It's alive!
Mar. 22nd, 2018 04:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrLast Friday I got the parts to fix the Win 7 box. Turns out I could have used a few other things, but I managed.
The new-to-me hard drive went in ok. and cloning the failing drive onto it went ok. After that I ran into a few problems.
The motherboard has 4 SATA ports and one PATA (IDE) port.
The SATA ports are arranged oddly and you can't really read the (poor) labeling on the motherboard. Since various things kept showing up wrong when I went into Windows (like trying to boot off of the D drive), I finally had to sit down and disconnect all but one drive, and boot with it attached to each of the ports in turn. That got me the port IDs.
[SATA 0]
[SATA 4] [SATA 1]
[SATA 5]
(SATA 2 & 3 are assigned to the IDE port)
There was a fair bit of futzing around after I got the drives hooked up the way I wanted. I hooked the Bluray drive to the SATA card I'd added. This later proved to be problematic.
Anyway, I had the drives hooked up like this:
SATA 0 300 gig boot drive
SATA 1 300 gig backup drive
SATA 4 2 tb drive that had been in an external case
SATA 5 (reserved for added another driove)
I'd have added that 4th HD except I discovered I was out of SATA cables. Turned out for the best though.
So I tried to set things up to restore from the backups I'd done when I realized the drive was failing.
First problem. The SATA card was *old* and instead of an eSATA connector on the card back (for an external drive) it had a normal SATA connector (they aren't interchangeable).
So I had to swap it for one of the other SATA cards I'd bough from Doug.
Next problem. Windows didn't see the drives attached to the card (needed a driver loaded, but couldn't do that until the restore was done.
By then I'd been at this for hours and decided it could wait for another day. Since Saturday was TV night with Fay, I didn't get back to it until. Sunday. I attached the external drive to the remaining SATA connector on the motherboard.
Only to find out that the image backup from Windows was bad. Arrgh.
But after telling Windows to give up on the restores, the system *would* boot into Windows. Just had a lot of icons missing from the desktop as well as things not accessible from the control panel.
I got lucky, due to the way Second Copy works, it'd backed up the ProgramData folder in *two* places (because it's also aliases to an "All USERS" folder). That second copy was mostly good, and I was able to restore various "missing" items from it.
Still a few things that need adjusting, but nothing important.
I'd also run into a problem with the 64 gig microSD card I'd bough to upgrade my Kindle Fire 7". Windows didn't recognize the format, but it did recognize the format of the 32 gig card I had in it.
I reformatted the 64 gig card, copied the 32 gig card to it and the Kindle proceeded to tell my it didn't recognize the format. Oy.
So I let the kindle format the card (back to the way it had been, apparently) then swapped it for the 32gig card.
Had to copy that to the HD on the win7 box using the USB cable for the kindle. Then I got to swap cards again and copy everything from the Hd to the 64 gig card (again, over the cable)
It takes *way* longer to copy *to* the kindle than it does to opy from it. :-(
But, it worked. And the new card is *much* faster.
The new-to-me hard drive went in ok. and cloning the failing drive onto it went ok. After that I ran into a few problems.
The motherboard has 4 SATA ports and one PATA (IDE) port.
The SATA ports are arranged oddly and you can't really read the (poor) labeling on the motherboard. Since various things kept showing up wrong when I went into Windows (like trying to boot off of the D drive), I finally had to sit down and disconnect all but one drive, and boot with it attached to each of the ports in turn. That got me the port IDs.
[SATA 0]
[SATA 4] [SATA 1]
[SATA 5]
(SATA 2 & 3 are assigned to the IDE port)
There was a fair bit of futzing around after I got the drives hooked up the way I wanted. I hooked the Bluray drive to the SATA card I'd added. This later proved to be problematic.
Anyway, I had the drives hooked up like this:
SATA 0 300 gig boot drive
SATA 1 300 gig backup drive
SATA 4 2 tb drive that had been in an external case
SATA 5 (reserved for added another driove)
I'd have added that 4th HD except I discovered I was out of SATA cables. Turned out for the best though.
So I tried to set things up to restore from the backups I'd done when I realized the drive was failing.
First problem. The SATA card was *old* and instead of an eSATA connector on the card back (for an external drive) it had a normal SATA connector (they aren't interchangeable).
So I had to swap it for one of the other SATA cards I'd bough from Doug.
Next problem. Windows didn't see the drives attached to the card (needed a driver loaded, but couldn't do that until the restore was done.
By then I'd been at this for hours and decided it could wait for another day. Since Saturday was TV night with Fay, I didn't get back to it until. Sunday. I attached the external drive to the remaining SATA connector on the motherboard.
Only to find out that the image backup from Windows was bad. Arrgh.
But after telling Windows to give up on the restores, the system *would* boot into Windows. Just had a lot of icons missing from the desktop as well as things not accessible from the control panel.
I got lucky, due to the way Second Copy works, it'd backed up the ProgramData folder in *two* places (because it's also aliases to an "All USERS" folder). That second copy was mostly good, and I was able to restore various "missing" items from it.
Still a few things that need adjusting, but nothing important.
I'd also run into a problem with the 64 gig microSD card I'd bough to upgrade my Kindle Fire 7". Windows didn't recognize the format, but it did recognize the format of the 32 gig card I had in it.
I reformatted the 64 gig card, copied the 32 gig card to it and the Kindle proceeded to tell my it didn't recognize the format. Oy.
So I let the kindle format the card (back to the way it had been, apparently) then swapped it for the 32gig card.
Had to copy that to the HD on the win7 box using the USB cable for the kindle. Then I got to swap cards again and copy everything from the Hd to the 64 gig card (again, over the cable)
It takes *way* longer to copy *to* the kindle than it does to opy from it. :-(
But, it worked. And the new card is *much* faster.
