Woke up this morning and the computer rebooted over night, when I logged in my desktop picture is still there but all my desktop icons have disappeared. Did a quick google search and tried ending the explorer task and running it and still nothing. Rebooted the computer a couple times and still nothing. Then figured I'd go look into the registry to see if anything weird was showing in there and nothing. When I click on the computer it shows my hard-drive is using 100GB of space but when I click on the c drive to view the contents it says that the folder is empty. Verified that files weren't hidden and even after doing the show hidden files it still says it's empry. Windows 7 seems to be operating fine even though it's showing nothing. Computer boots up fine, the ie icons on the taskbar opens up fine, any command line commands work. Tried running the sfc scannow and came back clean, chkdsk has come back with no problems either. Kinda at a loss as I'd rather not reinstall windows and I can't even back up the files I have as they aren't showing up. I do get the same thing whether I boot into safe mode or not.

Hi Christian, Did you check in the users folder under C:\ Drive to see if you any other profiles were created? Thanks,

Hi Christian, Running a System Restore rollback to a previous working date seems to be the best option here, as the incident has been observed only today. If you're unable to run System Restore from Windows, you may try running it from Windows RE.Ramesh Srinivasan | The Winhelponline Blog Microsoft MVP, Windows Desktop Experience

If you can strat your Windows 7 installation program after you log in, please run In-place Upgrade to repair the system.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

I am also getting this same issue. Noticed it a couple of days ago but didn't have time to look until today. When I open Computer, then open c:, it tells me that "This folder is empty.". I have also noticed that nearly all desktop icons have disappeared, except Computer and Network. The problem is that I can't run System Restore. When I open the Recovery window to run it, it claims "Some settings are managed by your system administrator". Now I know my account is set up as an admin, if I go into users it says System Administrator next to my account. I tried looking up this problem on google, and tried hitting F8 while Windows was loading, then going into system restore, but it says that System Restore is not enabled on the drive. I then opened up a cmd prompt, and ran "sfc /scannow" but it says that something's in progress so it can't do it. If I open a cmd prompt from Windows as an admin and run it, it scans through to 100% and says everything's fine. So can anyone help me, either fixing the missing c: issue without doing a system restore (preferably), or at least how I can turn system restore on? It's Windows 7 Home Premium, so I don't think I have group policies, (which Windows help seemed to think was the reason I couldn't turn on System Restore from within Windows). I also can't access admin tools, seems like it tries to find them on c: and can't, but everything else in control panel seems to be working. Also interesting but probably pointless info, I have some shared folders on the computer with problems, and I can view their contents from my other computer. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I don't like the thought of losing my files.

Hi, I got this issue today but not sure what caused it to happen. In the end I worked out that all files had been set to Hidden and my folder view options switched back to not show hidden files. Try the following: 1. Open an explorer window, hit Alt to bring up the toolbar. 2. Go into Tools> Folder options> View and set it to Show Hidden Files. 3. You should now see all your files/folders in C: drive again but they will be greyed out. 4. Select all files and folders, right click and select Properties. 5. Uncheck the Hidden attribute, choose Ok and apply to all files and sub folders. Hopefully this should resolve your issue. Colin.

You're a life saver! Never would have thought of that.. Now I'm thinking the antivirus and antimalware software I hurried to install may not have been that far off the mark. But setting it to show hidden files has fixed my problem, thankyou very much!

You're a life saver! Never would have thought of that.. Now I'm thinking the antivirus and antimalware software I hurried to install may not have been that far off the mark. But setting it to show hidden files has fixed my problem, thankyou very much! Glad that helped......it took me about 7 hours to get to that point after various malware/virus scans and numerous attempts at system restore (all my restore points seemed to be corrupt). I was ready to do a full OS repair just before working out that the files were simply hidden. I've never seen anything like it before and am really intrigued as to what caused it.

That also helped me. It happened to my computer yesterday and I was freaking out. I happened upon this forum and you saved me. Well done sir

I have similiar issue. Today I turned the system on and started surfing the net and then i started getting harddrive errors. I tried rebooting and all my icons were gone. I went into the folders on ym hd and they all showed empty. I system restored and now my icons are back but folders are still showing empty and a bunch of my programs like Pro Tools crash on startup. I dont know what is going on here. I am completely freaked out as I just built this system and have not setup a backup yet and I have an old HD that has alot of important data that is now showing empty folders.... Any ideas?

Most likley the hard drive errors are being produced by a virus/malware. I had the same issue on a customers computer today. There was a program creating the fake hard drive errors. I had to go into safe mode with networking, download malwarebytes, got that to allow me to access task manager, back to normal mode, ended the task, ran malwarebytes again to completely remove everything and used CCleaner Startup tool to delete the entries from startup. Glad I found this post, the virus it marked everything hidden never seen that before.

God has blessed you!!! Thanks!

God has blessed you!!! Thanks! I had a customer with the same thing, after setting to display hidden all was revealed, reset read only flag, but aren't there some/many files or directories that should be hidden or read only, W7P. Thanks