“I walked through the valley of the shadow of WIN 10 OS death, but I felt no evil: for my help files are with me and my rod (USB boot stick) and a staff of support (help) writers, comfort me.”
I wish it really was as easy as that sounds. I almost made a fatal error doing an update to my new WIN 10 install on my “office” computer.
I have been hearing a low grinding noise when doing file access on my “office” box. I thought it was my C:/ hard drive doing a very hard grinding sector seek. For sure I thought I was going to get the fatal C:/ boot disk crash. The drive is somewhere between 7 and 10 years old.
I loaded a drive backup and partitioning program named Aomei. That software did a good job of copying the C:/ hard drive to another drive. The problem was getting the new drive to become the boot drive.
I am not getting into all the details but what I discovered is that WIN 10 is sort of temporarily installed over WIN 7. There is the ability to revert back to WIN 7 for 30 days after the upgrade. When trying to boot the new drive, it kept reporting itself as a WIN 7 OS with messed up boot files.
One of the solutions recommended is to boot from the install disk and repair the system. The problem is that my WIN 10 does not have a boot or a repair disk. It was downloaded off the Microsoft web site.
With booting my “office” computer now totally out of the picture, there was no way I could make a boot disk off the non-functional computer. Then I remembered, I have an operating WIN 10 install on my little netbook “Rover”. Sure enough, there is a program in WIN 10 to create a start disk or USB drive.
But Microsoft has disabled the ability of this app to make a real boot disk with enough system files so I could do drive letter renaming. What it did let me do is make a 256 bit boot file on a USB stick, that only permitted me to re-boot the existing drive.
The shadow of death was creeping over the old computer and I thought I lost everything. I discovered I could recover the original C:/ drive disk, but would not be able to swap it out with the copy I made.
I hope the block is lifted on creating the system boot disk after the 30 day trial so I can make the drive swap. My fear was if I delete the old C:/ name and rename the new disk as C:/ , and then if it doesn’t boot, I would be deeper in the computer grave. I need a full OS on the bootable rescue disk or USB stick.
I discovered my old C:/ drive is not as bad as I thought. I could use more space and a faster disk, but it was not the device making the groaning sector noise. What was happening is that while accessing the hard drive, The A:/ floppy drive (with no disk in it) was doing its own random seeks when the hard drive was seeking. Floppy drives make a lot of noise when racking their read/write head. The A:/ drive is located directly under the C:/ drive.
I have since disabled the A:/ drive in the bios and the noise is gone. I very seldom use the floppy so it is no issue to have it disabled. I can just reset the bios if I need it someday.
It’s been a very hard day and many new lessons learned. I am thankful for having at least a few computer hardware skills.