Why is Windows 10 doing this after a reinstall?

[Craig234]

I was having problems on my Windows 10 PC where it would freeze installing OS updates, and then I'd power cycle it and it would roll back the update.

Then some guys who didn't know what they were doing had it and did this and shut off the power during the rollback, and made the system unbootable.

With no option, and no restore point, I did a fresh install of the OS from a USB.

To my surprise, it seemed to put everything that had been on the drive into a directory, titled "windows.old". Well ok. (There's also a windows.old.000 that's empty).

But here's where it gets odd. It seems to have integrated the fresh install with the old one on its own.

The 'Documents' Directory points to "C:\Users\craig.DESKTOP-OQRSQ1C" and to my old documents.

And in my device manage, the very top level, the device name, is "DESKTOP-OQRSQ1C".

What's going on? It's hard enough trying to figure out how to recreate the information on my SSD boot drive and get everything set up and worry about how much space is taken up by old data, that this is complicating it.

Why does a fresh install behave like this?

 

[Ichinisan]

If it didn't reset/refresh a previous Windows install and actually did a new one, the "craig.DESKTOP-OQRSQ1C" user folder is probably a brand new folder, named that way to avoid conflicts.

Maybe the old files are there because they came from OneDrive cloud storage...? If so, there are probably still duplicates in your Windows.old or something.

 

[Craig234]

If it didn't reset/refresh a previous Windows install and actually did a new one, the "craig.DESKTOP-OQRSQ1C" user folder is probably a brand new folder, named that way to avoid conflicts.

Maybe the old files are there because they came from OneDrive cloud storage...? If so, there are probably still duplicates in your Windows.old or something.

Maybe, but I have no idea what OneDrive cloud storage is. I'm not sure why there would be conflicts on a new install when the old is put into 'windows.old', but you might be right.

 

[XavierMace]

Fresh install normally implies you're formatting the drive, which you clearly are not.

 

[Craig234]

Fresh install normally implies you're formatting the drive, which you clearly are not.

Right, it wasn't formatted, but it an install from scratch onto the existing but corrupted OS drive.

 

[RLGL]

Your best bet at this point is write zeros to the drive and start over.