Well, that was fun. Computer problems are always fun…depending on how you define the word “fun.”
My main computer is a desktop running Windows 7. (I really dislike Windows 10. I could go on, but won’t.) A couple of Thursdays ago, the computer started giving me performance issues, and finally it booted into the Windows 7 Rescue interface, which is when I regretted not replacing my hard drive a while ago.
Just to be clear, all my data is regularly backed up. Images, sound projects, animation, writings…all fine.
I just didn’t want to have to reinstall all the programs I’ve built up over the years. I could (aside from the Giveaway of the Day ones), I just didn’t want to. Yeah, pillory me for a whiner.
So, I let the “Startup Repair” option run. I knew this could take hours. It actually took days. And of course, it usually has to run more than once, so…more days. Once it completed, it seemed to boot fine, but I knew the clock was ticking. Various messages about unreadable files were very convincing.
So I shut it down, pulled the drive and put it and another drive into my Kingwin dual SATA dock (which doesn’t seem to be available, or I’d link it), plugged that into my (Windows 10) laptop, and ran AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro (one of those Giveaway of the Day products that has been invaluable over the years) to clone the old drive to the, uh “different” drive.
(Of course, since that different drive had stuff on it I wanted to keep, I first had to clone it to a spare drive–which I couldn’t have used to clone the PC drive, as one was MBR and the GPT, and I’m sure this is getting a lot duller than it needs to be.)
Anyway, having set everything up, I then fired up my largely dormant MacBook so I could continue to surf the web, check email and so on, and even work on some project files. Naturally, since nothing works the way we want it to at first, the Windows 10 laptop first had to repair the PC drive before it could even mount it, and this took several more days, during which the progress bar actually seemed to recede. Finally, though Windows 10 laptop was satisfied, AOMEI cloned away, and to my very great surprise the “different” drive booted back into Windows. And now we’re back, as if the last couple of weeks hadn’t even existed.
Of course, they did exist, and I learned a valuable lesson–I need to start making disk images of the PC drive regularly. Probably monthly, in fact. I’ve got to be industrious if I want to be lazy.
Thanks for listening. See you next month.
A Planet That Has No Sky 