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Post by Dabeagle on Feb 8, 2019 19:52:23 GMT -5
I have been having computer problems of late. Today, for a very bad space of time, I thought my hard drive had crapped out - and that I'd lost all the stories in progress among a great, great many other things (personal pictures of the kids, for instance). While the computer did come back up, I have no idea if the hard drive is failing or not. This computer has been due for replacement, but I haven't had the bucks. I have managed to back up everything, however if I disappear you'll know what's going on. I looked at computers and to get what I think I need to do the various things I do, it'll be over 1k and depending on options, closer to 2k. I clearly don't have that, but have some hope - if my taxes aren't as FUBAR as some I've seen in the age of this new tax law, then I may be bale to do something. In the meantime I'll be limping along and possibly replacing things piecemeal to keep the system going.
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Post by Nick on Feb 8, 2019 23:01:24 GMT -5
So sorry to hear that. SSD drives are cheap now, and so is cloud storage - a lot can be snarfled free: Dropbox 2Gb, pCloud 15Gb, Google Drive 15Gb, and OneDrive if you use windows. Also, check out www.odrive.com/ which looks really useful. If I was starting fresh I'd go with Linux Ubuntu. Again, it's free and excellent too. All the best. PS Martin says Computer problems suck royally. |
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Post by TeddyBower on Feb 8, 2019 23:19:58 GMT -5
Yikes! I've been there, done that. Lost a lot of important stuff, but not anything to the scale of what you're facing. Glad you've got a backup made, and best of luck.
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Post by Dabeagle on Feb 8, 2019 23:44:52 GMT -5
So sorry to hear that. SSD drives are cheap now, and so is cloud storage - a lot can be snarfled free: Dropbox 2Gb, pCloud 15Gb, Google Drive 15Gb, and OneDrive if you use windows. Also, check out www.odrive.com/ which looks really useful. If I was starting fresh I'd go with Linux Ubuntu. Again, it's free and excellent too. All the best. PS Martin says Computer problems suck royally. Martin needs to get his cute little ass back on the page. |
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Post by dgt224 on Feb 9, 2019 2:28:28 GMT -5
Oof! I've been there too. About a year ago I spent a fairly harrowing day recovering from a failed disk drive. Happily I had fairly recently installed a third hard drive in my system and migrated nearly everything to a new file-system format called ZFS that's available on UNIX and Linux. One of the major features of ZFS is transparent duplication of files between drives with periodic integrity checking.
I came closer than I care to think about to heart failure when it looked like one of the ZFS storage pools had disappeared, but it turned out that I only had to tell it to import the missing storage pool and everything came back like magic. Took a couple of scary hours to get to that point, though.
That experience made me a lot better about making regular backups of everything on the computer!
Hope the computer holds together for you until you can manage a replacement.
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Post by Dabeagle on Feb 9, 2019 17:43:51 GMT -5
I'm afraid I'm less computer literate than I let on. I used to think nothing of wiping an HDD, reinstalling windows, etc. Unfortunately, I upgraded from 7 and don't have the disk anymore, I don't have a Win10 disk and I'm not sure how well the other things I use would react to a new OS. I backed everything up last night and will keep doing so in case I get forced into the less expensive HDD replacement and Win10 disk, or for when I can migrate to a new PC. Fingers crossed.
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Post by Rob on Feb 10, 2019 13:07:34 GMT -5
I’m not sure if you meant buying Win10 disks with the cheaper option of replacing the HDD. I’m pretty sure the Win10 iso can be downloaded for free from Microsoft and used to create installation media (eg. USB pen drive). I’ve not had to do it myself, but looking at the instructions on the Microsoft support site it seems you don’t need a product key if you upgraded from Win 7 as you should have a digital license (you can check where under the settings). In that case you just install Win10 on your new HDD and skip when it asks for product key, and then it should be recognised as legal copy as the digital license held by Microsoft should recognise your machine.
I agree with Nick about SSD as they are way faster and if you have a laptop it will give you better battery life. Swapping the HDD for SSD on my basic 2011 laptop improved performance a lot. But, don’t stop with the backups. Unlike HDD that can degrade and sometimes allow recovery, when an SSD fails it is usually game over.
Hope things go well for you,
Rob.
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Post by Nick on Feb 10, 2019 13:43:30 GMT -5
What are the other things you use? If you went with Linux you can run windows software under an emulator called Wine. It's a bit slower than running it natively, but it still works. You can also dual boot - have both Windows and Linux available to use. I found an old computer in a skip (dumpster). I reformatted the hard drive, loaded Linux Ubuntu and I'm still using it six years later. Another boon is that those who get off on writing viruses tend to concentrate on Windows. I do have virus protection on my Linux box but, touch wood, I've never ever had a problem. www.ubuntu.com/I don't want to appear a zealot, so I'll erm... go and have my tea.  |
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Post by Rob on Feb 10, 2019 16:02:46 GMT -5
Haha, I am a Linux advocate and maybe a bit of a zealot. Thinking pragmatically, I hoped to get Dave up and running ASAP  I know your question wasn't directed at me, but for me the only use I have for Windows is gaming. My 2011 laptop is a basic i3 model - it's the newest kit I have and is dual boot Win10/Linux. I can't really justify replacing it or my even older desktop as they run perfectly with Linux. I do want to do some gaming though, so I'll be looking to update when the AMD Zen2 CPUs arrive later this year depending on how my finances look. In the end Linux won't save you from a hard disk crash if you have only one disk. I use Linux software RAID with two disks in my desktop to give some protection against harddisk failure (really should be three disk RAID5). Setting up RAID can be a bit complex though so I'm also thinking of NAS RAID5 to have a dedicated shared file server, but that adds more cost. Anyway, Dave, if you do decide to go for Linux sometime then you have friends here to help |
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Post by Dabeagle on Feb 11, 2019 14:04:46 GMT -5
Thanks, Rob! Welcome to the boards!
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Post by baddius on Feb 13, 2019 13:53:51 GMT -5
I'm afraid I'm less computer literate than I let on. I used to think nothing of wiping an HDD, reinstalling windows, etc. Unfortunately, I upgraded from 7 and don't have the disk anymore, I don't have a Win10 disk and I'm not sure how well the other things I use would react to a new OS. I backed everything up last night and will keep doing so in case I get forced into the less expensive HDD replacement and Win10 disk, or for when I can migrate to a new PC. Fingers crossed. Unfortunately, the technology changes so fast, within 5 years everything that was "cutting edge" is now "obsolete" |
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Post by Dabeagle on Feb 13, 2019 15:22:28 GMT -5
An update to the situation - When I built the system several years ago, I went with two hard drives (both SSD) one primary and one storage. They were both SATA drives, which was new to me, and the optical drive (DVD/CD) was also SATA. The motherboard only had two power slots for SATA drives, so after loading the OS I elected to leave the optical drive unpowered so I could use the storage drive. I eventually purchased an external optical drive for the times I did need one, and it has been plugged in via USB for quite some months. Oddly, after unplugging that drive in preparation to slide the computer out and unhook the cables in the back in preparation to take it o the computer shop, I decided to try the power once more and it booted. I suspect, somehow, that the system was randomly focused on booting from the empty external optical drive. If correct, it takes the immediate pressure off and I can think about replacing it more at my leisure than I had feared. Trust me, I was losing my mind when I thought I'd lost everything!
Thanks for the advice, everyone!
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Post by dgt224 on Feb 13, 2019 16:55:07 GMT -5
That suggests lots of possibilities, some much more worrying than others. For example, does the optical drive have a separate power supply or switch? If so, it may be that it was left powered on and was ordinarily powered off -- the BIOS won't notice a USB drive that's turned off, so it won't try to boot from it, and the USB drivers should automatically remove or reinstall a USB drive when its power state changes, so there's no reason to leave it turned on when you don't need it.
On the other hand, if the optical drive gets its power from the USB connection, that suggests the BIOS is trying to boot from the optical drive and it wasn't previously configured to do that. If the BIOS configuration settings are changing spontaneously, I would be inclined to worry a bit more. Although it could also just mean that the backup battery for the BIOS settings has started to fail. If that looks like a possibility I would go into the BIOS settings and make notes on how it's all set up, and when you're ready to start replacing things, I'd start by locating the battery on the motherboard and replacing it. It's probably a 2032 coin cell, and they're good for a lot of years, but it's easy to replace, and if there's any indication that the motherboard might be acting strange, that's the first thing I'd check. (I don't know how long they last if you shut your computer down when you're not using it; my PC runs 24/7, so its CMOS battery doesn't get much of a workout.)
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