you have to use Windows to do it, as it needs to run a media creation program, but that wasn’t a huge problem.

So, boot from the DVD. Choose “Repair”, and wait. It fails. Repeat, choose “Advanced”. Fix some disk errors, and attempt what Microsoft call a Reset. This is essentially a re-install, and you can pick to retain user files, so I did that. One long wait later, it went through the big, recent Windows 10 update, and went back to the blank screen/reboot cycle.

Obviously, it’s time for a re-install from scratch. I can’t format the drive, as there’s a lot of data, and I don’t have anything big enough to store it on. I also don’t want Windows to do anything with the data (another thought to hold), so back out with Ubuntu to read the disk.

At which point I panic. I navigate to c:\users\, (or rather /mnt/media/[something]/users/ , and it’s empty, apart from the defaults. WTF?

I now discover the excellent ntfsundelete utility. It recovers some files, but not what I wanted. A few minutes thinking, and thankfully I discovered the data, with a bit of help from find. They were actually somewhere sensible-ish: c:\windows.old\users. There’s three reasons for not just knowing this:

1) Windows’ update procedure, as per the tweet linked at the top, and the Reset function of the install media, tells you it’s not going to do anything with the files. This is a lie. What I would imagine is supposed to happen is that the files will get copied back into the correct place, if the procedure completes succesfully: Windows installs have changed: they used to copy individual files into a destination directory having expanded them off the install media: they now unpack an image, rather like an ISO image or tar archive, into that directory, so anything that needs to be retained presumably needs to be held in a temporary location.

2) You might reasonably expect them to be in c:\users.old, in my opinion, less so inside a windows.old folder.

3) The PC already had a c:\windows.old, a consequence of it being upgraded from Windows 7.

So, as it was, it was a simple fix, once you know what has happened. Rename windows.old so the installer definitely won’t touch it, remove c:\windows, Program Files and Program Files (x86), and any other tempoary junk, run the install, making sure not to format the drive, and copy the data back into c:\users\[name], and of course sort out a few drivers…