What a day

[Sailorsong]

I'm lucky to be able to even post tonight. What I got up this morning my computer informed me that my hard drive was failing. Yes it actually told me to backup and replace the hard drive. LOL My computer has been acting kind of funny ( slow) for several weeks now. So I made the 4 hour round trip to the store to pick up a new hard drive and a new copy of windows. Sure didn't need that expense now.

But it is not all bad news. I was all ready to spend the next week trying to get everything on my computer back up and running. When I got home I discovered that the new drive had a CD with a program to clone your hard drive to the new drive. This was new since the last time I had to replace a hard drive so I was still a little bit skeptical about the process.

After a very long 5 hours the program finally finished copying my old drive to the new drive. It took that long because of all of the bed sectors on the old drive. I took the old drive out and booted windows on the new drive. WOW it is running. While I haven't checked out everything yet it seems that the only thing I lost was all of my old emails. And even better it looks  I will be able to return the Windows & software I bought so the cost will be a lot less. So I guess my previous life as a computer designed is paying off this time. LOL

As part of my checking things out for my computer I logged on the VA site and checked my up coming appointments. There was a new appointment listed for Orthotics fitting which I am hoping is not what I thing it is. When I went to the last Orthotics fitting the guy their said he could not fit me with a new style of AFO and I needed the Bioness instead. He also told me that it would have to be ordered through the PT department as they would have to see if it works for me first. So since this is with the prosthetics department I suspect this will a yet another waste of my time and money where they will again try to fit me with something they can't fit me with like the last appointment their.

Well I guess that is all thank goodness.

Dennis

[dogmum]

This is a tremendous help... thanks! I think I'm just going to buy the hard drive since I was in the market for a new one anyway.  

Downloading the tools beforehand isn't a bad idea though.  Thanks for passing this along.  You saved me what was sure to be a big headache...

Laura

[Sailorsong]

The CD that came with the drive really is a two different program both made the the drive manufacturer Seagate.

The first one is called Sea Tools For Windows. It is a diagnostic that tests you hard drive in several ways.

The second program is called Disk Wizard which is the program that sets up a new hard drive and copies the information on the drive.

I did go to the Seagate wen site and found they have downloads for both of them there under their support section.

If you suspect that your hard drive is going bad I would highly recommend you download the sea tools to check out your drive. If I had know about these programs and had them on my computer it would have made ny life easier to have tested my old drive when I first started to notice things slowing down.

During the clone of my drive it took so long because of the large number of bad sectors the clone program was finding. The program must have been trying to read those bad sectors thousands of times before giving up since the program would report that it would take only a few more minutes and then a few seconds later it was 1.5 more hours as it ran into these bad sectors.

Hope this helps/

Dennis

[dogmum]

Good job on the hard drive swap!  Nice that it came with a disk.  Do you know the name of the program?  Or was it branded by the hard drive?  I might be doing the same thing to my computer soon and that sounds like a good way to go.  

Sorry you're getting the runaround still at the VA. Sounds very similar to navigating the Italian national health system.  I hope that this time will be better than the last time.  Doesn't hurt to hope, right?

Laura

[HVAC]

Dennis,
Glad you saved your computer before the blue screen of death. Sorry about the VA. It is so hard dealing with any medical system. All this stuff is taxing.

Alex