Tripredacus

Just a fun topic, if anyone wants to see what kind of life their old hard disks have. After my recent panic of experiencing a disk failure that contained critical data at the office, I had realised that I had never had done a backup at home. So I had gone out and bought an external hard disk with some backup software. Before doing so, I decided to check out the Power On Hours of three of the four HDDs in the system, to see how long I had really gone dodging a data loss bullet. These disks are all in my "daily driver" Windows 7 32bit PC which I had posted about in the Windows 7 Uptime thread. First up is a SATA disk Western Digital 80 GB WD800AAJS-00B4A0 with Power On Hours of 90701 (3779 days, 10.3 years) But then there is this IDE data drive, Maxtor 80 GB 6L080L4 with Power On Hours of 139645 (5818 days, 15.9 years) And this other IDE HDD, Maxtor 20 GB 6L020J1 with Power On Hours of 139783 (5824 days, 15.9 years) The two IDE HDDs were from my Windows XP computer. I even remember buying that 20 GB disk at CompUSA for $100.

I will try it tomorrow hopefully.

You mean using a calc.exe from another OS?

Swapping the eprom from the failed drive, to the PCB of the good drive, and using that.... has brought the disk back to life. No clicking, detected in BIOS, detected in Windows. Now copying the data off of the once failed disk.

Not in LTSC myself, rather older version LTSB. I only have use for it for compatibility reasons. I'm not looking to be runnings "apps" rather "programs" and outside of using something like Server 2019, an LTSB/C edition of Windows 10 does just nicely.

A point of reference for myself: https://www.hddzone.com/wd-2060701335005-pcb-p-84.html The other disk has the same PCB version to the rev. I could image that disk to something else, to make it "available" to be the donor. I may even have some others at home... I already checked an there is someone in-house that can do the chip swap. Let's hope that the (correctly performed) PCB swap makes the data available. If I really think, there is only certain data that is worth saving... however having such and old disk I can easily fall into not knowing what I am missing until I need it. Otherwise, I may have the option of sending the disk to data recovery, presuming the company would pay for it.

Situation being, main dev workstation suffered a hard drive failure two days ago. Initially it went unnoticed but became evident when a save failed... because the drive letter wasn't showing up anymore. It is a Western Digital WD1600JS SATA 160 GB. The drive's PCB is fried. I have an "identical" disk that was also in the system, but was not used in RAID. Trying the disk on another computer revealed that it was not spinning up. After doing a pcb swap with the other disk, it was able to spin up, but it clicks and doesn't get detected in Windows. The data backup from this drive wasn't as up-to-date as I would have liked, so I am interested in what data recovery options there are before sending it someplace and paying for it.

I have Windows Updates disabled on both computers. On the 32bit it is green and updates the definitions on its own. On the 64bit it is yellow and it is because it doesn't update the definitions. I have them both configured the same, but whatever.

Thin products are a good idea for corporate types. The downside is that instead of designing things to be the same but lighter, they have designed things to be cheaper. Lower quality plastics has lead to tons of people having broken computers. Power adapter doesn't fit right, broken hinges but monitor still works, etc. You get what you pay for. I typically would prefer to stick to the high end business notebooks, which still come with optical drives. I recently turned down the purchase of a $1200 HP notebook for $150 simply because it didn't have an optical drive. 15 inch displays are good enough for travel, 17 inch is nice to look at, but they won't fit in my notebook bag. Companies always tend to screw up good ideas. On the other end, Intel tried to make that "Ultrabook" thing work, but made the requirements so complicated that it wasn't really worth buying them... or worse... making them. Personally, I wouldn't use any portable computer that wouldn't have a chance to survive being dropped.

I don't get any nags. On one computer the icon is always green and on the other the icon is always yellow. That's the extent of it. Honestly I forget they are even installed.

What is the monitor you have? I always keep an eye out for 12" monitor (dream perhaps the IBM PS/2 model) since those monitors give Windows 95 and DOS the look I seem to remember. 15" is the average to see, and 17" monitors and up are just way too big.

Welcome to the MSFN! Make sure to read the site rules, especially the first bit. We operate a bit differently than mdl.

The blue countertop makes me think it is a Napa.

As time went on, especially with the advent of Web 2.0 (although the roots go back into the late 90s) things became "cookie cutter" in terms of design. Especially with the web, where webmasters no longer will host large portions of functionality on their own servers, and will thus rely on the speeds of other websites to load the scripts needed to show theirs. This was never recommended but you'd be hard pressed to find a website that doesn't do this. And then websites will use pre-made packages for things, which contain way more bloat than needed. I have javascript disabled by default on most of my browsers for general web use... do you know that there are websites that will not show any text or pictures if javascript is disabled? The pre-made packages is also a problem with web development. As pointed out in the article, a simple program may also include a driver for an Xbox 360 controller. A developer may find one thing and just stick it into their program, even if they only need 1% of the entire package. It wouldn't be an issue if this bloat was not being noticed. It is noticed because programs are behaving badly. And the general run-of-the-mill machine has not maintained the rapid climb of memory and cpu speeds. The low-end devices make up the majority of any given retail market, yet the programs are made to run best on high-end systems. Manufacturers are also making mistakes. Notebooks shipping with 5400RPM HDDs... and I can tell you that standards of BIOS/UEFI are not being followed by the companies responsible for that. Its all bad and has been an issue for quite a while now, and often it seems like I am just old man yells at cloud.

Welcome to the MSFN!

Will powershell do? https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Open-Internet-Explorer-in-d91674ca

Internet Explorer will pass anything into it as an option without the use of a switch. So in the Run box you can test to see if it works: iexplore "D:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Spades\default.html"

So far there has been no reply from C. C. Anderson to the email that I had sent.

Some leads on drivers... Software: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tape/ Possible softpaq ID: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp23501-24000/sp23518.txt move up on dir on that to get the exe.

I can think of a variety of reasons... Ebay and Paypal fee structure situations. There were back and forth with penalising (or not incentivising) regular sellers and Ebay Store owners. Shipping prices. US v Canada being a big one. Another is Ebay not having any unified help list (a lot of websites have this problem) where you have to figure out everything by yourself. Learn as you go, you can't ship to x country because of import restrictions (Looking at Brazil here lol) or there is an import duty. Shipping times. Despite sellers in SEA having clear information regarding shipping... MANY people would buy from SEA and and opt for the cheapest shipping method. That being by boat, which can take up to two months from some countries. People would leave negative feedback on purchases from these sellers because the item did not arrive, at least by when they would expect. What then happens is that many sellers in Japan or Hong Kong (or other places) which tried to operate on Ebay proper could not maintain any benefits because their negative and neutral feedback ratings would be "low"... it was not uncommon (even today) to see high volume sellers from Asia with bad feedback percentage. So over the years, those high volume sellers have left ebay. Economy reasons. There was a slight boom after the 2008 recession in the US, but overall volume went down when economies came back. Their website is terrible and slow. I also wonder what percentage of high volume sellers were in their 50s when Ebay really started to get going, and ended up retiring. I know a few like this.

Legacy hardware prices are a bit weird. Especially when looking at solds on Ebay. The reason being is that Ebay usage is way down and cannot actually be used as a pricing tool for most things anymore.

Let us understand this computer. Is it just the OS+data on a 2 disk mirror and no other disks in the system? The mirror is broken, meaning one disk is ok and the other is bad? A backup exists but you can't find drivers for the tape controller? First thing is to make a disk image of the working disk. Usually in a mirror, you don't need to fiddle with the bad disk. You replace it and rebuild the array. If there is some other type of setup you should post those details. Also put what tape drive it is you can't find drivers for.

The DISM commands to check/restore health are to be run in the OS, not from the recovery command prompt. Those things that are renamed in the instructions on that site are not directories, they are registry hives. Ref: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2823223/unable-to-refresh-or-reset-pc-after-automatic-repair-fails-in-windows Media creator may or may not work for you. It depends on what OS is actually installed. Media Creator will work for a retail OS, and some licenses do cross to the retail SKU. If this tablet has some other type of OS, like the tablet version or other SFF version, the media creator may not work. BUT it doesn't cost anything so you can still try it if you want. The log files in Windows 10 are such a pain, mostly because so many different ones are created. It is possible you have found the wrong one. Ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/windows-setup-log-files-and-event-logs

I remember the Windows 2000 launch day, everyone was so hyped. They installed it onto a computer in a presentation and it just BSOD constantly. I think that we didn't have a working Windows 2000 computer for about a week.