Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

Thought so the way you carry on.

As the saying goes " an empty box rattles loudest"

I know my shit, and get paid very well for it. And don't ASSume...well you know the rest.

So, on Microsoft's website, I read this about Windows 7 and I'm going to assume it might also apply to 8 / 8.1.

Do I need to activate Windows after making a hardware change?

Maybe. When you make a significant hardware change to your computer, such as upgrading the hard disk and memory at the same time, you might be required to activate Windows again. For more information, see Activate Windows 7 on this computer.

The fact that they say at the same time....that makes me think perhaps if I just put the sold state in and use the old RAM, I could successfully activate / upgrade to 10, and then upgrade the RAM. Personally, I trust your professional opinion and you do seem to have a good amount of experience. You seem to realize that no matter how I feel about the situation, sometimes you have to do what you're told to do, not what you want to do.

[kaboom]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

I know my shit, and get paid very well for it.

Those are two different things.

I know some around here that "get paid well" and don't know their shit.

The old "I've been doing this for so many years, therefore it's correct."


Here's another one to consider. I hope you aren't doing installs for doctors over there. After you've sabotaged data integrity consistent with your equivalent of HIPPA, are you going to blindly quip "M$ requires updates," or will you admit it was your configuration that left everything open?

I don't care what M$ says- in the end, you not only left the door open- you ripped it off the hinges! And when questioned, blame someone/something else, namely M$'s "updates are required."

Do you honestly feel the need to come on here and proclaim this? It's not even your own idea, rather one ingrained from a foreign entity (M$).

As far as "making the most noise," we all need to speak up when something's wrong. Smoothing things over and making excuses/rationalizing are things children do. All I hear from you is "box beating." Tell me this- if you knew for certain that an "update" you "suggested" (well not really you, M$ suggested it- you're just their proxy) broke a system and locked customer out of his data, would you fix it for free?

I'll ask you again. If something you did ultimately broke the system (remote delete finally implemented after successive "updates," each containing a part of that code), would you fix it for free?

I would. Would you?

[diif]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

Yes, I was going to suggest trying with the original ram before I got sidetracked.

[fzabkar]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

Running CHKDSK against a drive that has bad sectors was inadvisable. A better approach would have been to clone the whole drive with ddrescue.

There is a new tool (HDDSuperClone) that expands on ddrescue's capabilities:

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsuperclone

If you have a WD drive, then you can significantly improve your chances of a full recovery with HDDSuperTool:

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool

Execute the MOD02 and MOD32 firmware patches to disable background surface scan and error processing:

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool/scripts

You can use HDDSuperTool to change the model number, serial number and firmware version of a WD clone to match the original HDD, if that becomes an issue.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

Although I cannot find the actual points, I believe I found the "weight" of each hardware change. From highest to lowest...

1. Motherboard (and CPU)
2. Hard drive
3. Network interface card (NIC)
4. Graphics card
5. RAM

Some people reported being forced to reactive when they just updated drivers. Some newer drivers made the Windows system think the hardware was changed I guess. I understand why the hardware change tripped the reactivation, but I don't understand why I cannot simply re-activate. I threw the old RAM in and I'm going to try 8.1 again, but with just the SSD. If that passes and it activates, I'll then try the RAM.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

Running CHKDSK against a drive that has bad sectors was inadvisable. A better approach would have been to clone the whole drive with ddrescue.

There is a new tool (HDDSuperClone) that expands on ddrescue's capabilities:

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsuperclone

If you have a WD drive, then you can significantly improve your chances of a full recovery with HDDSuperTool:

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool

Execute the MOD02 and MOD32 firmware patches to disable background surface scan and error processing:

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool/scripts

It's a Seagate. If it was WD, it'd probably still be working! (Just a little humor there, not trying to start a flame war or whatever they're called now-a-days).

And yes, running scandisk was a bad idea. Kind of sad that Microsoft's scandisk / chkdsk / whatever found nothing wrong.

With dd, I successfully copied every partition minus the main one. With ddrescue, I made it a very long way before bad sectors. I'm now at 99.99% rescued. I'm just using:

ddrescue -d /dev/sdc4 sdc4.img harddrive.log

I now have 186 errors, errsize is 96,768b and growing, 17 minutes left.

Since I wrote that, errors are now up to 200 and counting. Errsize is now 103kb.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

Running CHKDSK against a drive that has bad sectors was inadvisable. A better approach would have been to clone the whole drive with ddrescue.

There is a new tool (HDDSuperClone) that expands on ddrescue's capabilities:

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsuperclone

If you have a WD drive, then you can significantly improve your chances of a full recovery with HDDSuperTool:

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool

Execute the MOD02 and MOD32 firmware patches to disable background surface scan and error processing:

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool/scripts

You can use HDDSuperTool to change the model number, serial number and firmware version of a WD clone to match the original HDD, if that becomes an issue.

That tool sounds awesome. From my experience though, with the WD's that do die, usually it's the drive board. I haven't had many die though. We always use the blacks or reds in our systems here though.

What would be the purpose of changing the model number, serial number and firmware version? Just to fool Windows into thinking it's the same hard drive? That's a cool idea. Too bad it wouldn't work on this system. We're going from a Seagate HDD to a Silicon Power solid state.

[fzabkar]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

HDDHackr is another tool that makes a WD drive look like a Fujitsu or some other brand. It is used to circumvent the upgrade annoyances posed by the Xbox 360. With a litlle more hacking, it could also be used to circumvent licencing problems such as yours, and more particularly in those cases where the software manufacturer is defunct.

Certain Seagate drives go offline when they stumble on bad sectors for too long. In such cases you can disable error processing via the drive's serial diagnostic interface. In the old days these sorts of options were available via the IDE interface, at least for some drives. Now the HDD manufactures have hidden all this stuff from the user. The result is that users now have to pay for expensive data recoveries by shops with special commercial tools. Bastards.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

HDDHackr is another tool that makes a WD drive look like a Fujitsu or some other brand. It is used to circumvent the upgrade annoyances posed by the Xbox 360. With a litlle more hacking, it could also be used to circumvent licencing problems such as yours, and more particularly in those cases where the software manufacturer is defunct.

Certain Seagate drives go offline when they stumble on bad sectors for too long. In such cases you can disable error processing via the drive's serial diagnostic interface. In the old days these sorts of options were available via the IDE interface, at least for some drives. Now the HDD manufactures have hidden all this stuff from the user. The result is that users now have to pay for expensive data recoveries by shops with special commercial tools. Bastards.

A few questions. With the PS3s, you can just threw a bigger drive in, format, install the OS and away you go. I figured the same was true for the 360's. Is this not the case? I remember something about passwords for the 360 drives, but I thought that was if you wanted to access the hard drive on a PC or something.

I might have an across the problem you're talking about. DD Rescue had 4 minutes left or so. Now, it's got 5 hours, 8 minutes. It bounces around a bit. Current rate is 0 B/s. It just made a successful read 28 seconds ago. Before that though, last time I checked, it was something like 53 minutes.

I don't know a lot about DD Rescue, do you know if there's away, without exiting the program, just looking at the output, to tell where it is on the drive? Like what sector it's trying to read and how many are left to try? It shows 99.99% recovered. I have two ipos's and one opos.

ipos: 5959 MB, non-trimmed:  8060 kB, current rate: 1769 kB/s
ipos: 6097 MB, non-trimmed:    0 B, current rate:   0 kB/s
ipos: 6097 MB, non-trimmed:  428032 B, average rate: 28562 kB/s

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

So, an update. I put the old RAM in, Windows 10 still showed unactivated. I tried to manually update, same issue, product key wasn't accepted. I reinstalled Windows 8.1 but didn't pick the 10 update this time. I checked activation status, success! It successfully showed that it's activated.

Now, I just replace the RAM and go for 10? Or should I do 10 and then replace the RAM or what? Does it really matter at this point which way I go?

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

install 10, activate 10 first and then swap the ram. saves u the trouble in case it fucks up during the 10 activation of having to swap the ram *again* to reinstall 8.1.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

install 10, activate 10 first and then swap the ram. saves u the trouble in case it fucks up during the 10 activation of having to swap the ram *again* to reinstall 8.1.

Good idea.

I think it's good that we figured this out. Other users could use this information. For anyone who's going to do more than just replace the RAM or replace the hard drive, do them separately if you're running an OEM copy of Windows.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

Chances are good, they were replacing the hard drive

$500 for an HDD? WTF is this? 2011?

(2011 was the year of inflated HDD prices, because of the Thailand flood.....)

[fzabkar]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

The following ddrescue tutorial was written by Scott Dwyer (aka "maximus"):

Ddrescue: Advanced Understanding:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=172&t=1173

Scott is also the author of HDDSuperTool and HDDSuperClone.

It appears that ddrescue is trying to recover the bad sectors that it encountered on earlier passes at the 6GB point.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

The wild wild west of computing is LONG GONE fellas!

The malvertising and trojans are the new computer wild-wild-west!

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

$500 for an HDD? WTF is this? 2011?

(2011 was the year of inflated HDD prices, because of the Thailand flood.....)

I bet they were buying a new hard drive and buying an actual copy of Windows 8.1 or 10, instead of just using the OEM version. It's actually kind of hard to find a copy, unless you buy one. 8 is a lot different than 7, that's for sure. I've seen posts where people were trying to reinstall 8, they needed a disk. They'd call the company who made the laptop and the company would tell them they needed to purchase a retail copy of 8, which is ridiculous.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

The following ddrescue tutorial was written by Scott Dwyer (aka "maximus"):

Ddrescue: Advanced Understanding:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=172&t=1173

Scott is also the author of HDDSuperTool and HDDSuperClone.

It appears that ddrescue is trying to recover the bad sectors that it encountered on earlier passes at the 6GB point.

Thanks fzabkar. Even when I didn't have the -r set? I thought that determined whether it went back to the bad sectors or not.

Anyway, it finally finished, I started again with a -r. I guess there's no since in recovery the partition, now that I got the machine activated. I might still do it just for fun or something. The user was smart and had everything he cared about on external media. I wish more users were like that!

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

$500 for an HDD? WTF is this? 2011?

(2011 was the year of inflated HDD prices, because of the Thailand flood.....)

yea, i really hated that. it was simply a massive profiteering money-milking exercise. a worldwide shortage of hard drives never happened. i read reports on how the hard drive manufacturers made big time profits during the flood. good thing ssds are now mainstream and affordable these days. makes it less likely and makes them think twice about pulling a stunt like that again!

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

yea, i really hated that. it was simply a massive profiteering money-milking exercise. a worldwide shortage of hard drives never happened. i read reports on how the hard drive manufacturers made big time profits during the flood. good thing ssds are now mainstream and affordable these days. makes it less likely and makes them think twice about pulling a stunt like that again!

What exactly happened in 2011? I don't remember really expensive hard drive prices. Well, I think I remember some of the largest hard drives (like when the first 1 terabyte drive came out) being a bit pricey.

This customer's PC isn't the only really expensive fix I've heard of. Around here, the places aren't that bad, but they do charge a lot.

One of the local places charges:

- Memory Modules --------------------------------- $0.00
- PC/Electronic Recycling ------------------------ $0.00
- Diagnostics ------------------------------------ $35.00
- Desktop Blowout (dirt / dust) ------------------ $10.00
- Laptop Blowout (dirt / dust) ------------------- $35.00
- Floppy Drives ---------------------------------- $25.00
- Cooling Fans (Case / Processor) ---------------- $25.00
- Optical Drives --------------------------------- $25.00
- Hard Drives (Installation Only) ---------------- $25.00
- Video Cards ------------------------------------ $25.00
- Processors / CPUs ------------------------------ $35.00
- Modems ---------------------------------------- $25.00
- Sound Cards ------------------------------------ $25.00
- Network Cards ---------------------------------- $25.00
- Power Supply ----------------------------------- $35.00
- Motherboards (Laptop/ Desktop) ----------------- $65.00
- Data Transfers / Data Backup / Drive Cloning --- $65.00
- Drive Formatting with OS Installation ---------- $80.00
- Adware / Spyware / Virus Removal --------------- $80.00
- Insurance Claim Letter ------------------------- $65.00

The prices for stuff like modem, sound card, network card, that's just installation. You still have to pay for the hardware. Generally, the price of the hardware a lot of times has a high market value. From what the Small Business Development center told me, you should have a 10% market up on the hardware, but some places, (especially automotive places) actually charge double!

I've gone into this place and bought a 25-pin parallel cable. The price was something like 25$. I told them normally I just buy them on-line but I couldn't wait. I really needed one. They asked what I was using it for, I told them. They ended up giving it to me for something like 5$. That was really cool. I told them I'd send some business their way if I had too much myself. A lot of times, I can go down there and because they know I fix stuff myself, they'll help me out if I need it. For example, they don't sell used hardware, but they'll sell me used stuff if I need it. I had a customer who didn't have a lot of money and had a very old laptop. They sold me a 5$ used laptop hard drive for her. There's no warranty on the used stuff so there's a bit of a gamble.

For viruses, they'll probably charge 80$ for the "removal" and another 80$ for the OS reinstallation and probably 65$ on top of that for the data transfer.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Useless Microsoft and Windows 8.1 / 10 installation

Windows 10 activation failed. Instead of calling them this time, I decided to try their on-line chat tech support. This time, the guy I talked to, he fully understood the problem. He asked if upgrading the RAM was absolutely necessary. I said because it wasn't my PC and it was a customers and the customer bought the RAM and hard drive himself, I felt it was necessary. He was real cool, said he understood. He said do not use the Upgrade 10 Now inside 8.1 to upgrade to 10. He said use the ISO. He said download a new ISO so it's fully up-to-date. I did that.

I'm fully updating 8.1 first and then I'm going to clone the hard drive, in case it fails again, I can just write the image back. He said once I install off the disc, it should be fully activated. I think he did something on the Windows servers. He said to make sure the new RAM is installed before I do the process.

I hope this works. He claims it will. I'll keep you guys posted.