Computer Bad Luck Today

[Chris Savage]

I got a lot accomplished today...but just as I went to do some coding my main PC decided to act up. An Alienware update broke something causing the computer to not want to start. Anyway, I didn't get the stuff done that I wanted to today, and I'm not sure if I have a bad memory chip or not (why the original issue happened in the first place), so we'll try again this week to get the hardware set up.

You cannot view this attachment.

[JKnightandKARR]

This is why I miss DOS and Win 3.x.....  Seams like MUCH better reliability..   On the random and rare event,  my desktop will want to be final setup again, and my Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop is overheating and going into sleep mode.

[Chris Savage]

This is why I miss DOS and Win 3.x.....  Seams like MUCH better reliability..   On the random and rare event,  my desktop will want to be final setup again, and my Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop is overheating and going into sleep mode.

I'm still having issues with this PC. I booted it up after work and it said my memory or CPU changed and gave me options for what I could do. Neither has changed. Looks like I need to consider new RAM chips. Going to run MEMTEST86 tomorrow.

[JKnightandKARR]

I changed my motherboard out not too long ago, with the SAME model, and my system threw a fit over it.... Windows pin had to be removed and redone, and ALL my normal logged in stuff, ALL got logged out.......

[Chris Savage]

I suspect that I may have both a bad SSD and a bad memory module. Best Buy has my memory in stock, so I just may buy some and see what happens. OTOH, I was hoping to run MEMTEST86 first and see what happens. The memory / CPU message has come up about a half a dozen times already. Not cool. Sadly, my PC case sits in a spot where it isn't super easy to access the insides.

[Chris Savage]

I've received the new SSD for my PC. Yesterday I ordered new RAM. Today I need to get a disk cloning tool for the M.2 NVMe drives. The RAM should be in tomorrow. Once this is all done, hopefully I can start moving forward again.

Hopefully, this ACASIS NVMe M.2 Duplicator Dual-Bay Offline Clone USB C to NVME Docking Station for M2 SSD M Key Hard Drives will do the job quickly.

[JKnightandKARR]

Hope it works out better.

[Chris Savage]

Hope it works out better.

We'll find out this weekend...I'm going to take it apart and clone the SSD and install new memory. I'll deal with the old parts later. Just want to get everything up and running as fast as possible.

The memory was supposed to arrive today, however I just got a notification that my package was "delayed". Ironically, I ordered the cloner yesterday and it was delivered in the wee hours of the morning (overnight).

[Chris Savage]

Okay, so I spent ALL of Saturday messing with this computer. I would be accurate in saying that everything that could wrong, did! But I believe the worst part is over and now we can get back to our regularly scheduled program, already in progress.

[JKnightandKARR]

I hope it is. Computers are such a P.I.T.A. sometimes!

[Chris Savage]

WINDOWS computers, in particular, can be a P.I.T.A. (skip this if you're not ready to read a book).

This whole thing started when there were some Alienware updates that were listed as critical. One of them was a BIOS update. The BIOS has updated in the past with no issues. But in this case, that particular update never ran. The way the BIOS updates on this PC is that the image is stored in a special place on the boot drive and then initiated on restart. However, the PC failed to restart, so the BIOS never updated. This happened a few times in a row. Finally, I ran the System File Checker and it found problems. That's when it occurred to me...this PC is like 5 years old (or more). I figured the SSD was probably failing and that there were some bad blocks on it, so I bought a new one.

But, while trying to back things up and retry the updates in the mean time, I occasionally got some memory error beeps. As you can imagine, I was incredulous! So, I ordered memory too and an SSD cloner from Amazon. Everything was to be here by Friday. First, the disk cloner came and then the drive. When I went to clone the drive, it would NOT start. I was scratching my head and reading the limited documentation, when I noticed in the fine print that you could NOT clone to a drive of equal size. The target MUST BE a larger drive!!! That was NOT in the online description.

Next, just when the memory was scheduled to arrive, I got an email from FedEx that my package was DELAYED. I'm used to this from Amazon, but not usually from a third-party carrier (FedEx). The memory was coming from Best Buy. So this whole thing dragged on into Saturday. When the memory arrived, I installed it and fired up the PC. Memory error beeps. This memory was supposed to be compatible with this PC. So I readjusted and reinstalled the modules, same crap! I put the original memory back in and everything came up fine.

Finally, I decided to just return the memory to a local Best Buy and trade the 1TB SSD in on a 2TB SSD so I could use the disk cloner and get it all over with. When I got home, I installed the modules into the cloner and hit start. It was running! It finished much quicker than I expected, but I installed the 2TB SSD into the PC and tried to boot it. NOTHING!

Alienware has these diagnostic utilities that run when the PC fails to boot. It ran some memory tests and some windows repair, but ultimately it could not seem to get the computer to boot. I went looking for the two "recovery" discs I burned at one of my earlier backups. These are a CD-R that is essentially a Windows boot disc with repair tools. I have a backup of the PC from before this all started. The boot disc was corrupted. I have another one from my laptop. It too was corrupted! Now I'm super frustrated!

So I go to my laptop and I create a USB Boot Drive. When I try to boot to it from the Alienware, it tells me that it is missing system files. So, I get another thumb drive and create a more complete one, with system backup and everything. This takes over an hour. Meanwhile I am trying to figure out what happened to the cloned image and why some stuff isn't working. Finally I come to the conclusion that the cloner failed and I go get my new complete boot drive and once again, the PC says there are missing files. After booting into safe mode, everything looked okay, so I rebooted. PRESTO! Windows booted and everything looks good. But, not everything was running right.

As you can imagine, I am tired, frustrated, and it's now midnight on Saturday. The Alienware PC has a recovery tool on it in a special partition and that seemed to work after getting it back into failed boot utilities, and I decided to try and use that to restore from my backups. That took much less time than backing up did and I was done by 2AM and ready for bed. The next morning I tested as much as I could before I had to leave for several Mother's Day events and by the time I got home I was too tired to mess around. Best I can tell, my Windows backup is working, though it did bother me that once the backup was completed, the system would not boot on its own again until I went into the recovery system and entered Safe Mode again.

Finally, I incrementally updated the BIOS manually using a thumb drive and the boot menu (F12) at startup. Everything seems to be running now and the side panels are back on the PC and all the USB cables have been reconnected. One more weird thing happened that is noteworthy...ALL my PCs have been running Windows 10 Professional, but only the Alienware has been nagging me about upgrading to Windows 11, saying it is ready to go and I keep denying it. But NOW, after all of this, I checked for Windows updates, and now it says this PC is NOT compatible with Windows 11. I'm inclined to say that's a good thing, but I honestly don't know why this happened. I know on my development PC it's because that Dell doesn't have the TPM module and on my laptop it is disabled in the BIOS. But the effects on this Alienware have me confused.

One last note and it was the one thing I did last night before going to bed. When you clone or restore a backup from a smaller drive to a larger drive, the larger drive appears the same size as the smaller drive because the partitions are backups up exactly as they were. Normally on Windows 7 or later you can go into Disk Management and expand the system partition to use up the extra space on the larger drive, however, this doesn't work if there are additional partitions on the drive AFTER the system partition. In this case, there were three "recovery" partitions. I made the difficult choice to remove them in order to expand my drive.

The caveat being, if I cannot get a working boot disk, I may never successfully be able to restore the system again from my monthly backups. OTOH, I am considering that Windows 10 is slated for EOL (I forget the date). So I may just prepare for eventually having to fresh install Windows 11 on this PC. The Alienware is primarily used for gaming, video editing and music editing. Still, this has been a learning experience for someone who ran a computer shop from 1991 through 2005.

You cannot view this attachment.

[JKnightandKARR]

WINDOWS computers, in particular, can be a P.I.T.A. (skip this if you're not ready to read a book).

THAT was a read! lol  Yeah, that would be VERY frustrating.  TOTAL PITA!!  Sadly I am unable to offer any suggestions on helping...  Looks like Win 10 gets the axe on 10/14/25, but might just need a fresh install... that's my only idea..

Right now, just redid thermal paste on my laptop, which now keeps freezing, so off to repair center....

[Chris Savage]

THAT was a read! lol  Yeah, that would be VERY frustrating.  TOTAL PITA!!  Sadly I am unable to offer any suggestions on helping...  Looks like Win 10 gets the axe on 10/14/25, but might just need a fresh install... that's my only idea..

I warned ya...I mean, the PC is back up and running. I was just discussing everything I went through to get there, which shouldn't have happened. I back my data up monthly. Restoring everything should have been the easy part.

[JKnightandKARR]

Pain thats for sure....

[Commander Data]

I warned ya...I mean, the PC is back up and running. I was just discussing everything I went through to get there, which shouldn't have happened. I back my data up monthly. Restoring everything should have been the easy part.

Interesting. I learned from you so now find myself questioning things. I have not tested my own recovery discs. I made them and that was that. I have two Dell computers and they have the recovery tools included. I do still image the main drive every month.