Windows 10: Music and videos folders replaced by empty ones after restart

What I did before: I installed iTunes and iCloud, the latter needed the PC to restart, so I did. The PC restarted, and the lock screen appeared. However, I couldn't type or click anything, both my keyboard and mouse seemed to not be recognized at all. I pressed and held the power button to restart the PC once again. This time, I got a black background with white text at the bottom saying it was repairing my D drive where I have my music and videos folder stored on. It looked like this if I remember correctly:Image


After it had completed doing this, I could log into my account. That's when I saw that there weren't any videos in my videos folder, it was totally empty. Same with my music folder. Everything else seems to have been left unchanged. So what happened here? Is there a way to recover or maybe even just find the files?


What's odd but also give me some hope is that there is still as much space left on my D drive as before this incident. At least that's what it shows for the D drive under "This PC":





My videos and music combined were around 1-1.5 TB in size for reference.


As for recovery tools: Recuva wasn't able to find anything. DiskDrill predicts to take like 20 hours for a scan haven't completed a full scan, but seems to find at least some files. PhotoRec also takes very long and is restoring files, but without their original names.


It looks to me like the files aren't quite deleted yet, but somehow hidden where I can't access them is there a difference then....?. So it there maybe a simple solution to get my files/folders back?

:)

 

What exactly are are "My music", "My Pictures" and "My videos"

You can't redirect the shortcut links which is the subject of the post

 

Quick Access not searching Pictures folder

Summary, that last suggestion didn't work.

• I moved the pictures to another folder temporarily.

• Then I tried to remove the Pictures folder with option one at Add or Remove Folders from This PC in Windows 10 | Windows 10 Tutorials. Even after rebooting, the Pictures folder remained.
• So I tried using option two. Same thing: reboot >> Pictures folder still there.

• Since there were no troubleshooting steps for this scenario, just for the heck of it, I ran through the restore steps. Copied some pictures into the Pictures folder, ran a Quick Access search and initial problem remains: Searching all of QA doesn't find any files in Pictures folder, running search on just the Pictures folder does. I want to run a global search and find matching files in any/all of the Documents, Music, Videos, and Pictures folders.

That article dates from 2015 and I'm guessing is out of date. I hope it didn't create potential future problems in my registry.

Bottom line: I'm still looking for a fix.

 

What exactly are are "My music", "My Pictures" and "My videos"

The link has the following advice that, of course, does NOT work in Win10 !

Workaround

If the My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos links in the Start menu do not point to the Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders, you must manually redirect these links to the correct folders. To redirect these links, follow these steps:

1. Click Startthe Start button , right-click the link, and then click Properties.
2. On the Location tab, replace the wrong target location with the correct target location. For example, to redirect the My Music folder to the Music folder in Windows Vista, enter %systemdrive%\Users\user_name\Music.
3. Click Apply.

If this was a fix for Vista, it seems kind of sloppy to keep it around !

- - - Updated - - -

If you CHECK THIS BOX they disappear.