Solved Help Please! All System Restore Points Are Gone.

[BILL 143]

Is there a way to recover missing restore points. I have been rebuilding my PC and Installing all updates since Feb 18th 2026. There is a record of shadow copies in the Reliability View page showing restore points after each critical windows update. Yesterday something happened to the .Net 4.8 updates and they stopped installing. So I stopped for the night and figured I would do a restore in the morning but All the restore points are gone. I do not want to start over again if I can locate the missing restore points. I did find that a USB drive had been added in the system protection somehow (not me) and there is a file on the USB drive that was not there when I started called System Volume Information. I think somehow the Restore System put everything on the K: drive by mistake when I first started the rebuild there was only the C: drive there no K: at all. There is 7 GB of restore points there I just don't know how to access them. Help is Badly needed please!

 

[Firewatcher]

First thing to check is the Shadow Copy Service running, if not the restore points may still there but not picked up by the System Restore Utility.
If that is the case, starting the service might do the trick. If that doesn't work, there may be an issue with your recovery environment - try loading an installation disk or bootable repair USB which will use it's own recovery environment and again you might see your restore points available. Pete

 

[townsbg]

Under the start menu look for system restore.It's also found in the middle of the screen before the one that you where on. You can use restore points from there. Any that are missing are gone.

 

[SIW2]

Have a look with shadowcopyview

ShadowCopyView - Shadow copy viewer for Windows 10/8/7/Vista

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shadowcopyview-x64.zip

 

[BILL 143]

The first thing I did was check Volume Shadow Copy in Services, it was not started and set to Manual, Started the service and changed to Auto. The second thing I did was run Dism from elevated CMD prompt, I followed that with sfc /scannow. The third thing was Check disk. Then I tried a Safe Mode start to check if the restore points were visible, they were not. I started lots of research, all day I ran the cmd command in an elevated prompt "vssadmin list shadows" and in the attachment is what it displayed. Everything was working fine attachment 03-02-26 lots of restore points being created and then on 03-03-26 nothing. All updates for .Net 4.8 stopped updating. Downloaded EaseUS Free software, could not figure it out so contacted support, we attempted to connect but connection from Team viewer was to slow. Downloaded "Shadow Explorer" That was useless. So here I am now. I downloaded Shadow Copy View but may need some help with what it found.

Thank you all for any help with this issue.

Bill

- - - Updated - - -

Ok, it looks like all Volume Shadow Copies are on the USB K: drive, could someone walk me through how to get them back to where they belong please.

- - - Updated - - -

Thank you all for the help but after spending the day trying to recover my restore points I have decided to start over, again-again-again so going for my 4th attempt at this rebuild and will start the F-Disk as soon as I have all my files off of the hard drive, learning as I go I will start saving System images sooner rather than when it is done... Thanks again.