F-this! Reformatting my HD in an hour or two and starting new. Advice?

[Dr_Fwd]

Replace the HDD before you start doing anything!

[rbeau30]

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]

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]

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?

[Gman]

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.

[Gman]

Did we lose you? Are you coming back?

[GilpinGuy]

Did we lose you? Are you coming back?

LOL Yes, I am actually posting now with my Kindle Fire while my restore is in progress. Got my fingers crossed.

[Gman]

It really shouldn't take this long.

Sent from my tactical android.

[GilpinGuy]

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!

[Gman]

Good luck and have fun with it!