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Switch hard drives?
Peen
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I think the hard drive in my desktop is failing. I thought it might be the RAM but I just replaced that and it's still bad*, so now I'm thinking hard drive. I have a spare in an enclosure that I've been using as a backup drive but I don't know the best way to get my copy of windows on the new drive. I can do the hardware move so that isn't an issue. Help?
*Boots super slow, start menu doesn't work, accessing anything not on the desktop is a no go, can't install anything new (not even a flash update). Bad stuff.
*Boots super slow, start menu doesn't work, accessing anything not on the desktop is a no go, can't install anything new (not even a flash update). Bad stuff.
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Use it to make a bootable USB stick for windows installation. Anything that is on the backup drive that you want to keep needs to be backed up somewhere else because that drive will be formatted.
Remove your old drive from your computer, install the new one.
Install windows from scratch using the USB stick. Windows will automatically authenticate when you connect to the internet.
You can then put your old drive into the enclosure and hopefully be able to pull anything off of it that you need.
Sorry for what's probably a dumb question!
It's not a dumb question. It's what this forum is here for.
- About 17 different items were all trying to run at Startup
- There was a HP Printer "Manager" program that was nearly constantly eating up all available RAM (his system at the time only had I think maybe 4GB; it may have even been 2GB), so it would take forever for something as simple as opening a browser window
- He has a preference for Avast as a AV client; and it had some active monitoring that was bogging things down
I helped him clean this up, to the point that things were a bit more usable, but they were never going to get better without some hardware changes.
So, if you get a chance, hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager. Check the Performance tab and see if any programs are eating up CPU or RAM. If they aren't vital, or if they shouldn't be such drains, shut them down or tweak the program settings. Next, check the Startup tab and Disable any programs that you think shouldn't be running when you first boot.
[EDIT: you may need to check the Processes tab instead of Performance]
One other suggestion, since you're still troubleshooting. You can partition the backup drive and install Windows onto the partition without losing the backup data. This would at least give you a clean install to check what's causing your problems without automatically wiping the backup data. That being said, finding another spot to back up the data is never a bad thing.
Just did this yesterday to move my boot drive off of a failing SSD, and it's cake. No lost files, no need to back anything up et cetera.
Related, I know I'm not alone in this but I'd like to pour one out for the simple printer driver. I don't want an ink auto reordering service and I don't want a bad photo editing program and I don't need to make the printer internet enabled or anything else, I just want the computer to talk to the printer and print things, goddammit.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
My Brother does this stupid thing where if it thinks any of the inks are empty it shuts down all functionality until you replace the ink. It's really dumb.