Author Topic: Recovering from a BSOD  (Read 2258 times)

Recovering from a BSOD
« on: 20 January, 2019, 01:56:23 pm »
As I mentioned in another thread we have been experiencing occasional Hard disk failures.  We had a series of micro power cuts yesterday which has now killed the PC.  It is showing a stop code Inaccessible boot device.

I tried various things to no avail but then found a Windows 10 install on a USB stick which I thought could repair the install.  But now we have a fresh install of Windows 10 in a new directory but of course all our programs and docs and personalisation are not there.  It has renamed the old install as Wiindows.old.  Can I move old into new or take what is corrupted from new to repair the old.  In other words how do I get back my old install. Files and docs are not much of an issue but the programs are.

During my attempts to repair it flagged a text file that I can now access "srttrail.txt" which may offer some clues to the original failure.

Thanks for any help.

R

PS, this happened hours after I had placed an order for a SSD to replace the HDD.

Kim

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    • Fediverse
Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #1 on: 20 January, 2019, 02:00:05 pm »
Restore from backup, or take the opportunity to start again without the cruft.  Repairing Windows is a mug's game.

Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #2 on: 20 January, 2019, 02:09:22 pm »
Restore from backup,

How, please?

Kim

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Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #3 on: 20 January, 2019, 02:12:19 pm »
Restore from backup,

How, please?

Depends on how you made the backup.

Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #4 on: 20 January, 2019, 02:19:45 pm »
What back up?   :facepalm:

Gattopardo

  • Lord of the sith
  • Overseaing the building of the death star
Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #5 on: 20 January, 2019, 02:24:19 pm »
Ah, have you bought a new drive?

Kim

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    • Fediverse
Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #6 on: 20 January, 2019, 02:29:56 pm »
What back up?   :facepalm:

Ah, a learning opportunity...

Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #7 on: 20 January, 2019, 03:02:50 pm »
Ah, have you bought a new drive?

Ordered but not yet received.

ian

Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #8 on: 20 January, 2019, 03:53:06 pm »
To be honest, I'd do as Kim says, and start afresh. You can spend many, many, hours trying to restore the old, but I'd be mercenary about what it is you actually need and think about re-sourcing or replacing those programs. And learn the harsh lesson about making and maintaining several backups.

Kim

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Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #9 on: 20 January, 2019, 05:04:16 pm »
It's not a harsh lesson if all you've lost is the evening spent setting your computer back up the way you like it.

Harsh is losing irreplaceable data, or vast amounts of real work.  (DAHIKT)

Gattopardo

  • Lord of the sith
  • Overseaing the building of the death star
Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #10 on: 20 January, 2019, 05:18:18 pm »
Data isn't lost just hiding ;)

Have you got a caddy to install the old drive in?

ian

Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #11 on: 20 January, 2019, 05:25:16 pm »
It's not a harsh lesson if all you've lost is the evening spent setting your computer back up the way you like it.

Harsh is losing irreplaceable data, or vast amounts of real work.  (DAHIKT)

These days it is mostly a harsh lesson – every photo, every contact, etc. etc. lives in the digital domain.

fuaran

  • rothair gasta
Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #12 on: 20 January, 2019, 05:26:53 pm »
For programs, usually best to do the proper install process anyway. If you just copy the files off another drive, it won't work. It probably relies on stuff like registry entries etc, which would be missing.

Kim

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Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #13 on: 20 January, 2019, 05:36:21 pm »
It's not a harsh lesson if all you've lost is the evening spent setting your computer back up the way you like it.

Harsh is losing irreplaceable data, or vast amounts of real work.  (DAHIKT)

These days it is mostly a harsh lesson – every photo, every contact, etc. etc. lives in the digital domain.

That's why it's best to have learned this lesson back in the 1990s, when all you were losing were some lab reports, stuff you had copies of on CD or 35mm film and a pirate copy of Half Life.

On the plus side, backup tools have become much more automatable.  None of that tedious CD mastering, mucking about with tape streamers or giving yourself a bad case of wanker's arm[1] from repeated floppy-swapping.


[1] One of those schoolyard diseases that everyone lived in fear of being diagnosed[2] with.
[2] I may be mis-remembering, but IIRC the diagnostic test for that one involved having sufficient muscle tone in the forearm to be able to resist a chinese burn.


ian

Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #14 on: 20 January, 2019, 05:56:27 pm »
I once interviewed a guy who told me a too-long sob story about losing all his PhD data and thusly leaving university after three years with pretty much just the lousy t-shirt to show for it. I may have been less than charitable, if you've three years of priceless data that your entire qualification depends upon, I'd expect a doctoral candidate to have the nous to back that shit up. (Not discounting the likely fact it was BS to cover that fact he'd failed to obtain his PhD, in which case learn to bullshit better.)

Certainly in the Apple-verse, Time Machine makes back-ups simple. Plug in disk and erm, that's that. Of course, it's sensible to keep important stuff online or at an alternate location too, on account some miscreant runs off with the backup disk or other calamity. Mine goes to the box under the stairs and up to the clouds.

Kim

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Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #15 on: 20 January, 2019, 06:08:53 pm »
Barakta's sister carefully kept her dissertation on a USB flash drive, so she wouldn't lose it.  Predictably, she managed to corrupt it instead.  She learned an important lesson[1] there.

Barakta had several backups of hers, which was handy when the Linux box she was cooking the LaTeX on decided to die of capacitor plague the night before the deadline.

Nothing interesting happened to mine, mostly because it was a pile of shit.


Time Machine is an excellent tool, even if it does do archaic fruity things in order to use a network share as the destination.  I'm also a big fan of borg, which is a cross-platform beard-and-sandals command-line equivalent.  And you can solve a lot of problems with rsync...


[1] Unfortunately it was "don't be homophobic at the person with the filesystem recovery tools" rather than "make backups", but it's a start.

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #16 on: 20 January, 2019, 06:20:37 pm »
Tomorrow I shall be visiting a site to help them setup a new system. The day is 21st January 2019, but the subtitle of the day is "Backup, What Backup?  :-[".

They have recovered the HD from the company that told them it was fried. It will come back here and I'll have a go recovering stuff off it...
It is simpler than it looks.

Gattopardo

  • Lord of the sith
  • Overseaing the building of the death star
Re: Recovering from a BSOD
« Reply #17 on: 21 January, 2019, 03:42:51 pm »
Barakta's sister carefully kept her dissertation on a USB flash drive, so she wouldn't lose it.  Predictably, she managed to corrupt it instead.  She learned an important lesson[1] there.

Barakta had several backups of hers, which was handy when the Linux box she was cooking the LaTeX on decided to die of capacitor plague the night before the deadline.

Nothing interesting happened to mine, mostly because it was a pile of shit.


Time Machine is an excellent tool, even if it does do archaic fruity things in order to use a network share as the destination.  I'm also a big fan of borg, which is a cross-platform beard-and-sandals command-line equivalent.  And you can solve a lot of problems with rsync...


[1] Unfortunately it was "don't be homophobic at the person with the filesystem recovery tools" rather than "make backups", but it's a start.

Don't people have multiple saves, on friends computers?  I did computer studies GCSE.  In 1990.  That is worth a PHD now. ;)

While my PHD thesis was a work of art...or was it science ;) As I mentioned before, it was a poorly paid research continuation of my Dissertation...but meant I was still a student of sorts. Amazing i finished my PHD in record time and exactly when the non funding finished.