You know that OMG, WTF happened, feeling!

Innocently turned on the power socket which supplies the X275 & N2620 yesterday, and then decided to change the HDMI cable on the latter for a shorter one - Nothing untoward in that although I should have made the change before I switched the power on.

However, UNFORTUNATELY the desk area is very small and I must have jogged "something" on the X275 (still don't know what, except that it might have been one of the video cables to the monitors) - and then that m/c crashed big time and nothing I could do could make it boot in other than Safe mode. Nett result, am now spending hours reinstalling W7 Pro (luckily I have disks, unluckily they are not SP1, and many things won't install/update without that) and Office H&B (also have disks) and then all the other stuff what WAS working on that m/c:mad:

Ouch, that's time consuming!

Have you been able to fix it?

WSUS Offline (a God-send!) has been running for about 3-4 hrs now, and is progressively updating W7 & Office as I run the update generator and update installer time after time - every "loop" finds something new!

And when the above are all finished then there are lots of other stuff to re-install & update as well.

Thank goodness also for fast cable broadband or this would be an even bigger nightmare.

Not lucky enough for decent bb it says it's 16mg throughput, but in reality it varies so much.

And plusnet slow up windows updates, unless I pay an extra £5 a month for pro-internet (qos)

Hopefully you haven't actually lost any stuff?

Got it backed up?

Nothing critical stored on that machine, Thank Goodness, but quite a lot of resetting-up required.

WSUS is still finding updates - I really must get the hang, and the habit, of creating & updating disk images so that I don't have to go through this thing again

jeallen01 said:

WSUS is still finding updates - I really must get the hang, and the habit, of creating & updating disk images so that I don't have to go through this thing again

Click to expand...

I'll drink to that! My media centre PC has been in use for about 4 years but it was switched off all day while decorating. It wouldn't switch on again so eventually sourced replacement MB and proc. Course, the old CD drive is IDE, which new MB doesn't have and one less PCI slot. Etc, etc

jeallen01 said:

WSUS is still finding updates - I really must get the hang, and the habit, of creating & updating disk images so that I don't have to go through this thing again

Click to expand...

Personally I prefer to have 2 hard drives of the same size ..and a clone/docking station
and periodically clone the drive when in a stable state.
Takes about 1 hour per TB
So a 500gb drive for example would take about 30 mins.
and there are no hassles ..just a straight drive swap when problems occurr..
just a thought.

jeallen01 said:

WSUS is still finding updates - I really must get the hang, and the habit, of creating & updating disk images so that I don't have to go through this thing again

Click to expand...

Then, this morning, I ran Windows Update - and that found and installed another 100 or so!

Vipersan said:

Personally I prefer to have 2 hard drives of the same size ..and a clone/docking station
and periodically clone the drive when in a stable state.
Takes about 1 hour per TB
So a 500gb drive for example would take about 30 mins.
and there are no hassles ..just a straight drive swap when problems occurr..
just a thought.

Click to expand...

V/S
That would work for the X275 because it looks like the hard drive is easy to remove/refit, and so I could do that quite easily. However the drives in the 4x laptops and the ACER N2620G nettop are buried inside the cases, and removal would involve considerable dismantling/reassembly work, and so cloning would have to be by USB3.0 (2x of the laptops & the N2620G have that) or over the network for at least 1 laptop (the fourth is not very important anyway).

Will think about how best to do all that.

Cheers

John

jeallen01 said:

V/S
That would work for the X275 because it looks like the hard drive is easy to remove/refit, and so I could do that quite easily. However the drives in the 4x laptops and the ACER N2620G nettop are buried inside the cases, and removal would involve considerable dismantling/reassembly work, and so cloning would have to be by USB3.0 (2x of the laptops & the N2620G have that) or over the network for at least 1 laptop (the fourth is not very important anyway).

Will think about how best to do all that.

Cheers

John

Click to expand...

Hadn't thought of that ..but then..
I never bought a laptop that didn't have removeable drives with a couple of screws..
..buried inside..??
Damned stoopid design methinks..

Just took a looksee ...and it appears the same disassembly needed just to add or change memory..
I guess they dont want joe-schmo ..getting in it .