Wednesday, March 28, 2012

....AND MY MEGA HARD DRIVE GOT FULL!!


I had a 500gb hard drive I never thought would get filled up for at least 4 years. Well Surprise!! It got filled up within 6 months. {Working on a special project}. Two weeks before it got totally full, I noticed my system was unusually slow. A golden rule I have is that if my brain and hands are working faster than my computer, then something is definitely wrong. 


Unable to bear it any longer, I decided to defragment it. It took hours which I was willing to spare since it was for the greater good. Upon completion, I noticed that my brain and fingers were still operating faster than they system. Hmm..What do I do, I called upon our help desk support and they notified me that if the hard drive is getting too full, it acts that way. So I decided to compress it.


Compression Completed!! I rebooted and got an error about “BOOTMGR MISSING”. I raced to our our specialist engineers (Final Help Desk Support), Engr Nicho and Engr Wale.


Usually, this thing should be easy if my DVD drive were working but unfortunately it isn’t. Still don’t know why but that’s for another day. He sloted in his USB drive and after some magic, he was able to use a series of commands


  • Bootrec.exe /fixmbr
  • Bootrec.exe /FixBoot
  • Bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd
IT WORKED!!!


I was able to work although frustratingly for about 12 hours before I did something again and the laptop packed up again. It was Saturday morning and I decided to use the time to spend with my kids.


On Monday, I rushed to the office seeking the help of my computer specialists. The battle then began. They tried everything they could all to no avail. Two issues were that I didn’t partition my hard drive to separate the OS from Data. They could have easily formatted the OS partition and I would be fine. Since data could absolutely not be tampered with, and My DVD drive wasn’t working. It was literally hell.


{Meanwhile I was going out my mind!! No work to do.}


Solution:

Since I needed more space anyway. I decided to upgrade my laptop hard drive by 100%. We all sighed a breath of relief expecting to just format the new hard drive and later copy all my files.

My laptop rejected the hard drive. Why? Don’t know.

Ok since it is a SATA hard drive and experience has shown an OS could be loaded from a different system and then hooked to another system. We tried that option…Failure.

We attempted to load the OS from a USB drive …Failure

Eventually, we borrowed an external DVD drive and was finally able to format and install the OS. ---Success.


It took 19 hours to copy my files from the old hard drive to the new one.


After reinstalling all the softwares, all my old preferences on all the softwares were gone. Didn’t lament much because I just went to my old hard drive which is now connected via USB cable to my laptop and took the following steps.


1.   Open the directory

2.   Click on the USERS directory

3.   Select my old profile name

4.   Append \Appdata\Roaming to address bar

5.   Copied all the files and data there 

6.   Pasted in my C:\USERS\PROFILE NAME\AppData\Roaming

I was back and running again.


Contact us at TECHNICAL@ETNCONNECT.COM or 08037217281 if you have really serious computer issues.