C Drive re-install

Red Prince wrote on 1/30/2016, 10:10 AM

As long as the rebuilt drive will still have the letter C and all the other drives keep the same drive letters as before, the projects should appear the same as before.

It is, however, possible you may (or may not) have to reinstall or at least re-register Vegas. That depends on whether Vegas thinks it is now running on a different computer. That depends on what details Vegas install has recorded in the Windows registry (which should be on drive C). But even if you have to do that, the projects that exist on other drives on the same computer should work as before.

Adam

bill-kranz wrote on 1/30/2016, 10:44 AM

Red Prince:

Okay, that sounds good and I hope there will be no major complications...

Thanks,
Bill

JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/30/2016, 10:58 AM

> "My C Drive has developed some bad sectors and my tech person cannot get a backup disk image file of that drive with Windows or Hard Disk Sentinal. So we are going to have to wipe that drive and reformat."

Seriously? I think it's time to throw that drive in the garbage. Bad sectors are an indication that the drive is starting to fail. I would stop using it.

This is a perfect opportunity to buy an SSD to replace your rotating sector failing HDD. It will be like buying a new computer. You have no idea how I/O bound computers are until you switch from an HDD to an SSD.

Just my 2 cents but I would NOT reformat a drive that has developed bad sectors. Just get rid of it.

~jr

JJKizak wrote on 1/30/2016, 11:04 AM

Ditto. That drive will be nothing but trouble. Bury it now.
JJK

bill-kranz wrote on 1/30/2016, 12:18 PM

Actually we have discussed the role of SSD's in this issue but can a SSD drive function as the actual C Drive?

What he has done is install his programs - not the OS per se - to another HDD drive and link the EXE to the C drive. This makes it easier to reformat/install the OS if need be.

Or should we get a new HDD and a new SSD and put the Win OS on the SSD as the C drive??

Thanks,
Bill

Arthur.S wrote on 1/30/2016, 12:41 PM

SSD has been used as 'C' drives for a long time. They load faster so are ideal for that.

john_dennis wrote on 1/30/2016, 12:46 PM

"[I]...it's time to throw that drive in the garbage.[/I]"

It's time to drill two holes through the platters with a hand drill and one hole through the controller card and dispose of the e-waste properly per the local codes.

JJKizak wrote on 1/30/2016, 2:20 PM

Why not a sledge hammer breaking it into small atoms?
JJK

john_dennis wrote on 1/30/2016, 2:27 PM

I don't own a sledge hammer. I own three electric drill/drivers.

At my old work location, for low volume drive destruction, we had an electric press that would drive a point though the platters. For high volume destruction, there was a vendor that would bring a device very much like a shredder that would make small pieces of the drives. Not at the atomic level, however.

GeeBax wrote on 1/30/2016, 4:21 PM

With regard to SSDs, I have been using them for years. I keep the OS and applications, like Vegas, on them and all my storage is kept of separate drives. I use two SSDs, and one is cloned to the other every week, that way if anything happened (and it has not done so in 5 years) I can swap the two drives over and keep running as if nothing has happened. Make the jump, you will be glad your did.

John222 wrote on 1/30/2016, 4:55 PM

Hold on there... I believe you can clone that hard drive with Macrium Reflect Free. It has an option to ignore bad sectors.

http://www.macrium.com/help/v5/Other_tasks/Defaults_dialogue/Advanced/Advanced_Backup_Options.htm

PeterDuke wrote on 1/30/2016, 4:57 PM

Make regular backups of your C: drive image. It is then very painless to replace the drive.

PeterDuke wrote on 1/30/2016, 5:00 PM

"It has an option to ignore bad sectors"

Yes but if valid data/code is in those bad sectors he will lose it. He will still have to do a full re-install to be sure that everything is intact.

larry-peter wrote on 1/30/2016, 5:39 PM

If you have a lot of bad sectors Macrium Reflect will fail on the clone also. If it doesn't work for your drive, google DDRescue. It's a bootable Linux app that I used a couple years back to clone a drive that was quite near death that Macrium couldn't handle. Of course it can't recover the data from bad sectors, but will give you a clone - errors and all - that will allow you to recover as much data as you can. It can also be run multiple times on a bad file and will "fill in" its first pass with as much new data as can be obtained.

John222 wrote on 1/30/2016, 6:59 PM

Ignore bad sectors is an advanced option for Reflect Free. It will clone with bad clusters.
It's worth trying. The bad cluster may be harmless or only affect one or two things that can be reinstalled or restored from backup.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/30/2016, 6:59 PM

> "What he has done is install his programs - not the OS per se - to another HDD drive and link the EXE to the C drive. This makes it easier to reformat/install the OS if need be."

I use to configure my computer this way and it gains you absolutely nothing because Windows keeps it's registry on the C: drive and once the registry is gone, you need to reinstall all of you programs again anyway so you gain absolutely nothing by doing this.

It's better to put the OS and Applications on the C: drive and all of your data on another drive, then use Acronis True Image to make daily incremental backups of your C: drive to the second drive. If the C: drive ever fails you can be back up and running in about an hour after buying a new drive.

~jr

Geoff_Wood wrote on 1/31/2016, 12:21 AM

You will have to re-install all plugins referenced in those projects to. Otherwise they should still work, but with those effects missing.

geoff

Geoff_Wood wrote on 1/31/2016, 12:23 AM

..... or it could clone something that will remain an obscure bug-bear forever-more !

geoff

imaginACTION_films wrote on 1/31/2016, 12:24 AM

+1 to JR
I have used SSD C drives on several computers for years. Just OS and programs, all data to other drives. Acronis is fantastic. If you need a bigger SD for example, you just install it physically and use Acronis to populate it with your latest complete C Drive. You will have all your apps running perfectly without any need to re-activate etc.
It's a huge load off your mind.
David

Rich Parry wrote on 1/31/2016, 1:37 AM

I would try "SPINRITE" disk recovery before I gave up. Do a web search if you are interested.

Rich

Red Prince wrote on 1/31/2016, 10:28 AM

Yes, SpinRite is the best.

Chienworks wrote on 1/31/2016, 7:48 PM

Spinrite is great. We've used it to recover dozens of drives that seemed otherwise trashed. After that, use Clonezilla to copy the drive to a new drive. Or, even try it first. Clonezilla has an option to retry bad sectors in raw mode and try to reconstruct the data from them while it's making the copy. I used it just a few months ago to recover the C: drive in my main workstation at home. The drive was so bad it wouldn't boot anymore, and if i booted from another drive C: wouldn't mount as an NTFS drive. Clonezilla crunched away at it for about 15 hours and the resulting copy is 100% functional with all files intact. As an added bonus, it is able to adjust partition sizes while making the copy. The old drive was 250GB. The copy is now a 500GB partition of a 2TB drive.

The key thing to remember here though is do not try to continue using the old drive. Once you've got a copy toss it, or file it away as an emergency backup. Bad sectors are an early warning of a near imminent total drive collapse. Replacements are far, far cheaper than the agony of losing a repaired drive again.

bill-kranz wrote on 2/3/2016, 5:32 PM

Thanks for all the helpful tips!!

Over the weekend the sound failed on the PC and the next day another taskbar/Cortana lockup occurred. No error messages.

We are going to get a new SSD-SATA type drive, load Windows 8.1 and then DL Win 10 Pro 64bit. I don't have a specific need get a disc image per se so that will make the changeover much faster and easier.

After all that is done I will report back.

Thanks again!!

Bill

bill-kranz wrote on 3/7/2016, 12:22 AM

Update:

Within a few days of posting that message the C drive completely locked up so I have bought a 500GB Samsung SSD drive to replace it- $137.00 on sale. The last task I had time for was to copy my C drive "My Documents" folder to my D drive ( a 500 GB HDD) on the same PC. That is where I store My Pictures.
I also have a 2 TB HDD that has "My Videos" on it. My tech friend took out the Pictures HDD to see if his USB based hard drive reader could see the picture files on his PC. He noticed things locking up so he aborted the process.
He put the Samsung in place of the old C Drive but I think we are going to try to pull the Picture and Video files from those 2 drives by seeing if other PC's I have can view the files in question.
I can't imagine the other 2 drives being bad.

I did test a Sony 13 Pro folder project cut and paste to a USB WD Passport drive and reversed them back to my 2nd PC to see if everything opened okay. This was the original media, a rendered .mpg4 and the .veg file/.bak. At first the project re-opening stalled at 12%. I used Task Manger to close out and the 2nd opening it opened okay and seems in order.

Anyway later this week we will tackle loading Win 7 to Win 10 64 bit Pro to the SSD and figure out what to do about my 2 storage drives. I think I have a hard drive reader that is serial cable based as opposed to a USB and have a year 2000 XP Pro PC and a basic HP desktop with Win 7 on it to see if one of them can offload some media I need.

Right now things are pretty much a disaster. I just got Zoolz Cloud Storage but did not have time to upload about 2 years worth of of project videos. I did have plans to use Spider Oak as my cloud storage but recently they went to a subscription model and that affected my back up plans.

My original media is in a safe place and I have 52 videos on You Tube.

Thanks,
Bill