View Full Version : F-this! Reformatting my HD in an hour or two and starting new. Advice?
GilpinGuy
02-18-2013, 21:29
My laptop has been acting really weird: very hard start ups, erratic behavior, inexplicably disconnecting from the network when everything else on the network works fine, needing to restart SEVERAL times a day, etc., etc.
Disk checker software stuff says very few "bad sectors" but another disk checker thing says I have several disk errors in the last hour. WTF? No Norton virus alerts ever. No Malwarebytes alerts ever. No porn (had to cut that off right away).
I give you computer guys A LOT of credit for dealing with this shit all day long. I can just imagine the asshats at some office freaking on your ass!
To be safe, I bought an external HD and have backed up my personal docs: everything in "My Documents", the entire "iTunes" folder and all of my photos.
I was hoping to make a "disk image" so I could restore all of the programs that I downloaded, some of which I paid for. Windows 7 won't let me make a disk image - it has failed repeatedly and I have spent many hours trying to figure out why. I have Googled the error codes that I get and done all of the fixes that I can find. No joy, just continued frustration and wasted time. I've been messing with this for 3 days now.
Therefore, I am ready to say FUCK IT! and reformat my machine to factory settings and begin again. I don't give a shit if it takes 2 days for all of the updates and shit to download.
Any advice from you sages of the ether-world?
(excuse any "incorrect" terminology)
export your web browser bookmarks... i always forget that one[facepalm]
blacklabel
02-18-2013, 21:37
export your web browser bookmarks... i always forget that one[facepalm]
That's why I love Chrome. All that crap is in the cloud.
I'd suggest using Belarc Advisor or another similar program to get your Windows key and then downloading the OS you need direct from Microsoft. No bloatware that way. You can install it from a USB device as well. Maybe screenshot and save the Programs and Features window so you have a record of the programs that you have installed. Other than that, double or triple check that you have all the stuff you want off the drive before you reformat it.
theboomboom
02-18-2013, 21:40
Windows 7 does a decent job putting everything you need in your profile folder in the Users directory (this includes your internet favs). Back that guy up and you should be good. Game saves sometimes go in different places (not sure if you play any games or not), so you may want to back those up as well.
After formatting, I usually just copy that junk in a "backup" folder on my desktop. It is conceivable that whatever is messing things up now would cause issues again if you simply copied all the data from your old profile into a new one. I also like the fact that it gives me a fresh start on everything. If I want to move certain files back into Documents or Pictures or whatever, I just drag and drop.
Some applications that you may have purchased a licensed for may need to be de-authorized. This might include photoshop, or iTunes. .
If you've already figured out how to create images, when you restore your computer, go ahead and create an image from there after you reload all your programs but before you copy your backup data from the external drive. Save this image file in case you need to re-format again, you won't have to hassle with reinstalling all the programs you use.
Others might have some more tips to add...
I'd give an online virus scan a try, try http://www.eset.com/us/online-scanner/ I've had it find things that Symantec and Malwarebytes missed.
Jackrabbit
02-18-2013, 21:46
I'd run Rkill and combofix first. Wouldn't hurt.
Download them from bleeping computer.
cfortune
02-18-2013, 21:53
What error code is Windows backup giving you?
Replace the HDD before you start over and then have to replace the HDD.
You heard it from me in the last thread. You're wasting your time with that HDD.
http://www.ar-15.co/threads/86999-for-Computer-Guys
You're already 2 weeks in. What's your time and the frustration worth to you?
A direct disk image probably isn't going to help you anyway since it would likely restore any software issues. Is this laptop old enough to need a new hard drive since you're starting over anyway? I'm just going off info in your post so maybe not.
It take one more pass to make sure you got all your data just in case. Go get your latest drivers for the laptop (network, wireless, touchpad, etc.) and keep those handy.
After you do a complete format and reinstall Windows and your drivers IMMEDIATLY start doing Windows Updates and don't stop until they're all done. Don't surf the web. Don't install anything else. This is the most time consuming part but they're there for a good reason. You may want to just install the basic programs and give it a couple days and recheck for bad hard drive sectors. That may be a sign of the drive going bad.
If you're comfortable with this suggestion I wouldn't put Norton back on. I replaced intrusive anti-virus programs by staying on top of my software updates and not doing anything remotely sketchy on the internet and it's worked great for 3 years if not more. Browsing with Chrome makes it even easier. My 2 cents.
Uh...I think that's the basics...
I'll just add that the more you work that drive, the worse it's going to get.
I can do just about any formatting/reformatting on my Macs. I use a local guy for all the PC stuff.
Good luck.
Linux Ubuntu
http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
I have this on my laptop without any issues [Coffee]
I'm with gman on this, that drive has been suspect from the beginning.
Make sure you have your data. Start gathering your "paid" program info. Most of those folks are going to have a record of your purchase based on your e-mail.
Get a new drive, install fresh.
Install the old drive in an external IDE/SATA to USB carrier or use an adapter. I've had good luck with the cheap bytecc stuff from Microcenter. They make one that will connect just about any drive. Not so much luck with cheap eSATA enclosures from there. If you can pull your old stuff great, if not and you have a backup somewhere, that's fine too.
GilpinGuy
02-18-2013, 22:30
A direct disk image probably isn't going to help you anyway since it would likely restore any software issues. Is this laptop old enough to need a new hard drive since you're starting over anyway? I'm just going off info in your post so maybe not.
It take one more pass to make sure you got all your data just in case. Go get your latest drivers for the laptop (network, wireless, touchpad, etc.) and keep those handy.
After you do a complete format and reinstall Windows and your drivers IMMEDIATLY start doing Windows Updates and don't stop until they're all done. Don't surf the web. Don't install anything else. This is the most time consuming part but they're there for a good reason. You may want to just install the basic programs and give it a couple days and recheck for bad hard drive sectors. That may be a sign of the drive going bad.
If you're comfortable with this suggestion I wouldn't put Norton back on. I replaced intrusive anti-virus programs by staying on top of my software updates and not doing anything remotely sketchy on the internet and it's worked great for 3 years if not more. Browsing with Chrome makes it even easier. My 2 cents.
Uh...I think that's the basics...
Thanks man.
I did actually think "Well, if I do an exact image of my had drive, wouldn't that just reload all of tha bad stuff too?" Then I read this and that that said you should do it, so I figured they knew what they were talking about. <sigh>
This laptop is about 2.5 years old. I'd rather not go the "just buy a $1500 Mac" route. I'm so tired of hearing that - I didn't and still don't have $1500 for a $500 computer. This one was $400 something and was kick ass until last month.
Idiot here: how do I get all of my drivers and keep them handy? I assume burn them to disk, but how does one go about getting all of them, and get them to said disk?
GilpinGuy
02-18-2013, 22:34
Replace the HDD before you start over and then have to replace the HDD.
You heard it from me in the last thread. You're wasting your time with that HDD.
http://www.ar-15.co/threads/86999-for-Computer-Guys
You're already 2 weeks in. What's your time and the frustration worth to you?
Man, I'm just trying save a few buck here. I figured a back-up drive would be a good investment anyway, so I dropped the $100. I "hoped" that I had some virus or software issue that would clear up after reformatting. Now that I have all my kids photos and shit backed up I'm ready to try whatever.
I can always post here on my phone or Kindle. [Flower]
Linux Ubuntu
http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
I have this on my laptop without any issues [Coffee]
You left out the best part...It is free!
1. Keep your data separate from your OS.
2. Image your disk with the OS and keep the image as a baseline copy. I just assume I will do a wipe and reload of the OS every year anyway if it is a MS box.
3. Backup your data on a regular schedule. If you backup daily, keep a weekly copy in a separate location. If you backup weekly, keep a monthly copy in a separate location.
4. If you have data you cannot afford to lose and it is not overly sensitive, use Google docs or DropBox.
5. If you can afford it and want to invest the time, a RAID based network storage device will allow you to keep your sensitive data in-house and available.
I used to use Norton Ghost many years ago, and it was a good imaging system. Acronis True Image is a good application and works much the same way Ghost did. Since I have several Linux boxes, and I am familiar with DD and some of the GUI frontends for DD, I choose to use those free tools rather than spend money on backup software.
I am almost independent of MS, however there are a few things at work that require me to keep a couple of MS boxes at home.
GilpinGuy
02-18-2013, 22:43
What error code is Windows backup giving you?
0x8007001
Over and over again....[dig]
GilpinGuy
02-18-2013, 22:55
Screw it. Here we go......[werdo]
blacklabel
02-18-2013, 22:59
Good luck man!
Idiot here: how do I get all of my drivers and keep them handy? I assume burn them to disk, but how does one go about getting all of them, and get them to said disk?
First we need to back up a step. Are you restoring from dedicated Windows disks or a backup from the manufacturer? If it's a manufacturer backup it should have the drivers you need.
If it's from a plain Windows disk you need to do things before you format. Go to your manufacturer's web site (Dell, HP, Acer?) and you'll follow some steps asking for your model and OS and you should be presented with a big list of stuff to download. Everyone's page is layed out differently so I can't be too specific but if you're lucky and they're good it should be easy to grab what you need. Be SURE to get motherboard, wireless, touchpad, and display drivers. Those tend to be the more crucial ones. Windows can get most of the other stuff running if you forget something specific. You can stick them on that external drive. Basic Windows will get your USB ports running.
It's really tough to hit everything over the internet but I hope this thread gets you off in the right direction. I saw a lot of helpful comments. The easiest way to get through this kind of thing is to find a friendly geek to help in person.
Replace the HDD before you start doing anything!
If you have Comcast, don't forget you get free Norton Antivirus. Sounds like the symptoms are indicative of virus or other malware.
Byte Stryke
02-19-2013, 04:52
My laptop has been acting really weird: very hard start ups, erratic behavior, inexplicably disconnecting from the network when everything else on the network works fine, needing to restart SEVERAL times a day, etc., etc.
Disk checker software stuff says very few "bad sectors" but another disk checker thing says I have several disk errors in the last hour. WTF? No Norton virus alerts ever. No Malwarebytes alerts ever. No porn (had to cut that off right away).
I give you computer guys A LOT of credit for dealing with this shit all day long. I can just imagine the asshats at some office freaking on your ass!
To be safe, I bought an external HD and have backed up my personal docs: everything in "My Documents", the entire "iTunes" folder and all of my photos.
I was hoping to make a "disk image" so I could restore all of the programs that I downloaded, some of which I paid for. Windows 7 won't let me make a disk image - it has failed repeatedly and I have spent many hours trying to figure out why. I have Googled the error codes that I get and done all of the fixes that I can find. No joy, just continued frustration and wasted time. I've been messing with this for 3 days now.
Therefore, I am ready to say FUCK IT! and reformat my machine to factory settings and begin again. I don't give a shit if it takes 2 days for all of the updates and shit to download.
Any advice from you sages of the ether-world?
(excuse any "incorrect" terminology)
friendly advice, if you have 'bad sectors" Norton and Anti-Malware programs don't detect that. REPLACE The Hard drive, a reformat may or may not repair the damaged sectors. Then you have the question of "What caused these bad sectors?"
Now would be a REALLY Good time to look into a SSD for your laptop.
You will have to re-install your programs, always keep the source, even if its a download.
Edit:
Let me repeat this, just in case, you know, for the cheap seats.
Bad sectors is a hardware issue unrelated to the operating system, anti-virus program or any other software.
ALL hard disk drives fail. its a fact of life. whether you have a windows box, macbook or any other *Nix box the hard drives will fail... this is where you start looking at the MTBF(Mean time between failures) for the different types and manufacturers.
have a great day
buckshotbarlow
02-19-2013, 07:48
New hd, and learn to rebuild about every 3 months. I refuse to run windows for more than that...that damn sxs directory grows out of control and this is the only way to keep it clean.
Replace the HDD before you start over and then have to replace the HDD.
You heard it from me in the last thread. You're wasting your time with that HDD.
http://www.ar-15.co/threads/86999-for-Computer-Guys
You're already 2 weeks in. What's your time and the frustration worth to you?
I don't get why you'd want to rebuild your system every 3 months, but that's your choice. I usually run mine until there's a HDD failure or I decide to rebuild a system with new hardware. HDD failure hasn't been a problem since switching to SSDs. I have 8 Windows 7 systems at home and they just run. They all get backed up to an HP Home Server every night and important files are saved to 2 different HDDs so drive failure won't lose my data.
Apple systems are made with the same commodity hardware as PCs. I've dealt with Mac Pro batteries failing and rupturing the case, HDD failures, display failures, etc. They're not immune and have their own issues.
My team at work manages about 22,000 PCs and 150 Macs and I've been in IT for over 20 years. This isn't my first rodeo. [Coffee]
Did we lose you? Are you coming back? [Help]
GilpinGuy
02-20-2013, 02:46
Did we lose you? Are you coming back? [Help]
LOL Yes, I am actually posting now with my Kindle Fire while my restore is in progress. Got my fingers crossed.
It really shouldn't take this long.
Sent from my tactical android.
GilpinGuy
02-21-2013, 02:28
It really shouldn't take this long.
For a guy who is more comfortable swinging an axe than doing this sort of stuff, I think I did ok. Just wanted to take my time, make sure that I had a plan, not royally eff things up, then dive in. Yeah, I'm a little anal.
I actually got the machine back to "factory restore", restored drivers, got my wireless network working, downloaded windows updates, and got Firefox downloaded so I can post on here (explorer never worked for me).
Now this machine is working freaking awesome. I haven't seen and of the problems since. Pretty damn proud of myself. :)
Thanks for all of the help and advice folks!
Good luck and have fun with it!
clublights
02-21-2013, 07:53
NO matter the OS you choose... if your machine and wallet... can handle it .. get an SSD drive... the speed jump is AMAZING. you wouldn;t think it would be that big of a deal but boy is it ever.
Worth every dime .
NO matter the OS you choose... if your machine and wallet... can handle it .. get an SSD drive... the speed jump is AMAZING. you wouldn;t think it would be that big of a deal but boy is it ever.
Worth every dime .
Just make sure you install a FRESH version of the OS from the M$ website. You don't want to copy your existing OS from an HDD to an SSD. To give you an idea, I got a brand new Lenovo and installed a fresh copy of Win7 onto the HDD and a boot up too about 2min. I then installed an entry-level SSD into the same laptop, installed a fresh copy of Win7 and now it REboots in less than 30 seconds including manually typing in my password. Insane. I also tested Photoshop before and after and before it took about 40 seconds to fully launch and be ready to use. Same thing with the SSD is done in 8 seconds. Unreal. Keep in mind this is a basic SSD and a basic laptop too.
blacklabel
02-21-2013, 18:20
What size are SSDs coming in now? I've always shied away because of the limited capacity in the past.
What size are SSDs coming in now? I've always shied away because of the limited capacity in the past.
Relatively affordable 500GB options are on the market. The 64's, 120's and so on are getting wildly cheap these days. Love it!
Edit: Size shouldn't be too much of a factor though. No need to have massive SSDs for the purpose of storage because unless you're doing lots of reading & writing you won't ever get the performance gains. You want your OS, programs and a couple other things on the SSD for quick access. Then just get a standard HDD for your storage needs.
cfortune
02-21-2013, 19:57
Just make sure you install a FRESH version of the OS from the M$ website. You don't want to copy your existing OS from an HDD to an SSD. To give you an idea, I got a brand new Lenovo and installed a fresh copy of Win7 onto the HDD and a boot up too about 2min. I then installed an entry-level SSD into the same laptop, installed a fresh copy of Win7 and now it REboots in less than 30 seconds including manually typing in my password. Insane. I also tested Photoshop before and after and before it took about 40 seconds to fully launch and be ready to use. Same thing with the SSD is done in 8 seconds. Unreal. Keep in mind this is a basic SSD and a basic laptop too.
I've never had an issue using something like Acronis true image to move from spinning disk to SSD. Granted I've only made that move twice.
If you want an imaging/cloning tool that can also be used for backups, etc., check out Macrium Reflect (http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx).
If you move from a HDD to a SSD, make sure you reconfigure the OS for the new media. There are numerous websites that illustrate tweaks to disable indexing, defragmentation, SuperFetch, prefetch, etc. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2727880
I bought multiple OCZ SATA 3 240GB 2.5" SSDs. They work well and the size is very accommodating to the apps that we use. In our desktops, we use the SSD as a boot drive for the OS and applications and also have a SATA 3 HDD for occasional storage. Almost the entirety of our important stuff is kept on a home server.
One more thing to note: If the machine is more than about 18 months old and you are having more frequent OS crashes, replace the ram along with the hard drive. Yes, memory goes bad and I doubt you are running a "business class" computer with ECC memory. Here's the study Google did across their tens of thousands of in-house computers showing error rates averaged across each stick of memory. On average you will see 400 corrected errors per dimm per year, and they get worse starting about 10-18 months. http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
I've never had an issue using something like Acronis true image to move from spinning disk to SSD. Granted I've only made that move twice.
As long as you realign the SSD afterwards you should be okay and won't notice much of a fall off in performance. There are a few things that Win7 & Win8 do when being freshly installed on an SSD that are unique to HDD installation to take advantage of the way that SSDs go about things. Some of these can repaired afterwards but I've found it's just easier to suggest the average user do a fresh OS install.
cfortune
02-21-2013, 21:16
As long as you realign the SSD afterwards you should be okay and won't notice much of a fall off in performance. There are a few things that Win7 & Win8 do when being freshly installed on an SSD that are unique to HDD installation to take advantage of the way that SSDs go about things. Some of these can repaired afterwards but I've found it's just easier to suggest the average user do a fresh OS install.
I hear ya.
Plus if their BIOS was set to use their drives as IDE versus AHCI then they'll have to reformat if they move to AHCI. I'm not 100% on this being true for all SSDs but I know my first SSD highly suggested AHCI over IDE.
I hear ya.
Plus if their BIOS was set to use their drives as IDE versus AHCI then they'll have to reformat if they move to AHCI. I'm not 100% on this being true for all SSDs but I know my first SSD highly suggested AHCI over IDE.
There are a few more technical aspects to a SSD swap that I wasn't going to get into on a firearms forum. Sure, you can just copy shit over and call it a day and you'll still have performance gains over what you have with an HDD. The best advice I can give is make sure your BIOS is set to AHCI and then load a fresh copy of your OS onto the SSD and activate with your key through the normal process. Then install the drivers and prepare to be blown away by the performance. It's awesome!
Bad sectors on a disk usually just indicate a hard drive that is physically failing. Reloading the OS will not fix that. Buy a new hard drive and reload.
Also I would reload from base and never clone. Because you clone malware and viruses too. I wipe my system down to zero once a year or more for that reason alone.
Bad sectors on a disk usually just indicate a hard drive that is physically failing. Reloading the OS will not fix that. Buy a new hard drive and reload.
Also I would reload from base and never clone. Because you clone malware and viruses too. I wipe my system down to zero once a year or more for that reason alone.
Had you read the thread, you would see the OP did buy a new hard drive after receiving some solid advice.
Had you read the thread, you would see the OP did buy a new hard drive after receiving some solid advice.
I read his opening post and gave my opinion and reconfirmed his.
Bad sectors on a disk usually just indicate a hard drive that is physically failing. Reloading the OS will not fix that. Buy a new hard drive and reload.
Also I would reload from base and never clone. Because you clone malware and viruses too. I wipe my system down to zero once a year or more for that reason alone.
I use a virtual machine, kept updated, for that. I love seeing "your machine is infected, click here" in slax.
Damn you use Slax... thats not an easy OS, you must be into some more complex stuff.
Buy a new hard drive and reload.
My apologies, it looked like a hit and run post since that had already been covered.
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