Tag: Hard drive

March 28, 2024 – No Wonder People Hate Technology

March 28, 2024 /

I am a programmer for goodness sake, why is so much information bad? A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the hard drive on my primary desktop was almost filled. It wasn’t that long ago that I went on a cutting spree trying to free up space on that hard drive (a couple of months). I finally figured out that One drive was syncing everything wherever it was connected. I thought that I was putting stuff into One drive to keep my hard drive clean.

At the same time, I had enough of my laptop. The hard drive is constantly pegging at 100% use. It cripples the ability to do anything on the computer and has for many years. I had an idea, I am going to swap that hard drive for a solid state drive and take the old hard drive and put it into my desktop that is almost full.

I am no idiot. In the old days, you had a CD-ROM that you put into the drive and you rebuilt the operating system from disk. Well, I don’t even have an optical drive in my laptop. So, I looked up multiple instructions that concurred. Create a recovery drive on USB. Replace the hard drive and then boot from the recovery drive to rebuild the operating system. “NNNNNT, Wrong”.

First of all, a recovery drive is only for rebuilding working and existing hard drives. Trust me, I spent hours trying to make it work. I don’t care what expert said what, it does not work. It wasn’t even easy to build the recovery drive either. I spent probably six hours messing around with that.

The instructions say, you need a 32GB USB drive. OK, I went out and bought one. Then, it says use the recovery drive utility built into Windows. After two hours, the first one failed. Two more hours and the second one failed. I started checking the internet for why this was happening. As it turns out, the USB drive needed to be formatted in NTSC and not FAT32 format. Once I did that, add another two hours to create the recovery drive.

I swapped the hard drive and then booted from the recovery drive. At first, I tried the option that restored my settings. That got to 70% complete and then I was alerted that there was an error. I tried it again, same result. Then third attempt, I tried a new install, also failed. I went to bed for the night, pissed and bewildered.

The next morning, I started checking the internet and found out that this can only be done with a Windows image. The registration component is apparently on the motherboard. I didn’t want to ruin my recovery drive in case I still needed it, but I needed an 8GB drive for Windows 11 media. The only drive I had of that size was my bootable Ubuntu image. It turns out, when you build an Ubuntu drive, it write protects those files and so my 8GB drive had three partitions that I could not get rid of. I had to download Rufus again just to get rid of the partitions.

One of the permaculture principles is the problem is the solution. So, fortunately, all of my data was backed up to One Drive. But, I did have to re-connect mail, and download browsers and Microsoft 365 and all that stuff. This is the easy stuff since I have been religiously using Bit-Locker to store all of my account information. And now, I am just clicking through and adding stuff.

Did this make a performance difference? You bet it did. I no longer want to throw my laptop off of a building. Installing the old hard drive should be easy (compared to this). Once I have all of that working, I am going to start ripping DVDs of content that I am keeping on One Drive. I don’t want to get rid of my podcast raw data and things like that, but I certainly don’t need to keep easy access to it and I definitely don’t want it clogging up my hard drive. That is a whole different story. Even though I have a DVD burner, that is not working either.

End Your Programming Routine: We are in the habit of taking all information as good information, myself included. When multiple sources had the same instructions, I took for granted that it was correct. It may be that this was valid for Windows 10 and not 11, I don’t know what was wrong. This should have been done in a couple of hours and stretched into days based on bad information. I am glad that I had more than one computer and USB drive.

February 20, 2024 – What the Heck is UEFI?

February 20, 2024 /

For the last couple of months, UEFI has been irritating me. I am going to get into what it is in a minute. A couple weeks ago I set off to fix the situation and then I really messed things up. So much so that I actually bought a new solid state hard drive (SSD) to start over. This was an attempt to make progress on my Software Defined Radio scanner project.

First let me define what UEFI means. This is an acronym for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. If you do not do what I do, then you may never see it. There is a selector screen before the operating system boots up. In my case, I can choose between starting Linux or Windows.

This is an old computer that was inherited. I wanted to keep it in case we needed some data from it, but I did not have the password to login to Windows. By running Linux, I can access anything on the hard drive. This is also part of my long running experiment with Linux which will eventually become my software defined radio police scanner.

For several months now, I have been getting notifications that my UEFI driver was out of date. It wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that it notifies me twice a day that it is out of date. At first, it was a problem for later, which became months. Then I set out trying to fix it.

It turns out that the UEFI driver has a Microsoft signature. I thought that maybe if I could add an account to Windows, I could run the driver update there. Once I selected boot to Windows, it was a one way street. After the Windows path was chosen, there was no going back to having the Linux option. So then I started changing settings in the BIOS. I messed the configuration up so that it wouldn’t boot Windows either.

I saw some options to go into ‘Safe Mode’ make a recovery disk and all of that. But, the truth is that this machine also has Windows 10 and is just slightly newer than my primary desktop. I highly suspected that it was not going to make the Windows 11 cutoff and I felt like all of that effort would be for little gain anyway.

I made the decision that I was going to start over. Solid State Hard drives are cheap. I paid $30 for a 512 GB drive. If you haven’t gone from disk based drives to and SSD, it it hard to explain how much better things work. I firmly believe that my Windows 7 computer runs better now than it did when I bought it in 2012. In fact, that computer runs better than my significantly more powerful laptop from 2018. I am going to be changing it to an SSD as well after I get a few other projects completed. But, let’s get back to the subject at hand.

I have started to become comfortable with Linux. I am not proficient by any means but I am convinced that Linux is in my future for the desktop that I do most of my writing on. Once support runs out for Windows 10, I will be converting that computer to Ubuntu. I am a light PC user anyway, browser based work, word processing and spreadsheets are the primary stuff I do. The more familiar I am with Linux, the easier the transition will be for me.

Its funny, the more connected our devices have become, the more isolated they are. In the old days, I would start a file at home, email it to myself and continue to work. Or even better, I put it on a thumb drive. I haven’t done anything like that in years because I can’t really share anything between environments anymore for security purposes. My biggest outstanding concern is that I have been using, saving and storing everything in Microsoft 365. This seems like a topic for another day however.

As it turns out, UEFI is important to me and without it working properly, I can do nothing. The good news is that I got my SSD today and I already have Ubuntu installed along with everything except the Software Defined Radio and SDR++. Starting from scratch, I got an updated UEFI driver and everything works like it was supposed to.

The computer geeks out that probably find this to be a little juvenile. I had no idea what this driver was supposed to do. Reading the release notes there were vulnerabilities to certain viruses. Hindsight being 20/20, Ubuntu recommends the risk as low and to not worry about it. There are some commands to ignore the device check that I read after the fact. I wish I would have read that before I messed up everything but in the end this is going to be better.

End Your Programming Routine: I have heard that the reason little kids learn so fast is that they have no fear. They just push keys and try things because they can. I have a streak like that with Linux, I don’t know what I don’t know and definitely what I am doing. That being said, be careful. I had no data or anything really on this computer so it was $30, a re-install and two hours for me and the end result is a better computer. I guess I am learning like a child but I will be more cautious in the future.