Missing files

[brward]

My Laptop suddenly turned itself off last night and then it failed on reboot

After several attempts to repair failed I was forced to do a reinstall, but this of course messed up all my settings and users. I tried to manually move the files back from the windows.old file but the folders all appear empty.

Any ideas to find these missing files or to do a bit of magic

 

[Maguscreed]

If your computer did a hard reset for no apparent reason it might be better to focus on tracking down the source of that issue before attempting to return the machine to it's former glory.
This is a personal opinion mind you some people might disagree. A hard reset like that is usually an indicator of a major hardware level problem though, something that reformatting alone is not going to fix in the long term.