Solutions to problems with hard disk drives, SSD and CD/DVD drives
Hard-disk-drive problem: chkdsk runs repeatedly My desktop PC runs Windows XP SP3 [the last Service Pack for Windows XP, but the problem could apply to Windows Vista/ 7/8.1/10 using the NTFS file system] and it is giving me loads of disk error messages. As it starts up, the Windows XP logo with its animated…
Backups fail after Windows 7/8.1/10 changes drive letters for USB flash drives Often backups fail if Windows changes the drive letter of a USB flash drive that was used to create the backup. This makes subsequent backups fail. If you use USB flash drives to store backups, you might have discovered that Windows 7/8.1/10 can…
Hard Disk, SSD and USB flash drive Disk Management in Windows 7/8.1/10 In Windows 7/8.1/10, you can access all of the installed drives – hard disk, SSD, flash drive(s) and CD/DVD drives – via Computer and Disk Management. Both of those areas of Windows provide options that allow you to format (delete all of the…
When creating a system image using Backup and Restore, Windows 7/8.1/10 overwrites the previous system image When you use Windows Backup and Restore to create a system-image backup on an external hard disk drive, it creates a folder on the drive called WindowsImageBackup. However, when you create a new image on the same drive, Windows…
Using diagnostic flowcharts to diagnose and fix hardware problems with PC components As you can see from looking at any of the diagnostic flowcharts made available from the following link, there are no photo-illustrations or explanations of basic computer functions. The intended audience is the hobbyist or technician who already has some experience of repairing…
Solid-state drives (SSDs) are increasingly being used instead of hard disk drives, or in combination with them, on desktop and laptop PCs. Windows is usually installed on the much faster SSD that boots the system extremely quickly and a high-capacity, slower hard disk drive is used for storage. SSDs have no moving parts, making them…
If you have an old PC that still works perfectly well and you have a network, you can put it to good use by turning it into a network attached storage (NAS) device that can serve files to the network – free of charge. FreeNAS from http://www.freenas.org/ is an excellent network storage operating system that…
PROBLEM: I want to install an SSD drive in my desktop PC to improve boot times and performance by transferring Windows 7 from my PC’s existing hard disk drive to it. Can you tell me the best way to do that and are there any serious pitfalls? ANSWER: The best way to do that would…
PROBLEM: My desktop computer with a new 1TB hard disk drive and is running Windows XP Professional, The C: drive containing Windows is 100GB and the rest of the disk is partitioned as drive D: which is used for storage. Both partitions are formatted to use the NTFS file system. The PC was running just…
PROBLEM: The hard disk drive of my HP Pavilion laptop PC seems to have failed irrecoverably. The error message produced says: Operating system not found. I assumed that the Master Boot Record had been corrupted, so I loaded Windows XP’s Recovery Console to rebuild it. I intended to use the fdisk /mbr command, but the…
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