Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m continuing my work on the failed computer system from last week. Let’s get started.
Lesson #1 for me today: SAVE YOUR WORK WHEN YOU STAND UP! I had a 3/4 finished post waiting to be finished. I must have gotten up for something, and I later had to reboot for something covered later on. WordPress does not auto save. With that out of the way, I’ll try to recreate something resembling my lost post.
So, last week, I covered how I used Linux Mint to do a memory dump of a failing HDD (Hard Disk Drive). This week, I plugged it into my tower and checked it for errors. My copy of Windows gave it a clean bill of health. “Only 4KB of data in bad sectors,” was the worst report I got from it. 4KB is tiny, but if it includes the boot sector, I’m out of luck when trying to boot to it. My PEBKaC (just look it up, it’s funny) moment happened as I went to shut down and boot into the suspected drive.
At this point, I went into various fuzzily related details to create suspense, such as how I couldn’t find my other SATA cable or how I didn’t have the correct mounting for my case for this HDD. I yanked the unformatted SSD and connected the HDD and let it rest just outside the case. (The picture is from just now, not then.) Anyway, at one point, the drive was putting its weight on the power cable, so I started turning it over. My father cringed as I slowly rotated the box to avoid too strong of a gyroscopic effect on the spinning disks. He told me that Hard drives used to be sensitive to the orientation they were in when they were first formatted: they must not have had as good motor control for the read heads. While this is an aging HDD, it isn’t 90’s technology, the latest example cited as not being up to being turned on end.
Also of note, I stuck Ubuntu MATE on another USB thumb drive. I actually had emptied a few others as well, but I only went through with the one.
At this point, I rebooted and lost my earlier post. Now for the results.
I first tried to get into the boot order to adjust it. That didn’t help too much, but I did find the boot menu. I selected the 2TB drive available and “Windows is getting used to its new hardware,” or something to that effect. It took a while. I ended up not being there when it rebooted itself, and I had to get back into the BIOS and back and forth… I eventually pulled my main hard drive, the green one in the picture, and let the HDD at it. With nothing else in the way, it booted. To black. It’s like the login screen was stuck loading after giving me the mouse pointer. Startup repair didn’t do much for me.
At present, (the time a depicted by the picture) I have three hard drives connected to my computer. I managed to find the lost SATA cable in a drawer I’d forgotten it was stashed. The configuration of the power cables is maxed out. Sure, I might be able to use a little trickery and rerouting to fit a few more things, but the geometric shape and lack of cable elasticity is making things difficult.
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P.S. Edit: Guess what I found after writing the final two paragraphs. Yes, the lost post in question. I need to pick a single browser for composing my posts. The only reason I even recognized it as the lost post was because it lacked the picture. I like this a little better, so I’m still using it instead of going back. At the same this post missed some stuff. Instead of merging them though, I’m just going to post it as a page and link it HERE.
P.P.S. It was a page all along.
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The final results are in: the little Chkdsk stunt with repair stunt worked. I was able to boot the drive successfully two consecutive times. I won’t vouch for its speed or the fact that that copy of Windows somehow missed my bigger monitor, and had the audacity to call it older than the one it actually found. Jokes aside, it did say some older monitors might not automatically connect. Detect monitors didn’t find it either. I don’t really care. The problem I set out to solve is fixed, and the drive is now pulled from my system.
Final Question: I know I said I would like to do a monthly video, but at this time, I don’t know if I can keep up on the ideas. Until I get a bigger project, I will probably just make a video when I am doing something new and hardware related. What would would you like to see in such a video?