Started to delete “Windows” folder by accident

nomdeboardie

I think I accidentally pressed Delete on the “Windows” folder in my root ( C: ) drive a short while ago. And yes, there was even a step that required me to proceed as administrator or some such...I’m a complete idiot (thought that I was deleting another folder I had put there temporarily and then figured there must be a general control of deleting files/folders from the root, even though I knew that wasn’t the case) :eek::o
OS is Windows 10, so the little green progress bar started to creep across the top of the folder, at which point I panicked and closed it down. I’m hoping that it was just ‘preparing to’ do the deletions and that nothing actually happened, and haven’t really noticed anything amiss with the behaviour of my system yet. Any suggestions as to how I could check whether anything has been removed?

me_irl

Did you check to restore any files / folders from your Recycle Bin?

Also, do you have a restore point that you can fall back to just in case?

nomdeboardie

me_irl wrote: »

Did you check to restore any files / folders from your Recycle Bin?

Also, do you have a restore point that you can fall back to just in case?

I looked through the recycle bin and got the impression that what I saw looked like regular data files/folders that I would have intentionally deleted

I haven't investigated the restore point situation with this comuter yet (haven't intenionally made any yet, have had it 10 months). I did make a system image a few months ago.

Looking elsewhere online I see mention of right-clicking on a folder > Restore Previous Versions, though trying this out on a test data folder just now I got th emessage that there were no previous versions. Afraid to even try this for the Windows folder.

nomdeboardie

Further info:

Looking in the Properties for the folder, it seems “There are no previous versions available” ... “from File History or from restore points”.

“Date last modified” is 1/11/2016, so assuming that if some of the contents had been deleted that would count as a modification, so maybe this is a good sign(?) (If I delete a file from a data folder I have not acessed for a while the timestamp is updated, so I would assume the same would have happened for the Windows folder)

Capt'n Midnight

system restore to be on the safe side.

nomdeboardie

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

system restore to be on the safe side.

Thanks (+ belatedly to me_Irl)

Starting the System Restore process in one way suggests that various apps will be removed, including one it took me a while to dowload and set up, though going from another angle presents me with a couple of recent restore points where the app/update loss warnings are less severe. Maybe I'll hold off on this for the moment, then do it if I have problems.

Capt'n Midnight

use the restore from just before you removed the files

you can also refresh windows system files with SFC and DISIM however they won't fix other apps

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wiki/windows_10-update/system-file-check-sfc-scan-and-repair-system-files/bc609315-da1f-4775-812c-695b60477a93

nomdeboardie

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

use the restore from just before you removed the files

you can also refresh windows system files with SFC and DISIM however they won't fix other apps

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wiki/windows_10-update/system-file-check-sfc-scan-and-repair-system-files/bc609315-da1f-4775-812c-695b60477a93

Thanks, yes if I do a restore I will use the latest of the 2 or 3 it presented. (I've done restores before when I had an XP machine, but the interface for 10 seems a bit different, so less confident about doing one)

Meanwhile, from the advice in the link you gave above, I ran an "sfc /scannow" just now (have ran these before) and all checked out OK.
+ Still no apparent problems, or any signs of a '"Windows" folder in the Recycle Bin, so I'll keep touching wood and assume nothing bad happened