All Happening...
From
Spectre@21:3/101 to
All on Sat Jul 15 21:21:00 2023
I got handed a old Dell Inspiron One in need of assistance last week, I've
had it pretty much 1 week today. It arrived not booting, BSD and stuck in a loop.
Phase one, living in hope was just use the repair tools, keep my fingers crossed and hope thats it. Of course given I'm tpying this, we already know
it failed. No repair possible, and filesystem is somewhat in trouble.
Wrestle it to a command prompt and run chkdsk.... ~12hrs later, it's happy
the file system is repaired, and there were plenty of errors. Both directory entries and permissions that just made no sense.. they showed as illegal characters. At the end of this, I have a valid file system and a corrupt OS. Still won't load a desktop just sits there sucking its thumb with a cursor on
a black background.
Phase two, boot a win7 system from USB. Copy the existing data off, and
start again. Hmmm took a while to find WintoUSB which promised to do what I needed, but then ran into it takes some ~10hrs to build an installed system
on my pooty.... and have to guess between BIOS MBR vs UEFI. I run with UEFI spend my time, and end up with something that won't boot. In hind sight I probably should've checked what the Inspiron supported. Another 10hrs and a BIOS/MBR install we're off to the races. Of course its only to find out how slow this horse really is... it starts to load, goes to installing system drivers, and spends the next ~18 hrs getting to 99% before stalling out, and because it was night time, I gave it the benefit of the doubt and left it
over night. Come the morning, still 99% and I abandon all hope and reboot
it. I'm sorry I was interrupted during install, I need to reboot, whereupon
it proceeds to loop through the same error.
Phase three. Probably should've done this in the first place. Boot Knoppix from the USB stick. It boots, although it takes a wet week off USB. Manage
to copy the HD contents to another HD. Proceed to install a new win7, I've been in this thing before, and I had imaged a 1TB drive onto a new 2TB drive last time. This time I just repartition it and go for broke using the
entire drive, single partition. Looking good, Win7 installs quite happily...
I install a variety of updates, SHA2, something else, and the win update update. So far so good. It sucks in some 168 updates for 1.x gigglybytes. Proceeds to install, all good... I come back some time later and during the install its sitting there cycling Red, Green, Blue, White, Black full screen.
I let it go for a while, eventually give up and reboot it. It comes back
with failure to install now uninstalling updates.
At this point I'm at Friday, its #1 Daughters 21st tomorrow, I pack it up
from the kitchen table and take it out to the "new" pooty room. Plug it back
in let it power up, it goes through the motions, and ends up at the cycling screen again... however time is no object this time, and in dejection I just let if run.. somehow it gets past the flashing screen, manages a reboot, and next I see it, its sitting at a login prompt. Woot.
Tonight, after most of #1 Daughter's 21st, I'm sitting there considering copying the old contents back to the new install... it spontaneously reboots, and produces a new boot error. It seems to have lost the MBR... no valid
boot record by the looks of it.
So now I'm back to square one, and at this point probably going have to open
it up and resort to replacing that HD. <sigh> Getting to old for this
hassle.. On the plus side, I've survived the 21st, and it went without
mishap.
Spec
*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
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* Origin: Good Luck and drive offensively! (21:3/101)