Windows reinstalled itself?

[dylanldionne]

Windows 11 Pro

Ryzen 7 3800X

Asus Strix X470-F Motherboard

64Gb Corsair Vengence Pro RAM

Asus TUF RTX 3080

XPG SX8100 NVMe Boot Drive
HX1000 PSU

Ok, give me a sec to explain:
I arrived from 2 days away from home. When I left the PC was on, when I arrived the PC was off and we did not lose power while I was gone.

1. I tried starting the computer, and it stayed stuck on the Bios Splash screen, without the option to go into the bios.
    
2. Unplugged the PC and started it again, it went up to the windows login screen was frozen there for 2-3 minutes. During that time I noticed the internet did not connect before it froze (probably unrelated) even though I am using wired internet. It unfroze and the internet connection appeared at the same time. Then I clicked to write my pin and the computer blue-screened.
    
3. I unplugged the PC tried again and got a very similar result .

So I remembered last time I had issues was because my GPU was not plugged properly (I am using a riser) and looking into my PC I saw a Network card I had put in, that I was not using. I thought, this network card might be confusing things and I don't use it so lets just remove it.

 

      4. I started up the computer again and it started up really quickly. (almost as if it was new), but my when logged in to windows everything was back to default. None of my stuff on the desktop, background back to default, windows button moved back to the middle, startup apps back to default, I was logged out of my browser and from outlook. But when I checked, all my programs and apps are still installed.

 

      5. I restarted the computer once more, it started up at a normal speed and everything was back to normal.

 

I just do not understand what happened.

 

[Mark Kaine]

hmm, its pretty easy to understand:  Windows updated (since you left it on unsupervised, which you shouldn't have) and "fixed" all the stuff you did to it (you mentioned moving the buttons) that's just completely normal windows behavior, nothing got lost just set to default (correct?)

 

it didn't reinstall itself, it just updated and made sure everything is running smoothly (from Microsoft's perspective) 

 

 

nothing to see here, imo...

 

 

maybe consider installing sledgehammer so it doesn't happen again in the future, all i can say really. 

[C2dan88]

9 minutes ago, dylanldionne said:

I just do not understand what happened.

24h2 update installed - have a recent windows.old folder present? Or your user profile (AppData folder) corrupted?