Windows 10 disappeared

On my brother's desktop, windows 10 disappeared and was replaced with windows 8. Anyone heard of such a thing? It just updated to the creators update a couple of days ago and seemed to be working okay. He turned it on today and windows 10 was gone and replaced with windows 8. Very strange..

 

It sounds like a wonderful magical world that you live in, you should go back there and never venture out into this world again... it's got Windows 10 in it... sigh.

On the other hand, maybe a disk / boot device failed and found another installation of Windows?

That's my first guess, as I keep a 2nd Windows install on a secondary disk in computers I build, so I can boot up and fix problems should the primary boot device fails.

 

Yeah I think that must be what happened. It was built by a local computer store and has several drives. It looks like there is a restore partition with windows 8 from 2013.

In my magical world, there is no windows .. period.

 

Either that or the update failed, Windows reverted to a previous known good version and used the windows 8 recovery for whatever reason. I've seen Windows 10 update rollups fail and revert to the previous Windows 10 version, but never to Windows 8 though.

 

He had been on the creators a couple of days before this happened. It seemed to have fixed itself today. He wasn't real clear about it, but he said when he was booting up windows said something like there was an older version running and asked if he wanted to boot in the other version.

 

That is definitely a drive with another OS on it then.

 

Screen shot of Desktop?

 

No, don't have one. It's not my desktop. It's back on Windows 10 now. I think windows 8 may have come from another drive he had attached to the computer but I haven't looked at it and don't know for sure, nor do I know why it may have booted from that drive.

 

That's usually an indicator the primary drive is having trouble with it's internal POST, potentially signaling an eventual failure.

The Primary drive doesn't respond and the secondary drive does and it boots what it has instead of the primary.

If you have the Windows boot options (Default Operating System) set to display both the Windows 10 boot and the Windows 8 boot during startup, sometimes someone will hit a keyboard key at just the right time and switch from primary to secondary boot.

Maybe take that option for the Windows 8 boot out of the Default Operating System startup menu.

 

This story is getting more and more fantastic here and considering no hardware swap was mentioned in the first post. I think someone was had. This is why one needs to do more in-depth before posting as such.

 

I'm not sure what you are talking about. Would you care to clarify?