Now what? (Computer department)

[Hawkmoon]

Problem solved -- it's dead.

Came home from work to find it endlessly cycling between a blue screen of death and a black screen of death. I suspect the Western Digital Green SSD drive has bought the farm. The original hard drive is still in the box and has an earlier version of Windows 10 on it, so the plan now is to re-connect the old hard drive, clone it to a new SSD drive (either a W-D Blue, or a Samsung 870 EVO), fire it up on the new SSD drive, and do a hard update using a newly created 21H2 ISO that I conveniently made last night.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a backup computer.

Update -- and a slight miscalculation:

I pulled the W-D SSD drive and re-connected the old, physical hard disk drive. Everything fires right up, and I'm on it right now. However ... it seems I mis-remembered my sequence of updates and upgrades. The old drive does not have Windows 10 on it, it has Windows 7.

So my dilemma now is whether to clone the old drive to a new SSD, install that, and then update to Windows 10, OR

Update the old drive to Windows 10 first, then clone it to the new SSD drive.


I'm leaning in favor of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The old drive works, and I know the Win 10 update worked once on an SSD so I'm incliined to clone the old drive as it sits, install it, and then use the .ISO of Win 10 release 21H2 I made two nights ago to upgrade the SSD drive from Win 7 to Win 10. Does that sound like a plan?

[RocketMan]

It does sound like a plan.  Less chance of borking things on the old drive if it's left with Windows 7.  The spinning Windows 7 drive also remains as a backup in case you encounter problems cloning to the new SSD.  As long as that drive holds up, you can repeat the process as necessary until you get it to work.

[zxcvbob]

If you have no data on the SSD that you care about (and it sounds like that might be the case) I would build a W10 21H2 install USB and do a clean install onto the SSD.  It should activate automatically.

I just did that recently with the church office computer when it started BSOD'ing on startup.  Pastor said there was no data to try to save, and it was faster than trying to reset the old 2004 driver that was on there and then update it to a new version.

[lee n. field]

Update -- and a slight miscalculation:

I pulled the W-D SSD drive and re-connected the old, physical hard disk drive. Everything fires right up, and I'm on it right now. However ... it seems I mis-remembered my sequence of updates and upgrades. The old drive does not have Windows 10 on it, it has Windows 7.

So my dilemma now is whether to clone the old drive to a new SSD, install that, and then update to Windows 10, OR

Update the old drive to Windows 10 first, then clone it to the new SSD drive.


I'm leaning in favor of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The old drive works, and I know the Win 10 update worked once on an SSD so I'm incliined to clone the old drive as it sits, install it, and then use the .ISO of Win 10 release 21H2 I made two nights ago to upgrade the SSD drive from Win 7 to Win 10. Does that sound like a plan?

Lots of ways to get to where you want to be.  The path I would take would depend on how failed the current drive was, how well prepared I was, how much time pressure I was under, and how many changes had happened since I cloned the old drive originally.

[Hawkmoon]

Lots of ways to get to where you want to be.  The path I would take would depend on how failed the current drive was, how well prepared I was, how much time pressure I was under, and how many changes had happened since I cloned the old drive originally.

I have a spare computer up and running, so no real time pressure. And the time since I replaced the hard drive with the SSD was aparently longer than I thought, because the old drive still has Windows 7 on it -- I thought I had upgraded to Windows 10 before installing the SSD drive.

BUT ... one of my hints that things were not right with the SSD drive was that AutoCAD stopped working -- and I wasn't able to get the installation program to run, so I couldn't repair it. The old drive still was a working copy of AutoCAD on it. So that pretty well sets my plan -- clone the old hard disk drive to a new SSD drive, install the new SSD drive, and then do an upgrade to Windows 10 -- probably using the .ISO for 21H2 I just made a couple of days ago.

[lee n. field]

I have a spare computer up and running, so no real time pressure. And the time since I replaced the hard drive with the SSD was aparently longer than I thought, because the old drive still has Windows 7 on it -- I thought I had upgraded to Windows 10 before installing the SSD drive.

BUT ... one of my hints that things were not right with the SSD drive was that AutoCAD stopped working -- and I wasn't able to get the installation program to run, so I couldn't repair it. The old drive still was a working copy of AutoCAD on it. So that pretty well sets my plan -- clone the old hard disk drive to a new SSD drive, install the new SSD drive, and then do an upgrade to Windows 10 -- probably using the .ISO for 21H2 I just made a couple of days ago.

Re SSD failure, I posted this a couple days ago on my Book of Faces, referencing a "FB memory" about the first SSD failure I'd seen, from 2017:

-----from the BookFace-------

"And by now we've seen a bunch more. 

"They tend to fail in much the same way as standard hard disks do.  Some go "poof" and instantly fail.  Most that fail fail more slowly, with accumulating bad sectors*, or performance problems**.

"So, if in doubt, run the manufacturer's diagnostic.  Short test, >>and<< long test.  And if that says there's a problem, believe it.  And keep your data backed up.

"-------------------------------------------

"'*Bad sectors' -- obviously there's something else going under the hood, memory cells failing or whatnot, that's being presented to us in metaphor of a traditional hard disk.

"** I had one a few weeks ago.  I'd installed it at the beginning of the year.  In Nov. it starts taking a long, long time to boot.  Put the drive on my shop pc.  Linux smartctl diag said there was some unspecified error with the drive.  File system was still accessible, so I used ddrescue to clone to an image.  That clone, for a 240GB disk, took >>3 days<< to complete.  (It should take an hour or two at most.) But, all data was recovered.  Ddrescue reported a small number of unreadable spots."

[Hawkmoon]

Aren't SSD drives supposed to have on-board software that automatically maps bad "sectors" (or whatever SSD drives have)? Of course, that doesn't help if an area that already has data on it goes bad after the data was written.

I ran a couple of diagnostics on the questionable drive with it hooked up as an extrnal using a USB umbilical cord, and they all reported it to be ok (WCIIM, CHKDSK, and Crystal Disk. When I looked it it with File Explorer after running the diagnostics, though, I found a string of files with just numbers -- which, IIRC, indicate file fragments that were recovered by CHKDSK. So something was bad, but I don't know what.

[zxcvbob]

What are good brands of SSD, besides Intel and Samsung which are freakin' expensive?  Then the cheaper brands almost look too cheap.  Nothing seems to be in between.  (I've not looked all that hard; I thought the church computer HDD needed replacing so I started looking, but it just needed a reinstall.)  Are Kingston and PNY okay?

[Ben]

What are good brands of SSD, besides Intel and Samsung which are freakin' expensive?  Then the cheaper brands almost look too cheap.  Nothing seems to be in between.  (I've not looked all that hard; I thought the church computer HDD needed replacing so I started looking, but it just needed a reinstall.)  Are Kingston and PNY okay?

What are you considering inexpensive? I find the Samsungs to be very reasonably priced for the quality. Their hotrod versions aside, $100 for 1TB seems pretty reasonable.

[zxcvbob]

What are you considering inexpensive? I find the Samsungs to be very reasonably priced for the quality. Their hotrod versions aside, $100 for 1TB seems pretty reasonable.

I guess I was looking at the "Pro" line.  $200+ for anything from 240GB to 500GB.  I don't need that, but it makes me question the $20 drives.   

I put a refurbished Intel 180GB (don't remember what it cost but less than $50) and a new 2TB HDD in my desktop a few years ago and they get along great together.  The SSD does most of the work.

[lee n. field]

What are good brands of SSD, besides Intel and Samsung which are freakin' expensive?  Then the cheaper brands almost look too cheap.  Nothing seems to be in between.  (I've not looked all that hard; I thought the church computer HDD needed replacing so I started looking, but it just needed a reinstall.)  Are Kingston and PNY okay?

What we use at work are Sandisks.  Now part of Western Digital.  We've seen a few fail, but we sell a lot of them.  (Cloning to SSD for a performance improvement is a cash cow.)

Kingston and PNY.  Small sample size.  The first one I bought myself. years back, is a Kingston.  Still going.  Not sure what machine it's in.  PNY in the machine in front of me, no problems.

Both HP branded drives I bought failed prematurely.  Poof, gone.  I was able to reset one, but I'm not going to trust it.

The ones we see that seem iffy are the off brand "Chinatronic" drives that I see installed in secondary market refurb pcs.

[WLJ]

4 Kingstons - Zero problems
1 Crucial - Zero problems
1 Samsung - Zero problem

[cordex]

I’ve had a few Crucial failures in under a year (in arrays, so no data loss) which lead to me using Samsung everywhere else. No issues yet with Samsung but I’m sure we will have them eventually.