HDD Problems – Windows 7

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Hi,

My dad is using an old desktop of my. It has a dual boot with Win7 and Win10, with Win7 as the default – its what he likes and knows how to use.

For the past few months, on and off, the PC will only boot to Win10. If I run the ‘chkdsk’ command through the command prompt this seems to sort it out for a while.

The time gap between this happening is anything from a couple of weeks to a couple of months.

Both systems are on SSD’s, although Win7 is on the older drive, probably about 10-12 years old. I’m thinking it’s time to get a new drive and clone Win7 onto this, but wanted to see if there could be another way of solving it ?

Thanks

Steve

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It sounds like it’s time to replace the Win7 drive. I would run chkdsk just before doing the replacement and be sure the boot up is good. Hang on to the old drive for a while in case.

If you clone the Win7 disk, it does a sector by sector copy. If you have a problem, it could replicate it to the new disk.

Consider making a full disk image instead. Some backup software will allow you to restore a smaller partition to a larger partition, thus giving you the option of using a larger new drive. You will need an external USB drive large enough to store the image prior to restoring it to the new drive. (But you need an external drive for periodic backup anyway)

2 users thanked author for this post.

WSbigmig, satrow

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It may be the way he shuts down the machine (turn off the power) that upsets the disks.

Also worth checking the SMART status of both drives before replacing anything. (CrystalDiskInfo zip makes it easy.)

cheers, Paul

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Well, I had a look at my dads PC at the weekend, at there may have been a schoolboy error at some point, possibly on my part. The power lead wasn’t connected to the SSD, although it was connected to the motherboard. I added a SSD a couple years back to put Win10 on, so it’s possible I did something in this process. I don’t know whether the SSD would have been able to get any/enough power from the motherboard to work, but at other times couldn’t get any power which caused it to error ? Anyhow, it seems to be working ok at the moment.

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Paul T

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