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Unexpected PC hiccup
6 years ago
General
Hey, all. Well, I've been offline here for a few days due to my PC's hard drive unexpectedly dying on me. This meant no FA, no FB, no Telegram, just Twitter.
On Sunday I noticed some of my Windows apps just freezing for periods of time for no apparent reason. Then the system completely re-booted and hung at the BIOS screen with a warning about the hard drive now marked as "Bad". It took nearly 20 minutes for it to boot to Windows again where upon I promptly started creating backups and disk images which took another day to finish as the software banged on the (now) bad sectors to get at the data. In the mean time I ordered two new drives (one exact model, one slightly newer). Another couple of spontaneous re-boots and I had gotten the images off and onto a backup drive.
Pulled a Windows 7 ISO from my MSDN (so I could use it's restore feature), put in the new drive, did an image restore on one partition, a file restore for the other partition, and boom! Back up and running. A little surprised the multi-partition imaging worked as the new drive I installed is a slightly different model. The only thing I lost was a tiny OEM-installed recovery partition on the original drive.
On Sunday I noticed some of my Windows apps just freezing for periods of time for no apparent reason. Then the system completely re-booted and hung at the BIOS screen with a warning about the hard drive now marked as "Bad". It took nearly 20 minutes for it to boot to Windows again where upon I promptly started creating backups and disk images which took another day to finish as the software banged on the (now) bad sectors to get at the data. In the mean time I ordered two new drives (one exact model, one slightly newer). Another couple of spontaneous re-boots and I had gotten the images off and onto a backup drive.
Pulled a Windows 7 ISO from my MSDN (so I could use it's restore feature), put in the new drive, did an image restore on one partition, a file restore for the other partition, and boom! Back up and running. A little surprised the multi-partition imaging worked as the new drive I installed is a slightly different model. The only thing I lost was a tiny OEM-installed recovery partition on the original drive.
PepeK62
~pepek62
"You speak in strange whispers. This is not the way of Landru."
fluffypup
~fluffypup
Glad you got that squared away. :) (BTW, you can still upgrade to Windows 10 for free)
Andy_Fox
~andyfox
OP
I was considering installing Windows 10 in case I wasn't able to get a system image. Windows 10 has cooties though.
fluffypup
~fluffypup
Well the recent oopsies in 10's updates depend on hardware, though so far no issues for all I've installed it on. But hey, you'll still be able to upgrade when 7's is at end-of-life in January (which is gonna be a problem for me as a 7 Enterprise user :P ) for no charge... or go with Linux builds. All in due time anyway. Good thing you were able to get up and going again either way. :)
whines
~whines
Whoot, glad it was realtively painless :)
