July 09, 2015

If it Weren't for Etna...

... I wouldn't be online at all.

Seems that Seagate hard drives are becoming deprecated. Guess what Himawari's OS is installed on. Bit Rot has set in, and though I only know of three files that were affected (and nothing major was lost) there could be more, and at least one bad sector turned up in the worst place, the Master Boot Record. I discovered the problems after I got back from LibertyCon, and I found myself staring at a black screen saying some NT file couldn't be loaded.  It was trying to boot from my E: drive, which only contains my Anime files and a copy of my old XP install (trimmed) where I have some programs I want to remember to reinstall someday.

Much shenanigans ensued, and are still going on. I went out and bought two new WD 3 TB hard drives (last day of the sale at Fry's, $89 each!!) only to find that Win7 won't install on anything bigger than 2 TB. E: is a Hitachi 2 TB, so much juggling has ensued.

Now occasionally C:/D: can be induced to boot, usually by unplugging E: (the two partitions are a legacy of XP not being able to handle a big drive). After a successful boot, I can restart and connect E: and it will pretend everything's okay. But if you run the drive too hard, it seems to crash and reboot the system (and fail to boot the drive).

And it gets worse, as cloning software fails time and again ("If there weren't bad sectors, I wouldn't be cloning. No! Don't give up on the whole thing!") Windows Backup of course doesn't include the OS or the Program files (!) but the system image may. Only trying to install the system image on the other drive doesn't work because it's not the same drive, or something. It has been one frustrating failure after another.

(The worst was an attempt to install Win7 on the Hitachi. The configuration was ODD! My account had admin privs, but every time I went to delete large numbers of unneeded junk files being restored, it would demand that I click on a button saying I'm an administrator to delete them.  And then I've spent a couple of attempts to have the Win7 Install disk fix the boot process of the Hitachi, only to find out that the C: partition was blank, but the D: wasn't.)

It's even more complicated than that. I extracted all of the Windows Backup to one of the new 3 TB WD drives and set it aside just to be safe, and duplicated E: and D: to the other (the intent was to somehow get just C: on the Hitachi drive). I know my data is safe, and there are a couple of images of the rest of the system floating around, but getting anything to put them together in a way that WORKS isn't working.

In the meantime, I haven't been able to do anything useful on Himawari in over a week. I even missed the opening of the public Beta of World of Warships! Okay, that might not count as being anything useful either, but hey, it was a holiday weekend....

Posted by: Mauser at 04:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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