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#1
Update nightmares
I have recently had a nightmare with my PC. A Win10 update in late December trashed the BIOS of my mo-bo and the critical boot and other sectors of the primary drive "0" aka C:. A re-flash restored the BIOS but the USB3 ports went AWOL.
I took the C: drive out, attached it to another PC where I discovered nothing was there. I then re-partitioned and formatted the drive. I bought a new mo-bo and refitted everything.
I used my Windows installation disc, and all was fine. I restored the data and all seemed well. Then I discovered I'd used an old installation disc and that Windows it would not update past build 10240. It failed at the last part of the installation after rebooting. (It seems MS refuse to acknowledge this issue - there's thousands of similar posts.)
I had a backup image and used that, but the same failure to update occurred. But this time the Automatic Repair loaded after the reboot. A second running of the image worked and provided the update wasn't used, all seemed well.
Then my USB scanner went AWOL. Windows detected it but said no driver installed. Downloading and installing the driver failed. Then I hit a security problem, with Windows popping up red "access denied" windows. Which was odd, because I was in the supposedly hidden "Administrator" account. I rebooted, and then the Administrator account kept telling me I was using the wrong password. I now could not re-image the drive, so had to re-boot to the Automatic repair from were I could re-image the drive.
At this point I went to bed and let it do its thing. About an hour later I was awoken by a horrible buzzing noise. It was the USB backup drive. It had clearly failed. (A four year old 4TB Seagate.) Could the drive could have been dying for some time and be the cause of the faults/faulty images? (My personal data was also on another HDD in the PC so hopefully safe.)
This time I dug out my old laptop and copied the latest installation files onto a USB pen drive. I booted from this and re-installed Windows 10. This time I was asked to log in using my Microsoft Account. To be honest this was not what I wanted but there seemed to be no other option. The positive side was that it found my Win10 Licence and also my Office 2019 key. After the initial setup and updates, I'm running the current windows Ver 1809 Build 17763.107.
I have now set up 5 accounts:
Me (as a regular user)
The Wife (as a regular user)
Visitor (Guest account)
Admin2 (Administrator) and
Administrator ("Hidden" Administrator)
A new 4TB USB3 desktop backup drive arrived yesterday and seemed to work OK over night. Hopefully this now all OK.
PS: The scanner is fine.
There was also a problem with my old LaserJet 4010TN which kept stopping because the paper size was wrong, an A4/Letter thing. I thought it was driver issue or settings on the printer, but it turned out to be a worn feed roller in one of the trays. Swapping the trays around fixed that but I still need a new roller (or whole tray?).
Thanks for reading. Happy New Year.
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