Yes, Again
This is the latest in my occasional series of public service announcements to clone your hard drive. Consider yesterday, for example.
The symptoms: A few days ago, a program I had open on my Windows 10 desktop stopped responding and refused to let me close it. More weirdly, the Windows task manager refused to open. Then one by one, other programs started to freeze. And Windows refused to shut down. I had to cut power and reboot. I ran Microsoft's scannow and dism tools, which reported no problems, so I decided to ignore it.
Yesterday the same thing happened. This was not okay. I did a system restore, allegedly bringing my system back to exactly the same state it was in a few weeks ago. Now I had a new symptom: Half the programs I tried to open (programs I use every day) returned the message: "This program cannot run under Windows. Contact the manufacturer to see if there is a Windows-compatible version." (I am paraphrasing; I did not record the exact wording.)
The cure: I keep multiple clones of my hard drive, of which the most recent were dated September 27 and October 15. (Yesterday was October 30.) I had a vague recollection that I might have seen some early signs of trouble prior to the 15th, so:
1) I opened my laptop, pulled out the hard drive and popped in the September 27 clone.
2) I booted up. All was normal.
3) I took the drive I had just pulled out, plugged it into a USB port, and used robocopy to copy all non-system files with dates of September 27 or later onto my new internal drive.
Total time (once I made the decision to do this): Maybe 15 minutes or so. Everything is back to normal.
If I had had to reinstall Windows and restore from backups, I wouldn't yet be back on line.
Clone your hard drive. This entry was originally posted at https://wotw.dreamwidth.org/142520.html. Please comment there using OpenID. I'll read comments here too, but if you have a choice, I prefer them there.
The symptoms: A few days ago, a program I had open on my Windows 10 desktop stopped responding and refused to let me close it. More weirdly, the Windows task manager refused to open. Then one by one, other programs started to freeze. And Windows refused to shut down. I had to cut power and reboot. I ran Microsoft's scannow and dism tools, which reported no problems, so I decided to ignore it.
Yesterday the same thing happened. This was not okay. I did a system restore, allegedly bringing my system back to exactly the same state it was in a few weeks ago. Now I had a new symptom: Half the programs I tried to open (programs I use every day) returned the message: "This program cannot run under Windows. Contact the manufacturer to see if there is a Windows-compatible version." (I am paraphrasing; I did not record the exact wording.)
The cure: I keep multiple clones of my hard drive, of which the most recent were dated September 27 and October 15. (Yesterday was October 30.) I had a vague recollection that I might have seen some early signs of trouble prior to the 15th, so:
1) I opened my laptop, pulled out the hard drive and popped in the September 27 clone.
2) I booted up. All was normal.
3) I took the drive I had just pulled out, plugged it into a USB port, and used robocopy to copy all non-system files with dates of September 27 or later onto my new internal drive.
Total time (once I made the decision to do this): Maybe 15 minutes or so. Everything is back to normal.
If I had had to reinstall Windows and restore from backups, I wouldn't yet be back on line.
Clone your hard drive. This entry was originally posted at https://wotw.dreamwidth.org/142520.html. Please comment there using OpenID. I'll read comments here too, but if you have a choice, I prefer them there.