The home PC (a Dell XPS 8700) failed, leading to the painfully slow backup and recovery of Windows 8.1, the upgrade again to Windows 10 version 2004 and, luckily, the recovery of data. A few weeks later, it failed again, the lock screen and mouse frozen at 3:06 am on a Tuesday morning, rebooting only to alternate failures of an attempted diagnosis and repair or a 0xc000021a stop code (the blue screen of death).
This time, I had moved all the data into the cloud and I had made a Windows 10 recovery drive. Unfortunately, the ‘recover from a drive’ option was missing, making ‘recovery drive’ a misnomer. Other options explored and confirmed as dead ends, I had to start afresh.
I had almost reached the end of a fresh start, when the PC failed a third time, the screen frozen, followed by more stop codes. The process of booting saw reports of errors on the C:\ and attempts to repair them, repeatedly. Perhaps the hard drive was failing?
Replacing the hard drive
This PC had always had only one visible partition of its 2 TB hard drive, the C:\ volume. The hard drive was old, but the operating system reported that it was healthy. Command wmic diskdrive get model, status returned ST2000DM 001-1ER164 OK.
ST2000DM001 is a Seagate 3.5 inch hard drive. The Seagate store on Amazon identified that the current equivalent model is ST2000DM008, priced at about £ 60. I gambled that sum and a new drive would solve the problem.
I replaced the drive, following the straightforward instructions in the PC’s owner manual: open the case, unplug the old drive, remove its fixing screws, swap the drives and reverse the steps.
Installing Windows 10
On the second failure, I had downloaded Windows 10 to a 32 GB USB key. Initially, the PC would not boot from the key, so I had to change the boot order in the PC’s BIOS/UEFI settings. During the installation, a reboot was required, but the PC rebooted from the key. I had to restore the original boot order, so that the reboot was from the PC’s hard drive. Product Keys were not an issue – presumably they were preserved somewhere in the PC’s firmware.
At the start of the installation, a dialog box presented the structure of the drive that had been removed. Presumably that structure was cached somewhere, perhaps on the PC’s 32 GB mSATA drive, which was configured as a RAID 0 cache. The solution was to use the dialog’s options to delete all of the partitions presented.
Windows Update offered a number of immediate updates, once Windows 10 was installed.
Removing old Windows
After the second failure, the C:\ drive had two folders with old Windows, Windows.old and Windows.old.000. The first could be deleted. The second refused to be deleted, not from an elevated Command Prompt or even from an elevated Command Prompt in the hidden Administrator user account. However, the Disk Cleanup application was, ultimately, able to remove it.
With the new hard drive, there was no old Windows to remove.
Upgrading Microsoft Edge
I anticipated that I would need a modern browser, so I upgraded old Microsoft Edge to new Microsoft Edge, and customised it to remove the cruft and search engines other than Google.
Windows Terminal
I also anticipated that I would need a good terminal, so I reinstalled Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store.
Restoring GeForce
I had read that Windows 10 version 2004 and old display drivers did not play well together and I attributed the first failure of the PC to a driver problem – the initial symptom then had been the ‘black screens of death’ (black screens and a cursor). So, the first thing I did was to restore the most recent version of NVIDIA’s GeForce.
Partition the hard drive
After the second failure, it had seemed sensible to partition the old hard drive between C:\ (for the operating system) and D:\ for data. That would involve first shrinking C:\ to a sensible size – I thought 256 GB would more than adequate.
However, despite acres of free space on the volume, the Disk Management application reported that C:\ could only be shrunk by 6 MB. I thought defragmentation would help, and the Optimise tool analysed that defragmentation was required, but that did not affect Disk Management when run.
The Application log of the Windows Logs of Event Viewer, filtered by Source = Defrag, revealed that the last unmovable file appeared to be \hiberfil.sys::$DATA. Others had reported that turning hibernation off temporarily would solve the problem (with elevated command powercfg -hibernation off) – and so it proved. I turned it off, could shrink the volume, and turned it on again.
With the new hard drive, performing the same partitioning, there was no corresponding problem; the Disk Management application allowed the C:\ volume to be shrunk right down.
Relocating data
Having created a D:\ volume for data. I relocated my OneDrive to D:\ and certain folders to OneDrive.
Restoring Dell’s SupportAssist
It seemed sensible to restore Dell’s SupportAssist application. Running it identified a couple of drivers to be updated.
Restoring Office and iCloud
With each reinstallation of Windows, PC had lost its old name. I deactivated the old PC name from Windows 365, restored the name of the PC, and reinstalled 64 bit versions of the Office applications.
For Outlook, that meant reinstalling the email accounts, which is convoluted because Outlook initially assumes (wrongly) that the outgoing mail server must have the same logon details as the incoming one. Each account needs to be manually ‘repaired’ to fix that.
I reinstalled iCloud from the Microsoft Store, and reconfigured it to work with Outlook.
Restoring other software
For coding, I restored Visual Studio Code, GitHub Desktop (locating the local GitHub root outside of OneDrive) and Git for Windows.
For graphics, I restored GIMP and Inkscape.
Creating a recovery drive
The second failure had occurred during the recreation of a recovery drive. With the new hard drive, the Recovery Drive application completed the task.
Intel’s Optane Memory and Storage Management
The PC originally came with Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology (RST), which application Intel reported was now end of life. I decided to risk installing the replacement, the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver Installation Software with Intel Optane Memory. That was probably a mistake.
Originally, RST included Intel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT). SRT used a solid state drive (in the case of the PC, a 32 GB mSATA drive) as cache memory between a hard disk drive and system memory. Too late, I discovered that SRT had been dropped from RST from version 16. It is not clear the driver can be rolled back.