Saturday was spent just making sure everything was backed up, and then some. I turned out to have more drives laying around than I thought so not only did I run the Macrium backups of my C and H drives (C being the SDD, and H being a legacy drive that has a ton of stuff on it), but I've been able to clone off C just for suspenders. And I am FINALLY cloning D, which is all my video, which I did not have a backup of....

Lesson learned, sometimes Macrium can leave that 100 meg system partition exposed, and it will get a drive letter assigned to it, which will make that clone unbootable. Few things seem smart enough to fix it. But the ACTUAL fix is to fire up Disk Management and remove the drive letter.

Ran into a couple of issues related to this machine being made before everyone was fully committed to UEFI, It's not really a problem that the C backup (2 TB SSD) went onto a 3 TB HDD, but it just wasted some unallocated space, but really, there was only about 500 gig on it anyway. I did have a 2 TB Seagate laying around, but the note on it says it's unreliable.

Maybe the old Motherboard knows the jig is up, because it's been behaving itself all day, no crashing. But then, I'm not doing anything really taxing like opening a browser window....

One of the drives laying around contained nothing but a clean Win 7 install. I'm not sure what the genesis of that was. It's getting the D backup on it. I have to remind myself I have a new computer to build, and I don't need to see if I can still make a clean Win 7 install work without the crashes.

The scratch drive I tried putting Windows 10 on though, that was almost a write-off. The failed install left it in a bad state. Half the time I could hook it up and the system wouldn't detect it was there. But it might also be a SATA cable going bad. (But that would be very new, since I wasn't having any issues with the drive it was normally connected to.) Trying to use the Win 7 install disk to repartition wasn't very helpful, see the UEFI note above. Even manually choosing the UEFI CD Rom reboot didn't always work. What finally DID work was going ahead and let it format the drive to 2TB, MBR, and then Drive Management came to the rescue. I deleted all the partitions and it gave me the option of making it GPT. Of course, once all that was dealt with, Macrium was used to overwrite the partitions anyway....

So, a lot of puttering around avoiding the main issues, I guess. But I learned my lesson when a SCSI drive failed on my old Mac and took most of my stuff with it. Copies, and copies of copies, before I commit to something I can't go back on.

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