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 Personal-Computing, Hard-Drives, 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!