Tag Archives: Vista

microsoft, Operating Systems, Rant, tech, Windows 10

Windows 10 wiped all my hard drives without warning

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With the recent news that the latest Windows 10 update build (1809) deleted users downloads;

Microsoft:
We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating.
(via engadget.com)

i thought id post this story which ive been too lazy to post about for months.  If anything it shows that Windows 10 is not all its cracked up to be.

Over the years ive installed every Microsoft Windows OS;

  • Win 95
  • Win 98
  • Win Vista
  • Win 7
  • Win 8
  • Win 10

Windows 10 is the only one of those Operation Systems that wiped four hard drives without even a confirmation prompt to say you were “going to wipe out 5 hard drives”.

So what did you do?
It was almost new years eve and well my Windows 10 install was getting more broken after each update and the October 2017 update gave constant blue screens when using bluetooth headphones.  So i thought dam im going to have to reinstall windows 10 and all the dam updates.   At this point i really didnt want to do this with college work and programming source code scattered all over the shop.

F*ck it!
I had made a point of always backing up my PC since a horrable incindet back in 2003 where i lost the source code to two applications i was working on (fucking Maxtor Hard drives).  So yes i had a back up which was on another physical drive other than the SSD drive that Win 10  was installed.

Fed up of blue screens and problems since the October 2017 update i decided i had to reinstall Windows 10.  So i seen in Windows 10 there was a “Reset this PC” feature;

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was hoping this was one of “Ronseal” moments where it does “exactly what it says on the tin”,  it didnt.

What could go wrong
I had a back up and was ready to go, so i pressed the “Get Started” button and thought great, it will all be fine.  Now this is the part that is kinda fuzzy ill admit, i cant remember what it said but i was sure that “nothing” would go wrong when i presses the enter button to “reset this PC” that as i pressed it i walked out of the room to get a cuppa Tea.

The horror:
I was away from the PC for a while and thought to myself “sure might as well let it do its thing” and ill watch some TV.

I had expected than when i would return to the PC that Windows 10 would be installed and ready to go.  An hour later i came back to the PC to see that it hadnt booted into any Windows 10/Any kinda interface, nothing.  Black screen and a DOS prompt saying the dreaded message;

“No system drive found”

Windows had mangled or rahter me the menu which Windows used to find the system drive to boot from. After using the BIOS to boot of the correct drive Windows 10 booted.

Not only had the the main Windows drive been wiped but all other internal hard drives were wiped with exception to the External USB 3.0 drive.

External USB Drive to the rescue:
For some reason Windows 10 didnt wipe this drive if it had it would have been an utter fucking nightmare.  I had my programming and college work from over the tears on this drive and somewhere in the “cloud” with Goggle Drive.

Theres hope:
I knew that when you delete a file its not really deleted rather the location where it was is marked as a place for new files to be written.  So i had not make sure that i didnt save or write anything to all the hard drives in question.

Recovery Software:
I had used recovery software before and i knew that

  • it can recovery a lot of files
  • it takes a very long time depeneding on the hard drive in question

So i needed to find the best recovery software available and hope that it would work.

Recommended software:
Figuring out which recovery software was the best was difficult but after a few days of trial and error i found that EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard was the best due to its simeple to use approach via a wizard which walks you through the steps of what drive to recover etc.

It was easy to use and recovery almost everything that was deleted.  Some files cannot be recovered but it managed to recover ALL of my Music collection which was nothing short of a miracle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes:

This is not a  Paid advert but just a personal opinion from a Windows 10 nightmare.

tech

Windows 7 – is it worth it?

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500x_win-7-guide-headLifehacker’s Complete Guide to Windows 7:
This is a dam awesome guide on just about everything you wanted to know about Windows 7 its a must read.

Src: lifehacker.com

windows 7 vs Vista and CP – Gaming Benchmarks:
Heres another article that shows benchmarks between the 2 Windows Os’s and basically says that windows 7 is better than Vista. The benchmarks show a tiny difference but i using Windows 7 myself it sure does seem a little faster;

src: gamespot.com

Windows 7 on multicore: How much faster?
Is Windows 7 better with multicore Processors well not quite but a little seems to be the answer.

src: infoworld.com

tech

Windows Vista & Windows 7 Setup Problems -“unable to create new system partition or locate a existing system partition”

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windows_vista_logo.pngI came home from college yesterday and decided for some reason to install windows 7 64bit that i had downloaded.  Having already tried out the BETA and RC1 (Release Candidate 1) i thought sure i may as well.  Already having Two versions of vista running 64bit and 32bit and well used to dual-booting windows what should have talking 40 mins ended up being a complete disaster and took much of the afternoon.

Having my main Vista installation installed on one of the many partitions on my hard drive, the drive letter being “F:”. I delete the C: drive partition and had planned to install Windows 7 over the C Drive.

For some unknown reason my PC was not letting me install Windows 7 or Vista. So when i rebooted back i got the message;

“BOOTMGR is missing
Press CTRL ALT DELETE to restart”

I kept getting the same setup error during the install process. “unable to create new system partition or locate a exsisting system partition”.

I tried everything to get windows back up and running, i still had a full working Vista isntallation sitting on one of the partition drives but i could not get to it for reasons i cant figure out.  Installation my main OS on a drive letter other than the C Drive was not good idea and this probably caused some of the problems. But the fact that i couldnt get any new Windows OS to install made things very difficult. Ive had this problem before and its got something to with the motherboard i have or the combination of SATA/IDE drives.

After about 6 hours of madness and throwing DVD’s into the PC including;

  • An atempt to recover the c drive with Norton ghost 14
  • Windows vista reinstall
    windows Vista Repair (which was the solution that is for the BOOTMGR is missing problem, which didnt work as Vista could not the see the Vista installtion i had).
  • windows 7 install
  • windows 7 Repair

Nothing worked, Vista Repair let me down big time and even my norton ghost which is usually very good at restoring backups wouldnt work.

So i picked up the motherboard manual and looked at the back of it to see if i had written down anything t hat might help and of course i did. “Disable the IDE Drives”. I did this and i got things working again.

There is something wrong with either the motherboard (The motherboard i have is a Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H), BIOS (latest version) or combination of SATA drives and IDE drives i have. I dont know what that problem is but im guessing its got something to with some settings in the BIOS. Im running my SATA Drives in IDE Native mode rather than i expect the better “AHCI Mode”.

tech, Vista

“svchost.exe” Process takes up too much CPU time?

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I recently installed the new Realtek audio Drivers for my Vista 64 installation only to notice that while i played Youtube videos there was a bit of slowdown during the videos.

Anyway to cut a long story short by downloading a tool called “procexp64.exe” (Process Explorer) i was able to find out that the problem came from the process “svchost.exe”. it was using up to 30-50% of the CPU time. Meaning that things were running way slower than normal.

It took quite a few hours to figure out the problem and them i found it, by disabling the ATI HDMI outout in the “DEvice Manager” of the Control panel and restarting did the problem go away. Im Posting this this for future reference by anyone who finds this page. I was using ATi Catalyist 8.12 Drivers at the time with Vista 64 and a Ati Radeon 4870 512mb graphics card.