Extremely Wierd PC Problem, Windows 10 restarting into very old build of Windows 7?

[Tolga-Han]

Hi i had a very strange issue happen to my PC just now, firstly im running Windows 10 on a ASrock Z77 Extreme 9 Mobo with a Corsair SSD.

Now to the issue which extremely freaked me out, when i first built my PC about 5 years ago, i was running Windows 7, last year i upgraded to Windows 10 and a few months ago i was running into some issues so i reformatted my drive and reinstalled a fresh copy of Windows 10, well at least it should be a fresh copy of Win10 after a deep level format. About 10 minutes ago i was running into some problems with World of Warcraft, i kept getting dc'd and finally when i tryed to log on the loading bar kept freezing up, so i decided to restart my PC. I did the normal thing Start>Power>Restart, the PC rebooted up, i had the Win10 spinny loading up circle as normal, next thing however i get my Windows 7 Home Premium splash screen, right now im thinking to myself "WTF is going on here" i decided to let it continue, next it loads up into Win 7 complete with all my original programs which i had loaded when i first built my PC (eg, Asus GPU Tweak, very old version of Geforce Experience, very old version of Firefox etc).

At this point i was extremely worried i had screwed something up, so i completely powered down the PC then repowered it up to find im back in Windows 10 with all signs of the old Windows 7 no where in sight. Ive restarted my PC 3 times now the same way Win7 showed up the first time but so far each time Win10 has booted like a champ.

My question is what caused the issue in the first place? Was it some sort of Virus? Was it some sort of Backup which for some reason or another appeared and decided to boot up? Im completely stumped, for all i know i do not have any backups of my previous build of Win7 anywhere on my HDD's. The last thing on my mind is could the SSD be starting to die out, accidentally booting into a previous OS when it was supposed to have had a deep level format through it?

 

[Rocky Bennett]

This is very common issue with Windows. There is a very small file store in the Windows system called c:windows.twilight/zone. This file is only triggered on certain occasions and can reek havoc with anyone that experiences it.

But honestly man, that is a weird story and I hope that someone here can answer your question.

Good luck.

 

[akseli]

Well, you probably have installed somewhere. On some other drive besides the SSD which you formatted. And for some reason it once got booted back. This wome reason could be, if during boot the SSD drive didn't wake up fast enogh or some other reason led to bios skip it, then if it finds a bootloader from another drive, that may boot the Windows 7 if it's still installed. And normally the bootloader hopefully stored on the SSD, typically in a hidden small partition, does not know about the installed Windows 7 on another drive, and thus normally you wouldn't be able to boot it.

I mean, each physical drive can have a separate bootloader, normally computer takes the first one in configured order, but if that disk is not available due to temporary problem, it may check other drives.



Alternative thing could be, I really doubt such thing could be possilbe to actually work, but considering hibernate file loads a running OS into memory without technically booting it up, in theory it might be possible to load a hibernated Windows 7 left laying around even when it's no longer installed. But I really really don't think that could be possible due to bunch of tecnical reasons, it should fail to load anyway if the Windows 7 isn't installed anymore.


Check your drives if you have the Windows 7 installed somewhere. If you did Windows 10 free uprade from it, the Windows main directory might be renamed too, possible marked hidden too. And you can check if you have hidden(unassigned) partitions with Disk Managment(internal Windows program) The bootloader partitions are usually small, few hundred megabytes.

 

[Tolga-Han]

Well, you probably have installed somewhere. On some other drive besides the SSD which you formatted. And for some reason it once got booted back. This wome reason could be, if during boot the SSD drive didn't wake up fast enogh or some other reason led to bios skip it, then if it finds a bootloader from another drive, that may boot the Windows 7 if it's still installed. And normally the bootloader hopefully stored on the SSD, typically in a hidden small partition, does not know about the installed Windows 7 on another drive, and thus normally you wouldn't be able to boot it.

I mean, each physical drive can have a separate bootloader, normally computer takes the first one in configured order, but if that disk is not available due to temporary problem, it may check other drives.



Alternative thing could be, I really doubt such thing could be possilbe to actually work, but considering hibernate file loads a running OS into memory without technically booting it up, in theory it might be possible to load a hibernated Windows 7 left laying around even when it's no longer installed. But I really really don't think that could be possible due to bunch of tecnical reasons, it should fail to load anyway if the Windows 7 isn't installed anymore.


Check your drives if you have the Windows 7 installed somewhere. If you did Windows 10 free uprade from it, the Windows main directory might be renamed too, possible marked hidden too. And you can check if you have hidden(unassigned) partitions with Disk Managment(internal Windows program) The bootloader partitions are usually small, few hundred megabytes.

I thaught it was clear on my original post, though i might not have been clear enougth. My Win 7 was originally installed on my SSD, my other hard drives i connected after i had installed Win 7 and were used as data storage like games, music, movies etc. The Win 7 was upgraded to Win 10 last year then about 2 months ago i completely ran into problems like network speed issues, random .dll's failing bsod's hence the complete deep level reformat of the SSD and subsequent fresh installation of Win 10.

When the old Win 7 was upgraded to Win 10 last year there was way more shortcuts and programs on my desktop, the Win 7 that appeared on my computer the other day looked exactly like the first day i had freshly built my PC and infact showed up as running off my SSD which is what got me worried about the drive failing, rebooting into what was once upon a time there in the beginning, and hence asking about this problem.

What i wanted to know and i know its probably going to sound stupid but you know how some TV's and Monitors, if you leave an image for too long gets burnt into the screen, can something like that happen on a SSD where by an old OS somehow gets burnt into its memory chips and no matter how many times you 0 out the drive its always there somewhere underneath? If its possible then i might have to bite the bullet and fork out some more cash for a new SSD and launch this one just in case she decides to fail and pop up Win 7 again.