Vocal Voices

Or not...

Over the last 20 years I have developed a kind of feel for what goes wrong with your pc and what does not. Sadly that does not mean I can access that "feeling" immediately when something goes wrong.

So when my laptop declined to start and Windows offered to "fix" it (very kind of Windows8 to do that), it was failing. I went through the usual suspects, blinded by the fact that I could not get into the error log and see what Windows thought was wrong.

After increasingly destructive attempts to get my Windows alive again, I took a step back and thought about it. Nothing and I do mean absolutely NOTHING was working.

Now, of course, that should have twigged much earlier. Regardless of it's bad press, Windows, from XP onwards, is actually an extremely robust system which will try almost everything to get you going again.

Except when there is a hardware failure.

So, after a thought finally entered my head, I went to discover the fault. One thing I know is that Windows won't try and fix errors on the hard drive. I can understand this even if I don't agree with it. In severe cases it can do more damage than good. But, then again, in severe cases 99.9999% of people are not going to pay thousands of £ to recover their business critical data.

So I booted, yet again, into the windows repair tools and asked it to scan my C drive for errors.

12 hours later it reported that it had finished, that the 2 year old SSD had 80 faulty clusters and that it had fixed them.

Now the really deep techie stuff. Windows had "helpfully" tried to "refresh" my Windows8 installation 3 times. Fortunately it kept all 3 backups of the old system. I had to use a Linux live boot cd (Windows repair refused to move the directories), so that I could put everything back where it belonged.

I could have just restarted the machine and asked Windows to sort it out, but that's just asking for trouble. Windows8 has a "refresh install" feature in the repair tool set. OK I have to reinstall my apps, but my windows settings and documents remain. I chose that option.

Now I'm faced with the tedious journey of installing my apps again. But, then again, I get rid of all the junk I had installed for one time things.

Microsoft gets bad press, but Windows did almost everything in it's power to recover my machine. In the end it allowed me to get back what I had built before in a clean and fresh state so I could start on messing it up all over again.

+1 to Microsoft. But this is the second time my 2 year old SSD has failed and I'm becoming concerned that I'm going to have to start treating them like the old 1990's hard drives. i.e. back everything up for the guaranteed failure. It has been a long time since I felt I could not rely on hardware to keep most if not all of my data.

Now my purchase of that 1TB SSD is looking like a future thing. Trust is a hard won thing and it's just gone out the window.

And I need to go find the synaptics mouse driver so I can stop the trackpad throwing the cursor all over the place and selecting and deleting my text when I type.....

I am not going to knock MS Windows as an OS. There have bee some fairly dodgy versions, W98 and Vista spring to mind, but for the most part they have all done what was said on the box. On the other hand I cannot work with Linux as an OS, it does not work the way my brain works, but it is a vital tool for repair imo.

MS software is a different story, but that's for another thread.

I tend to partition my drives into three. It's a bit "old school" but habits die hard. The active partition/drive has the Windows OS plus a fair bit of space to allow it to grow. The extended partition has the logical drives. The fist is for Program Files and each software gets all its installation files in a folder within its main folder. The second gets all my own files - docs, spreadsheets, photos and so on. It means that I have to do a fair bit of work changing Windows' and software default locations for things, but to me it is worth it.

When things go wrong my first port of call is always Windows repair as it very often works to at least allow me back in. Once in I can then have a play. If all that fails then a Live CD of Linux, esp one with a partition manager and diagnostics, becomes the most useful tool.

And, of course, the last port of call becomes a fresh install of Windows.

I was going to get an SSD (Ebuyer keep pestering me!) but I might hold off for a bit as yet.

Yep Linux is critical for repair. I've used it as a second OS when working on Mainframe Unix mode or when working with Unix machines, mainly because of the differences in file formats (CRLF as opposed to LF).

I can use Linux, it's just painful. Always, all the time. It might be better than Windows98 and some tweaks which make it better than XP. But Windows7/8 are literally streets ahead of both Mac and Linux in file handling. As I do a LOT of file handling, that makes either of them somewhat painful for me to use.

Also using the Linux, even for moving the windows directories back, meant I needed to go into a terminal and use the mv command as the graphical interface didn't just do a mv in the background, it tried to read every file and Linux can't read every Windows8 file, some are unsupported.

On my Laptop I have two drives. So most of the apps and data were on the D Drive. However parts of two of my VM's were on the D drive along with a bunch of files which were in my Documents. I know, I should keep them out of there.

The sad fact with SSD's is that they are now really a requirement. They are fast with a capital F. The reliability is a real issue though. I've read a lot about the 3,000 write/erase cycle limit on most MLC NAND SSD's and it's supposed to be mitigated by the cache and the software on the drive. But, honestly, I'm sure that as they are mainstream and time goes on, we will see more and more that the 5 years average life is going to be much shorter depending on usage. I've just moved my pagefile to my hybrid drive to try and get the writes off the drive.

Reading this thread explains a LOT about how the drives work. One comment is in line with my expectations

SSD should work at maximum of 75% of their capacity... 50% or less is recommended

I've been working at 50% generally but am currently up near 70% at the moment. I'll be clearing down again.

I'm not going to go away from SSD. The speed is still too compelling. However when I put the micron 960gb SSD in as the second drive, I'm going to replace the BD-RW with an internal caddy and add a 1TB hybrid drive for the pagefile and for backups.

Sadly SLC drives (100,000 write erase cycles), is too expensive for now.

It has been a good mental exercise for me, reading through the conversation between you two experts.

It amazes me just how complicated computing has become. Folks like me wouldn't have a cat in hell's
chance of solving our computer problems if we weren't for you guys.

Complex aggers, not complicated.

Lots and lots of relatively simple things all meshed together to make something which seems to be very complicated.

Small steps.

I had to restore one of my virtual machines. The are of the drive it had been sitting on failed and I was not able to recover it. Which is why I keep two or more copies of each machine.

Sometimes it's just useful to talk about things we see. it helps us who work with computers think things through and come to conclusions when we're trying to help.