windows 10 reverted unexpectedly to windows 7 and lost all data

I did not find jpg and doc in documents.
Looking at his program areas, all the folder dates are circa 2009. Looks like a factory reset.
The window retore points showed two items.
A little under 3 hours ago (just after midnight), there was a windows update.
A little under 1 hour ago, there was a script update.
If there was no formatting during this reversion, I wonder whether there is a chance that some of his files are still there?

Thanks.

My son said it looks like a factory reset.
He never had it set for dual boot, but I'll check tomorrow.
Virus - thought that might come up.

>> GetDataBack
Should he move the drive to another PC and run GetDataBack there?

Thanks all.
He has an HP.  He just told me that he is upgrading to Windows 10. (I wish he hadn't done that.)
Maybe he will want me to run GetDataBack after it is complete.

Hmm, suppose this happens again, after the free trial. I wonder whether there is a W10 license that he can use to get a free version.

Now, I am reluctant to upgrade my Toshiba i3 laptop (about 7 years old; ~2.2 GHz) to W10 - might be too slow for an old laptop.

Thanks all for your comments. I'll close this question soon enough.
I had to go to work today and my son said that the GetDataBack program required that it be run on a different disk than the one being scanned. (I thought about a partition, but there is only so much I can do while at work.) So, he was resigned to losing data. (Luckily, he put into dropbox some recent work he did for his friend.) He is much wiser now. He locks his door, now has a strong password (instead of that 6 char name), and logs out or puts to sleep his PC when done.

I lost a lot of course work on his computer that I had just downloaded from Coursera and was going to ask my son to put it on his external backup drive, but he was travelling in Europe for a few weeks. And I roughly computed the probability of a failure and determined that it was negligible. I am still right on that point. Oh well. I have some on this laptop and I will back it up tomorrow. After all, the probability of my laptop going bust tonight is extremely low, I think.

Thank you all for your considerable responses. I and my son do appreciate that. Good to know about the GDB program. Thanks for that!

I had sent your comments to my son. From your comments, he now believes that the reversion did not happen due to a MS update or HD correction as he has had no problems with this PC. He now believes that he may have left his PC on unlocked and possibly someone reset his PC. (I had originally set it to lock after 10 minutes, but he was annoyed with having to log back in when he went away, so he undid that. Then I set it for ~45 minutes; but he was still annoyed.)  He has Norton AV and his last scan found no virus. His conclusion now is that he should be safer about his PC. (Not sure why he didn't listen to me about this point before.)

He said he had no dual boot.
His available disk space on the C: drive is about 600 GB (almost the size of the disk). Before the reversion, he only had about 100 GB available. Looked like a factory reset to me and him.

Regards,
phoffric

Since the recovery program has to be on another drive, I was wondering whether I could run a program on a 8GB flash drive I have. (I can get a 32GB flash, if necessary.)

You could use a Linux Live-System, many include photorec/testdisk, which are amongst the best data recovery tools (but they aren't as easy to use as many windows tools, and the recovered files will often be mixed up with no logical folder structure and have unusual file-names, so after recovery you'd have to go through every file to make sure what it is, then rename it to the original file-name). A good such DVD is PCRepix:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/pcrepix/files/?source=navbar
http://pcrepix.sourceforge.net/

You can use WinSetupFromUSB to create a bootable USB stick from the iso:

http://www.winsetupfromusb.com/

For Windows OS's to boot from USB that is more difficult. If you have Windows 8.x Enterprise edition, then you can use "Windows To Go" to setup windows on a bootable USB stick. I've just seen that on Windows 10 Pro it is included too, so for Windows 10 you don't need the Enterprise edition!. The problem is that in order to use Windows To Go you need a certified USB stick for that, and there aren't too many product available. It works fine on the other hand if you use a normal USB disk. You'll find Windows To Go in the control panel of your OS. I'm not sure if a 32GB stick is large enough...

I may have some free time to look at your suggestions now that my contract finally ended.

If going with WinSetupFromUSB, I need a Windows license, right? I have three XP PCs that all stopped working on the very last XP Update. (I figured it was designed that way, so I added memory and switched to Ubuntu.) But I have those XP license codes. (Not sure if MS will accept them since they were already being used on now three unused systems.)

If that boot works, then I guess I can install one of the recovery programs.

Not necessarily. Windows 10 for example you can install without License, and also for Windows 7 it isn't required. But the OS will then run in a trial mode. The different versions of Windows 7 have different trial periods during which you can use them without problems, after the trial has expired, as far as I know the OS will shut down by itself after an hour or so. On Windows 10 when you are in trial mode there are some functions missing, for example you can't adapt your desktop as much.

As XP isn't supported anymore, it would be unwise to install the OS on PC's. Besides, most XP installations were OEM, and OEM OS's you aren't allowed to move to another PC, unless you live in the EU or Switzerland, in those areas you'd have to call m$ to get the product activated again. On such PC's it would be much wiser to install Linux. If the Users are used to using Windows, I'd suggest using MakuluLinux LinDoz, it has a look and feel like Windows, you can change themes so it resembles XP, Windows 7, Windows 10 etc, and it runs well on relatively old hardware. It also has wine and playforlinux preinstalled, which allows you to run many Windows programs quite easily.