The cursor completely formatted my C drive while I was running the project

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Two hours ago, the cursor completely formatted my C drive.

I usually use a MacBook, but today I sat down at the PC. I’ve already been working with the cursor on a PC for about the last three months. But something went wrong today.

I cloned my project from github, and then asked the AI agent to study the project and launch it. It was a regular project on react, but the cursor said that it had found some errors and continued to run the project. Suddenly, I find that he has cleared the project folder. At least that’s what I thought. Then I just cloned the repository again and manually launched the project. I tried to launch it. The node has been deleted. Then I went to the desktop. It was completely black. Not a single label. Just the shopping cart. I frantically tried to open explorer, but, “The application was not found. It may have been renamed, moved, or deleted.” All other programs in the taskbar are the same. At that time, only the running programs remained alive. I quickly stopped the cursor and went to restart the PC. After the restart, there is only one folder left on the disk. The document folder that contained this project.

Translated from Russian to English using Google Translate

Steps to Reproduce

I have never changed any cursor settings on a PC. I usually use a MacBook, and this behavior of an AI agent is simply unacceptable.

Translated from Russian to English using Google Translate

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

This was the latest version of the IDE for Windows 11. I can’t say for sure now.

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Auto mod

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

3

After restarting the PC, the rest of the programs, including the cursor, that were open on the PC during the incident, were deleted. Right now my Windows looks like this xd

photo_2026-03-29 16.18.32
photo_2026-03-29 16.18.321280×960 72.9 KB

photo_2026-03-29 16.18.33
photo_2026-03-29 16.18.33960×1280 70.1 KB

6

Hey, thanks for the report. This is really critical, and I can see the screenshots with an empty desktop.

This is a known issue on Windows. The agent can run destructive shell commands like rmdir /s /q and Remove-Item -Recurse -Force via the terminal, and File-Deletion Protection and External-File Protection don’t protect against that because they only apply to built-in file tools, not terminal commands. We’ve seen similar cases:

Also, since you’re on a Russian Windows locale, there’s a chance another bug was involved, related to UTF-8 encoding in PowerShell scripts. That could turn a command meant to delete a specific folder into deleting the drive root. This specific bug was fixed in later versions.

What to do now:

  1. File recovery: as soon as possible, run Recuva or R-Studio. The key thing is don’t write anything new to that disk, so you don’t overwrite deleted data. The sooner you start, the better the chances.
  2. After you recover the system and reinstall Cursor, make sure to turn off Auto-run mode: Cursor Settings > Agents > turn off “Auto-run mode”. The agent will ask for confirmation before every terminal command.

To help track the incident, if you can:

  1. What exact Cursor version was it? Help > About
  2. Was Auto-run mode enabled?
  3. If you still have access to the Request ID from that chat, please send it (right top corner of the chat > Copy Request ID).

The team is aware of this issue. Let me know if you need help with anything else.

13

Yes, auto-mod was enabled. Perhaps this setting was transferred from the Mac, as I didn’t change anything in the Windows settings.

Cursor version: 2.6.22

4e0b6f2e-b59a-4bf6-82a6-7770e192c502

14

By the way, he didn’t delete the Program files and Program filex x86 folders, so the chat was saved.

15

Thanks for the info. Good that the Program Files folder is still there and the chat is accessible. I passed this to the team. The Request ID will let us check the server side. I’ll let you know if there are any updates.

20

Hey, one more thing. Since Program Files survived and the chat is still accessible, can you pull the agent transcript? It should be here:

C:\Users\<your-username>\.cursor\projects\<encoded-workspace-path>\agent-transcripts\

Find the file that matches the time of the incident. Let me know and I’ll DM you if you don’t want to post it publicly. It’ll show exactly which commands the agent ran, and that’ll help us understand what happened.

22

ofc, no any problems

4968405f-6d92-430e-a341-4f9fc8392226.zip (10.0 KB)

23

Got the transcript, thanks. I’ve passed it to the team for analysis. It’ll help us confirm the exact sequence of commands that led to the incident.