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Thanks for digging that up. Im seeing something similar in the manual about the diskette with drivers, editing config.sys, etc., but was hoping to not have to go down that road.  Shucking the drive and connecting it directly to a desktop is not a preferred option since I’ve heard of some potential issues with shucking WD MyBook drives, as well as voiding any warranty.  And the only spare desktop I have is old (core2duo/P5N-D), a bit finicky, and prone to crashing.  Who knows though, I may give this some thought. I’ve got two spare backups of the data now, so maybe if I was going to shuck a WD drive, this might be the one to experiment with since it seams to be failing anyway.  Just more time than I have this year for playing around. Maybe next January.

 

 

First speed bump with SpinRite.

I will start digging through the documentation, but if anyone has a quick answer, feel free to chime in.

I have run SpinRite from a bootable CD inserted into an internal drive on the laptop. It sees my main laptop hard drive, but not the external WD mybook.

I will look into the bios to see about usb support, but any other suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,

Dave

So thanks again folks for guiding me through SpinRite. I successfully burned it to a bootable DVD.  For others benefit, I will show the screen you get when you run the .exe file that you get when you purchase SpinRite.

So I wasn’t quite sure what was involved with burning an ISO as mentioned above, but I see now that the .exe file has the option to create an ISO that you then right click on and choose burn to disk.

I should note that I first ran SpinRite from windows 7. When I went to get a screen shot of the spinRite screen from windows 10, windows 10 would not let me run it. First it thought it was a suspicious program, and then when I chose the “run anyway” button, it gave me an “incorrect parameter” error.

My checkdisk finished relatively quickly this time (4 days compared to 10 days like last time), so I’ll be diving into running SpinRite onto this drive in the next few days/weeks/months.

 

 

Was XP still based on DOS? I don’t recall.  There has been some significant loss of functionality since the loss of DOS. I’m not saying we’re not better off for leaving DOS behind, but I remember one function that I got a lot of use out of in older windows versions, like Win95, that were based on DOS.

I don’t remember why I needed it so often, it was so long ago, but I remember feeling the loss of being able to:

rename *.xyz TEST*.xyz

Or something similar to that. Maybe Im remembering wrong and it was actually the extension I was trying to rename.

I also miss being able to go over to my buddies place and edit his bat or .sys files to load up stupid pictures on his screen when he started his computer. He generally had a lot of explaining to do to his parents.  ahem. I was younger then. Although probably still to old to be doing those types of shenanigans  🙂

I will assume you mean this:

Gets rid of this:

I have disabled them and will see what happens. I didn’t even think to try and disable anything like this since it has been the practice of companies in the past to use these as non-negotiable revenue generating streams. Thanks for the tip.

I would like to note that panda free was a great option for a couple years. Unfortunately on their free version they have recently become very aggressive on the pop-ups near my system tray. I usually end up having to clear almost half a dozen when I come back to my computer.

Avast has gone in the reverse direction. They are not as aggressive with messages, and they seem to have disable by default some features that would muck up your system restore points if enabled.  So I may gravitate back to Avast. However, I have learned recently that their free version collects data from you. But for myself, that isn’t a huge concern and I can live with it if it means less pop ups.

Cheers,

Dave

Thank you Woody,

I will follow up with you via email. Still no access to the topics, and a couple new issues have arisen with my login name.

Cheers

Dave

Oh that’s weird. It’s like I don’t have permission to see my own posts. It just gave me a “not found” error when I clicked on those links.

Thanks for pulling those out for me PK. No matter how I searched, using my username or otherwise, I could never pull up my old posts.

Cheers for that and have a nice weekend.

Dave

Yes, I think you are right. This is not the best place for a support fix. I thought the principles would catch site of my post here and let me know what the issue was.

2 users thanked author for this post.

woody, Microfix

[DaveYVR]

This is all I see:

 

Oddly, on this page I see 6 topics started, not 2.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by DaveYVR.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by DaveYVR.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by DaveYVR.

Thanks, that may come in handy some day.

However, it was quite some time ago so those posts I’m trying to track down would have slipped well past the first page. And I’m sure there are several that have slipped my mind completely and I will only remember if I see them in my profile.

Anyone have any recommendations on re-hooking my profile to past WS posts?

Barring that, I will have to let the past be the past.

Cheers,

Dave

Hi Folks,

Thanks for all the hard work migrating us stragglers over.

I recently went back to some tabs I had open to the Windows Secret forums (which were open and ignored for months over the busy spring and summer months!), and found they were extinct and also received some unusual security warnings from the browser. In any case, that lead me here to AskWoody.

First thing I did was remove the WS that was added to my username, and maybe that was a mistake.  I should mention however, that I could not log in with my email, even before any changes to my username.

So here is my first question trying to get over the learning curve hurdles. I was wondering how I could get back to threads I had started or contributed to on Windows Secrets. I looked in my profile, and I only see the recent threads I contributed to here on AskWoody. From other responses on this site I understand those Windows Secrets links to our posts were migrated here as well. Maybe I broke some database link or query when I changed my username?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks again for housing us homeless waifs. Windows Secrets, and by extension this site, are the only help sites I’ve ever remembered to come back to due to the excellent community.

Cheers,

Dave

1 user thanked author for this post.

Microfix

Ha! Thanks for the lead.  I wonder why he didn’t push spinRite 6.1 out if he’s still active. He was even suggesting a v7.0 would be in the works on his site.

That’s very interesting anonymous.  Too bad you couldn’t monitor the memory usage during this operation. The manual says SpinRite will suck up computer resources pretty quickly.  The manual does say that spinrite will remember where it left off, but not necessarily about a power failure. My laptop and drive undergoing chkdsk are connected to a pretty hefty power supply that should run a couple hours if the power goes out.

For my work, I run some pretty intensive scientific modelling and GIS programs.  For this reason I always max my computer memory.  Both my 7 year old desktop and 2 year old laptop have 32 gigabytes. My next computer I am aiming for at least 64, and maybe 128 if not cost / technically prohibitive.

The reason I bring this up is because I can watch the memory fill up with some of the modelling programs. The better optimized one are efficient, but some others will use every megabyte you throw at it. And once the memory fills up, you’re dead. An operation that would take 1 hour with free memory, will take days once the program starts swapping / scratching data to the hard drive.

I wonder if SpinRite is similar for memory use.

I also wonder if SpinRite can utilize all the memory on the computer given it seams to run in a DOS environment (correct me if Im wrong)

Sadly the only computer I have for the task is a 2011 sony laptop with 6 gigabytes of memory. But I guess my biggest worry with that laptop is a housefire 🙂