Tuesday, May 17, 2016

This won't take long...famous last words!

The time came when my good old Western Digital 500 GB internal drive packed it in. I had the drive for a good 7 years and but was starting to get bad sector issues. It was time to upgrade to a new hard drive, I purchased the Western digital black drive 1TB. I have upgraded drives in the past so easy peasy right??...........WRONG!

Below is the rather comical (comical now that is) run down of my computer adventure:
  • Installed the new WD hard drive inserted Win7 CD and started the PC. The screen goes blank and PC shuts down!
  • I reboot again and get a message “can’t read boot manager”
  • I reboot again this time a blue screen and the message “ corrupt bios”
  • I now remove the WD drive from PC and boot from the second drive in the PC (my drive for backup’s) with the Win7 CD all booted ok.
  • I now figure the WD is bad but I put the WD drive back in on its own removing the Seagate drive just to make sure. Restart PC and it boots into the Win7 CD without issue.
  • I now add the Seagate drive and restart and the PC screen once again goes blank and the PC shuts down.
  • I Googled it and found out I may be powering both drives from the same daisy chain on the power supply and it can’t handle it. I have to power each drive from a separate daisy chain from the power supply.
  • No problem I thought I will just plug in to a second daisy chain……it was too short!
  • I had to move the drive down 3 bays which meant removing RAM and the video card.
  • With that done the PC starts no problem and low and behold Win7 starts to install on the WD drive.
  • Then all of a sudden part way through install I get a blue screen and a message “memory dump” and this is just an ongoing cycle!
  • I went onto a PC forum site and was told to run a WD diagnostic program and I did and I was told my new drive was defective.
  • Back to the store with bill in hand and a hard drive that is hours old.
  • I was told at store that drive could not be returned as I did not have anti-static bag. I flipped and the exchange was made.
  • Put the new drive in the PC and this time I ran the diagnostic program first (learned my lesson) and the drive passed.
  • It then loaded Win7 without any issues and it was now time to start loading programs.
  • I had loaded about 15 programs and all was going great. I then downloaded Win4K3 64 bit version.
  • I was told I can’t load this version as I am only running Win7 32 bit???? That’s very odd as I know without a doubt I was using the 64 bit version.
  • Then it hit me……I installed my Win7 32 bit version and not the Win7 64 bit version!!!!!!
  • So had to reformat the WD drive and start all over again. I installed Win7 64 bit and all went well with the software install.
  • Finally I wanted to reformate the Seagate drive as it did have some programs on it from before. I wanted to use it to store my backups on.
  • As I went to reformat the Seagate drive I got a message “not an active drive” whatever that means!!!!
  • Back to the PC forum and I was guided on how to make the drive active and format it.
  • So now I have a Seagate 1TB 32mb 7200 drive for backup and storage. The new Western Digital black 1TB 64gb 7200 drive as my main functioning drive.
So how was that for an adventure!


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