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    Vista Clean Install

    Discussion in 'Gateway and eMachines' started by hydra, Jul 16, 2013.

  1. hydra

    hydra Breaks Laptops

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    After 5 years...

    Original WD 250G drive gave it up after 24,423 power on hours. I think son helped it by bumping spun up drive. Lots of hard sector failures which were multiplying while being used.

    I had second old spare cloned WD 250G drive with 6831 FX OS but tons of 4 year old, out dated, software on it. Against better judgment, time wise, I did a total clean install as I have the Gateway OS restore CD that came with laptop.

    After installing Vista OS I made lazy mistake by not deleting some of my secure rom games that were now in system folder.old. I did this to preserve the drivers, see lazy mistake.

    Amazing, I spent 2 hours trying to delete the invisible secure rom files out of spite. I was getting errors of system “cannot see” files or such, lol. I tried several delete methods found on the web, no luck.

    I then did what I should have done in the first place, have OS installer wipe the whole drive, single partition.

    While install was going on the second time, I downloaded both service packs from MS and device drivers still posted on the Gateway site.

    6 hours later I had OS and all updates installed plus critical apps and utilities. I then cloned this to another high time 250G drive and placed this drive into son’s 6831. Total size was 18G, for the clean install with apps/utilities.

    This thing runs very nice for Vista OS! Should have done this 5 years ago instead of cloning original drive.

    If 8800M GTS gives it up then I’ll just recycle my two remaining 250G drives for emergency OS boot drives or whatever.

    Thx
     
    hydra, Jul 16, 2013
    #1