Making Lemonade out of Lemons
December 17, 2007
Friday started out to be a good day. As I was pulling into the parking lot at work, I realized that I had finished everything that I needed to do the previous day. This means that today I get to work on what I want to work on. Yippee!
One of the first things I decided to do was take care of a problem that has been nagging me for quite awhile. The hard drive on my primary machine.
The primary machine that I use has two physical hard drives in it. Drive 1 is a crappy Western Digital. I don’t like Western Digital Drives, due to personal experience. You probably figured that out though.
Luckily the second hard drive is a Maxtor. The Western Digital has been having issues for at least 8 months or so, and every time I get any real drive access on it, like when Outlook is updating it’s offline files, the machine hangs for a little while.
My intent was to take a ghost image of the Problematic 150G Western Digital, and place the image on my fully functional Maxtor 250G Drive. Then I would switch the drives around, making the Maxtor my primary drive. After that, I could do what I want with the Western Digital.
I’ll make a long story short, and let you know that it didn’t work out as planned. I ended up having to reload Windows.
Now, when you’ve decided to reload your computer, and have prepared, it can be really beneficial, kind of a cleansing experience.
If you aren’t expecting to do it, then it can be a real pain.
This was a real pain.
The Lemonade Part
I didn’t realize how badly that flaky drive was slowing down my day to day operations. Since swapping those hard drives, the machine is flying. It’s also really nice to start over, I only have the applications on there that I really use.
I tend to install a lot of software, and although I uninstall it periodically, the computer tends to get a little cluttered.
It’s also nice to set everything up exactly the way you want it, get all of your images and shortcuts going again, the desktop arranged just so. I’m not a control freak, but I still like having my workspace squared away.
All in all, I’m glad that I had to re-load my computer, although I wasn’t expecting it, I did have the time to do it that day, and I’m really reaping the benefits of it now.
Also on Port 16:
Posted in Hard-Drives, Personal-Computing, Rambling
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December 19th, 2007 at 7:29 am
So I’ll ask the question all of us want to know…
What happened? Why did you have so much trouble with it?
Having a clean machine sure is great. I sometimes reinstall my machine for no particular reason, even when I’m having no trouble at all. It’s just refreshing to have a clean start.
December 19th, 2007 at 8:30 am
If you must know, Windows held onto the drive designations, so the secondary drive was still c:, and it was booting off of e:. I changed drive letters, but after that, as soon as you log in, it would log you right back out.
Same story in safe mode. I started to do a repair install, but during setup it prompted me for a driver, and didn’t recognize my keyboard and mouse. I didn’t want to wrestle with it anymore, and I always prefer a clean install to a repair install, so I just wiped it out.
I do like a clean start too. Back when I had time, I would reload it from time to time for the same reason.
December 19th, 2007 at 9:33 am
definitely calls for a detailed tutorial for technically challenged ones like me Scott! or prepare to be bombarded with tons of questions
I just think many will benefit if you write step by step of what and how you did it .. no?
December 19th, 2007 at 9:53 am
That probably isn’t a bad idea Pearl. Thanks!
September 27th, 2009 at 1:01 am
hey mike, this time i have to ask you about the external hard drive. Remember i kinda asked you about the E-sata on my new external drive? that same guy is now having trouble, i’ll briefly describe it. I had been dropping it a few times yet it’s running fine, but one day i placed it on my table, i knocked it off but i managed to grab the usb cable and it didn’t really hit the floor, but somehow problems started coming. Once i plug the a/c power, it starts off like a minor beep siren for 7 seconds, then you can hear it like a train, trying hard to kinda make it work. the drive is spinning, as i can feel it, just that i can’t load it up or use it and it just keeps on repeating with the load..so i dont know what happened..
September 27th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Sorry to break it to you Donald, but it sounds like it’s dead.
I would try downloading a utility from the vendor, and let it run a diagnostic on it.
This was a laptop, right? If it’s not, you could always plug it into your motherboard, and see if it has problems there, at least that would eliminate the chance that it’s the external enclosure. If it is a laptop, it may be worth seeing if you can plug it into a desktop to see if it works there.
September 27th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
hmm…dead as in, i can still pull the stuff out of it but i can’t use the hard drive anymore? well it’s an external 3.5inch hdd, but so far i remember there is still warranty to it, but i’m just worried if the data inside cannot be extracted
September 27th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
You would have to hook it up to find out. If it won’t be recognized, then you don’t have anyway to pull the data off of it without sending it to a data recovery service, which is usually really expensive.
Let me know how it turns out, I’m curious now.
September 28th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
will do..but i doubt i can find any technicians here, since i’m living in a small town and not much services are available to me. i might do it sooner or later, since i have a back up external drive, and my broken hdd has warranty, so i might as well wait til i really needa use it and let u know, i’ll post again ;D
September 29th, 2009 at 6:25 am
The first step would be to try and find a friend with a sata desktop, and hook up your hard drive to it. That will tell you if it’s the drive enclosure, or if it’s the hard drive. It will also let you try and take a look at the drive on that computer, and you can download and run the manufacturer’s diagnostic utility.