by "Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
Published 02/18/2017 at 17:42
by "Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
Published 02/18/2017 at 17:42
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I really did have better things to do today rather than fixing my damn computer, but it’s now running again. New and unique errors kept popping up so I finally did the system restore, and after installing drivers and a few apps things appear to be back to normal. Yeah, I would have probably just spent the day watching HGTV and playing video games and sitting on my ass, but I did two out of the three so I guess we can call it a successful day.
In order to prevent this from happening again I guess I need to come up with some sort of backup strategy. Maybe I’ll find a cheap but new 2GB drive to replace the used pair of 1GB units in currently use. I guess I should also grab the Windows key so that I can do a full reinstall if necessary.
One thing that really pisssed me off today was the steps necessary to create some Win10 restore media. I downloaded the ISO from Microsoft and went to burn it to DVD, but Windows told me that there wasn’t enough space on the blank DVD. Excuse me? Then I went to install it onto a flash drive, but the installer didn’t see the brand new drive plugged into and mounted on the computer. WTF MS? I found some third-party tool to do the job, and it did it well, but shouldn’t the Microsoft tool designed to do this job actually work?
The Mazda5 will be paid off in October and then I can finally get a new Mac, leaving this machine to gaming and grunt work and other less important stuff. If it doesn’t work it won’t really matter and I can fix it when I have some spare time, and won’t have to cancel plans in order to get it operational again. As it is I have several other projects to work on (replacing a few screens and keyboards on some notebooks, installing an OS, transferring files off of a desktop, etc.)
"bhtooefr" (bhtooefr)
02/18/2017 at 17:50, STARS: 0
With Windows 10, you don’t use a key - it figures out that it’s the same computer based on various hardware IDs, when you activate it.
In any case, I still say, mash F12 repeatedly after turning the machine on, select Diagnostics, and see what happens. Run the extended test too, when it asks.
"facw" (facw)
02/18/2017 at 17:55, STARS: 0
Definitely at least get an external drive for backups. Replacing the system drive with one less suspect is good, but any plan where a single drive failure leads to loss of all your data is a bad one. Cloud backup would be even safer, but has additional privacy and cost implications (I mostly just use Amazon Prime’s unlimited photo storage to get offsite backup on those those).
USB is definitely the way to go for installing Windows. Not sure why the tool didn’t work for you, I’ve only had that issue will a failing stick.
"e36Jeff now drives a ZHP" (e36jeff)
02/18/2017 at 17:55, STARS: 1
There actually is still a key, and you can pull it out from the registry with some tools. It can greatly simplify the reinstall process.
"TheTurbochargedSquirrel" (thatsquirrel)
02/18/2017 at 17:56, STARS: 0
You can’t put Windows 10 on a DVD because it is more than 4.6gb. Windows 10 also doesn’t have license keys anymore, your hardware gets registered with Windows servers.
"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
02/18/2017 at 17:58, STARS: 0
Ran it overnight, no errors found. Ran HD Regenerator (or something like that) and it didn’t find any problems on the drive. Ran a multi-hour RAM check and no errors found there either. Any good testing programs you’d recommend? Hopefully there’s something good on the latest version of Hiren’s boot disc, unless you can recommend another freely downloadable boot/utility disc.
I think I’ll clone the hard drive and run the original through SpinRite. It might take a few days, but it should give appropriate piece of mind.
"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
02/18/2017 at 18:02, STARS: 0
Explain this to me then - why does MS say you can install it on a USB drive that has at least 3GB free, but it can’t fit the same program onto a 4.6GB disc? And who has dual-layer blank discs laying around?
"bhtooefr" (bhtooefr)
02/18/2017 at 18:04, STARS: 0
Personally, if I had a suspected flaky drive that was still passing diagnostics, I’d not trust it, and just use it as a game storage disk (where I can redownload the files from Steam or wherever).
PSA diagnostics are the only tool I’m actually authorized to use for troubleshooting in the environment I support, although my client also has some SMART monitoring or whatever through Dell Data Vault that can automatically request that a HDD replacement be performed. I will also check Event Viewer for Disk and Ntfs errors, though - those are good signs that
something
is going wrong.
And I’m not sure how much SpinRite can really do on modern drives... it made more sense back in the MFM/RLL era, really.
"bhtooefr" (bhtooefr)
02/18/2017 at 18:10, STARS: 0
My guess is that they didn’t update the message for the actual size.
"TheTurbochargedSquirrel" (thatsquirrel)
02/18/2017 at 18:12, STARS: 0
Where do they say 3gb free? For one the installer has to format the entire disk so you can’t have other info on it, and the one time I installed Windows 10 from USB it used like 7.6gb.
"Flavien Vidal" (flyingfrenchy)
02/18/2017 at 18:16, STARS: 0
I have a Windows 10 X64 iso right here and it’s 3.8gb... Only standard commercial Windows are 8gb or so because they include both 32 and 64 bits version of the OS.
"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
02/18/2017 at 18:21, STARS: 0
It was the first link that Google presented, from thewindowsclub.com that mentioned 3GB. The screenshot above is straight off of Microsoft’s Win10 download page.
"404 - User No Longer Available" (toni-cipriani)
02/18/2017 at 18:27, STARS: 0
DVD+R DL.
"TheBimmerGuyWhoNowOwnsAChevy" (thebimmerguy)
02/18/2017 at 18:36, STARS: 0
To be fair, just putting it on a disk or usb isn’t that easy, I’m not sure about discs but the usb has to be 4ish gb to work and it also has to be a boot enabled drive, also it sometimes has to be changed into a different format. And despite what others are saying, there technically still is a windows key, it’s just more hidden, but if windows 10 came with your computer, then yeah there is no accessing or reusing that key.
"TheTurbochargedSquirrel" (thatsquirrel)
02/18/2017 at 19:11, STARS: 0
The Microsoft tool must use both 32 and 64 bit versions.
"Flavien Vidal" (flyingfrenchy)
02/18/2017 at 20:29, STARS: 0
I use Windows 7 official Iso to USB tool for it... it doesn’t require both version. Just making a bootable USB with my X64 only version of Windows 10 right now.
"Flavien Vidal" (flyingfrenchy)
02/18/2017 at 20:33, STARS: 0
Just did it and it required 3.90Go... As I said, official Windows 7 USB tool