Windows 10 Crash

Thank you sir.

Thank you Speed

OK Gents,

I'll frame my pole question as follows: One week ago the going price for a Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD was $229 at Best Buy, $219 at Amazon and $205 at Newegg.

Right now, Newegg has this item on sale for $169.00. Sale ends in three days.

My pole question is:

1. Should I buy the SSD this week for $169 as this is the best price I can expect? or

2. Should I wait for Cyber Monday in the expectation of buying this item for less?

I'm favouring waiting as I think the pre-sale price is just an attempt to limit sales loses at year end Cyber Monday clearance prices.

What do you guys think?

You can't beat the existing price.I replaced my HHD with an EVO 1TB SSD two months ago from Best Buy for 199.00.I think trying to second guess this sort of thing this close to xmas is a shot in the dark.

$169 is a great price. If they drop it for Black Friday, it won't be by much and it'll sell out FAST. Just make sure it's the correct item and form factor. Those HDs can have very similar names with very different performance. The 860 EVO and 860 PRO are very different drives. Also, the 860 EVO is typically available as an m.2 as well as a 2.5 drive.

This one is a SATA III 2.5 form factor so I should be OK.

I think I'll pull the trigger tomorrow for the sake of a few bucks. I'm left puttering around the house with not much to do and want to get this project underway. I miss flying.

https://www.newegg.ca/samsung-860-evo-series-1tb/p/N82E16820147673

Hi Gents,

Slowly inching forward. Took delivery of my new SSD last week, then realized that a 2.5" SSD will not mount in a 3.5" tray. OK back to Newegg and just took delivery of my 2.5" adapter today.

First two attempts to "burn" the Win 10 bootable image creation tool failed using software recommended by my son (ISOtoUSB). So after reformatting my flash drive again, I'm just now downloading the software recommended by Wolvie. With any luck, I can get this one to work and then use it to boot my PC from the flash drive. Then it's on to formatting the new SSD followed by a fresh download/install of Win 10.

That took about thirty seconds to fail. Can't run that software without min Win 7 and I'm stuck here on my laptop with Vista.

Next option? Who knows.

I think I'll have to find a neighbour with Win 10 and ask them to create the USB bootable for me.

Speed

Get your son to supply you with an installer? He shouldn't have any trouble given his line of work.

Update the laptop to Win 10 so it's more useful? Should be able to do that without any installer disks. Just use the link to the Download Windows 10 site and when it asks if you want to update this PC or create media, just say update. Once that's done, you should be able to use the etcher software, etc., to make your bootable USB. Plus, you have a laptop running Windows 10 now!

Instead of trying to make a USB, burn a bootable DVD instead from the iso? Vista should be able to do this as long as it has the appropriate type of DVD drive in it. I believe you can make a Windows 10 DVD, though I've not done it myself. You'll need to make sure the blank DVD has the right storage capacity.

If you have Windows 7 or 8 OS media (DVD), rebuild the PC with Windows 7 or 8 and then do the Windows 10 download and upgrade that way.

Can't think of any other options right now other than trying to buy a Windows 10 install DVD online, though since you already have the license, that'd be a waste.

Seems now that my brand new 16GB USB thumb drive is a paperweight. It just stopped working and I can't get it to appear under the Admin Tools so I think I better stop because the next tool I reach for will be a hammer.

Speed

OK good news.

I fixed the flash drive, no hammer's required, took several hours of frustration and research but I'm back in business.

Somehow during the attempts to burn the ISO image to the flash drive, the drive path letter was deleted. I finally finished enough troubleshooting to convince myself that the drivers were there and working, but I still could not see the USB stick listed as F:\ as it was before it disappeared.

So I kept working in Device Manager where I could see it, but also saw that it was listed as not working. I un-installed the drivers and once I could verify that they re-loaded and the USB was listed as working and ready for use, I figured out that the drive I had seen all along, that I thought was a partition of my main hard drive, was in fact, the USB stick without a drive path letter. As soon as I assigned F:\ to Drive 1 showing FAT32 and 14.5GB free space, it popped up immediately.

Yahoo!!!!

So, next step is to canvas my neighbours to see who has Win 10, and then get them to download the Media Creation Tool onto the stick. Then, maybe, I can get my PC up and running with a fresh install of Win 10 followed by DCS on that 1TB SSD. If all this works, I'm hoping the performance improvement equals what I realized with the Nvidia GTX 1070 card. Even if it's not that much of an improvement, it will be marginally better, while saving all of my work in the HDD.

I'll see what's possible tomorrow.

Remember, the biggest improvement you will see using an SSD is to put the OS on that drive, not the programs themselves. Programs will have shorter loading times with an SSD, but the performance increases of regular use will be with the OS interface.

Roger that,

Any improvement will be welcome.

So to update my progress so far, I finally figured out that WinRAR will work with ISO files and so I made several attempts to extract and load Win 10 media onto my USB flash drive. No luck. All of the videos and text on how to do this indicated that the stick needed to be formatted in FAT32 or exFAT, but I couldn't get the entire file to extract. I got the same failure notice with WinRAR as I did with ISO2USB and that message indicated that you can not download files larger than 3GBs without being in a NTFS format. So I bit the bullet and this morning cleaned the USB stick, reformatted that to NTFS and bingo, it worked.

I just now successfully booted the PC from the USB stick and am now in the process of loading Win 10 onto the SSD.

Other challenges were encountered with formatting the SSD and that's what kept me up late last night. Various videos demonstrated outdated DOS Comd entries that didn't work but finally just after midnight I tried one that worked. If you ever have to go through this, here's the process for the record:

Comd Prompt (Admin)
DISKPART
list volume
select volume _ (enter the number next to the drive you want to partition)
clean
create part pri
active
format fs=ntfs lable=SSD quick
assign letter=_ (pick a letter that is not already in use)
list volume
exit
exit

So first attempt just failed. Said it could not complete second boot from installation media

My guess is that I need to change the BIOs to direct the boot drive to the USB stick.

Here we go again.

First video said to change my boot security settings in the BIOs panel and that was pure BS so it didn't work.

I'm about to try this one which is a major PITA but I don't have many options at this stage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV9Vesd2SKc

That worked. Unplugging my HDD was the only way to get Win 10 to boot after install and cycle back to the new SDD. Just finished setting up my Windows experience to disable all the spyware, but otherwise it all looks good.

All in all, a painful, yet educational experience. Nothing got broken, I didn't have to resort to alcohol and now it's just a matter of downloading and reinstalling all that software and remapping my controls. Maybe I can copy over some critical files from my original DCS Open Beta files to save some time.

We'll see what happens when I plug the HDD in. Might need to make some changes in the BIOS to redirect the boot sequence (my PC uses a smaller SSD to boot into the MB control panel, then switches to the drive with the OS, that was my HDD but now resides in the new SSD).

Hopefully, I'll be back on the flight line this Saturday or next.

Just got a cheap external enclosure for the drive. You can get them for $20. That way you can plug it in just like a USB drive basically and browse it for your data. Once done, wipe it and then install it into the PC as a secondary drive. Then no worries about boot sequence.

Though, you shouldn't have any problems with boot sequence as long as the bios is attempting off the new drive first.

That said, you shouldn't have had any problems with a lot of this stuff and there were certainly problems, soooo...ymmv.

Good point, but I found out why the main HDD was registering as the D: drive, which I always thought was a bit weird. The Cyberpower builders used one double connection SATA III cable to connect direct to the boot SSD as the X: drive. Then used a second double connector to hook up the 2 TB HDD main drive, but connected the second connector leaving the first unused. When I hooked up the new 1 TB SSD, I switched these around and after having to unhook the HDD to get Windows to boot, I found that my new SSD had become the C: drive. I think that's why my PC never registered a C: drive before. You guys know a lot more about computers that I, so does that sound right to you??

As for my software rebuild, my first challenge was to try and delete the five copies of Windows 10 that had loaded onto the SSD but failed the final reboot. Windows installer simply saved each to the SSD as Windows.old, Windows.old001 002 003 etc. I tried deleting these from Explorer and couldn't despite having Administrator rights, but not having Administrator permissions to delete Windows. On-line at a Wiki site, the instructions started off simple enough with some more entries via the Comd Prompt to ensure the user administrator rights were enabled, but then quickly got stupid complex with reboots, BIOS changes to the UEFI settings blah blah blah, I had no idea what these instructions were telling me to do.

I checked online again and found another guy who posted a beautifully simple solution: Go to disk cleanup, select obsolete system files, delete and bingo, it was done.

So now it's 10:30 Thursday evening, my DCS download started at 7:00 PM Wednesday so my lovely internet took 27.5 hours to complete that process. Wow, it noticed download speeds ranging from a high of 475 KBs down to 70 KMs. I think I can type that fast!!!! So I'll now wait for all that to unpack and load, then download my Hornet so hopefully that's done by tomorrow morning.

Finally, I'll shut down, re-connect my HDD and start-up to see how the boot goes. I think you're right Wolvie and don't expect any problems with boot sequence (I might just check in with the BIOS settings but I'm sure it will be fine). Then I can start to work on my files in the HDD and swap over what I need to the SSD.

It's been so long since I've been on, I'm not sure I can remember my DCS password!!!

See you soon.

One quick footnote before calling it a day. Once DCS unpacked, I did a Windows forced reboot, then logged into DCS (yes my old guy brain did remember the password) and I was very impressed seeing that DCS instantly recognized my account and all the missing modules and so all I had to do was click once and now all my planes and maps and asset pack are downloading. I thought I was going to have to download each one at a time after entering my original download licence number. Now, if this download takes as long as the first one, I should be done by Sunday afternoon!!

Yup, it's a long process. I've actually just done the DCS part myself since I'm moving over some programs to my Windows 10 install. The new Samsung Odyssey + that's on its way is a Windows 10 device so if I want to try DCS or IL-2 Great Battles on it, I'll need them on my Win 10 partition.

I'm just hoping I can easily copy over my controls settings since that's going to be a huge pain.

Still downloading modules. It ran all last night and was chugging along this morning at 40-50 KBs. So I cancelled, shut down and reset my router. Now back to downloading the last bits but download speeds are still very slow. I've either used up all my bandwidth for the month, or the DCS servers are under a lot of demand. Since they are offering big savings on many of the modules, likely a lot of flyers are busy downloading.

Good news is that my boot and load times are significantly faster. Used to take seven to ten minutes from computer start to DCS start. Now I'd guess that is down to 3 minutes or less. As soon as this download is done, I'm going to shut down again, power up my HDD and start transferring files into the SSD. Then I'll create shortcuts to the programs I want to remain on the HDD (TS, Tacview, and graphics).

I won't be on tonight as I don't think I'll have all my controls sorted by then.

Good luck with your new VR headset.

Well, I guess I should have gambled a bit and waited. Newegg have the Samsung 1TB SSD on sale today for $149.

Then, on the other hand, I'd still have all that work and BS ahead of me to restore my PC.

It's done (except for controls mapping which I'm doing this afternoon) and it's worth $20 to have that behind me.

I've managed to isolate Win 10 and DCS onto the SSD and copied shortcuts to DCS SRS, TS, Tacview, Audacity etc from the HDD to my SDD desktop. So far, with the exception of TS, it all works fine. I'm hoping this will allow the SSD to run DCS at the best level of performance possible within the limits of my system. I think this is the best I can ever expect out of this machine.

I tried to copy and past my old user/saved games///Config/Input files from the D:\ to the new C:\ drive but it didn't work.

Did you just make short cuts to programs installed on your 'crashed' PC drive instead of installing the programs again? You should probably just install those programs again from scratch since installation makes key records (such as registry entries) that could be important going forward. Probably why TS isn't working.

You should think of that old HDD as basically a giant USB drive. Copy what you need off of it (saved mission files, documents, etc.) and then format it.

I had to download a fresh copy of TS and once I loaded that onto the D:\ drive (HHD) and copied the shortcut onto my SSD desktop, it worked fine. Some of the other software apps like Tacview, Audacity and the graphics I use for skins were as easy as creating a shortcut from the existing .exe file in the D:\ drive and pasting that onto my C:\ drive (SSD) desktop.

I also found that DCS SRS would not function when split between drives, so I just downloaded a fresh copy and placed that onto the SSD. I now see it listed as a module on my DCS splash page so I guess they finally made that official. Seemed to work OK, I connected to the 401 Sqn DCS SRS link and got green lights all round.

I ran a few test flights last night to de-bug my controls mapping. Took some fiddling to get all that set up again but it all works fine now. I also noticed a distinct improvement in frame rate stability with no micro freezes while in single player missions. Yet to be seen how that will play out on-line, but I did test my connection to the 450 server and got in without any problems. All in all really happy with the results.

I noticed on my second boot after having re-connected the D:\ drive that Windows entered a repair cycle before the log-on window and then downloaded a significant patch to the D:\ drive. So I don't know if that fixed what ever went wrong with Win 10 in the first place or just what exactly it did. I followed up by optimizing all my drives, then scanned and defragged the D:\ drive.

I think that my next step will be to find what ever I need from the D:\ drive, copy that into a temp file on the C:\ drive and then do as you suggest. By reformatting that drive, I can get rid of everything I no longer need (Windows FlightX, CoD, Norton etc) then reload the original Windows 7, backup and restore files and all my personal stuff so that if Windows 10 ever craps out on me again, I'll have a ready source for backup/restore and an alternate means to run the PC and access the internet all the while enjoying better performance from the SSD with massive free storage available in the HDD.

Now, if I could only fix my bad flying as easy as all that. It's incredible what you retain and forget in eight weeks!! (my attempt to fly AoA was a joke!!!)

I'll be on this Saturday for sure.

Sorry for missing the flight last night gents. Fully intended to be online but my internet had other ideas.

I get the distinct impression that my internet service provider is punishing me subsequent to my large downloads last month as was needed to put things right with my PC. I did receive a message from the address of my internet provider titled "Data Overage", but it contained no text and an attachment only, so rule of thumb is to delete immediately, so I did.

I started the latest update on Friday night, then just after midnight the power went out and it killed the download. Restarted Saturday morning around 9 AM and by 10 PM it was at 97% complete with download speeds as low as 5 KB/s. I was curious as to how much data is in 5 KBs and figure it's equal to five or six typed characters on an otherwise blank Word page. Finally it just stopped allowing data through and I watched as it sat for over five minutes with 0 KB/s down, 0 KB/s up. Finally the DCS server gave up and I got an error message, very similar to the one that started this whole Win 10 mess in the first place.

I had no e-mail and nothing worked for the remainder of the night. Total power down and this morning it seems somewhat normal.

Hopefully I can complete the latest update today and get online next week.

Enjoy a wonderful Christmas holiday with family and friends and I'll "see" you all in the new year.