formatting

[woodchip]

My win 7 os is not letting me format my hd even when I use the command prompt. Any suggestions?

[Tunnelcat]

I know this isn't an answer to your question woody, but since Windows 7 will no longer be supported next year, maybe it's time to upgrade your system if it can run Windows 10? Apparently, one can still get the free upgrade to Windows 10 from MS, even though they kind of don't advertise it. Apparently, MS has never shut down those upgrade servers according to ZDNET. I've got an office system that's still using Win 7, so I'm going to give the process a whirl pretty soon and see what happens. The worst that could happen is that I have to go out and buy a copy and upgrade it that way, because I don't plan on retiring this system for awhile. All my other systems are now running Windows 10 Pro, so it's my last computer standing right now running 7.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how ... 0-upgrade/

[vision]

Which drive are you trying to format?


Also, TIME TO SWITCH TO LINUX.

[fliptw]

so right clicking the drive in explorer and selecting format doesn't work?

Lets also assume windows won't let you format the c drive while windows was booted off of it.

[woodchip]

I know this isn't an answer to your question woody, but since Windows 7 will no longer be supported next year, maybe it's time to upgrade your system if it can run Windows 10? Apparently, one can still get the free upgrade to Windows 10 from MS, even though they kind of don't advertise it. Apparently, MS has never shut down those upgrade servers according to ZDNET. I've got an office system that's still using Win 7, so I'm going to give the process a whirl pretty soon and see what happens. The worst that could happen is that I have to go out and buy a copy and upgrade it that way, because I don't plan on retiring this system for awhile. All my other systems are now running Windows 10 Pro, so it's my last computer standing right now running 7.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how ... 0-upgrade/

TC, I am upgrading as my old mb died. Got a aesus prime h370m plus to replace it. New mb only accepts win 10 which is why I wam trying to format it. I already went and made a bootable flash for win 10 but it won't let me upgrade from the win 7...hence trying to format the existing drive.

[woodchip]

Which drive are you trying to format?


Also, TIME TO SWITCH TO LINUX.

vision, my existing hd is a wd 1 tb model wd1002faex. sata drive with 64mb cache

[woodchip]

so right clicking the drive in explorer and selecting format doesn't work?

Lets also assume windows won't let you format the c drive while windows was booted off of it.

no.

[woodchip]

General question. If formatting is to big a headache, what would be a good one to replace it ? I see all kinds of hd's under a 100 bucks including the same updated wd 1003 for 74.00. Thoughts?

[Vander]

Get a solid state drive. It's the best upgrade you'll ever get, and they've gotten pretty cheap now.

[woodchip]

Vander, looked into ssd's and the biggest problem I read is they are not as durable as reg hd's. My wd's are 10 plus years old and run fine where-as I read that ssd's last maybe 6-7 years. Don't know the veracity of this. Also the cost of ssd is close to twice the cost of regular hd.

[Vander]

Here's some info. Unless you're going to be continuously writing to the drive over years, it won't be any less reliable than a mechanical drive. The cost increase is more than justified by the performance increase. Of all the upgrades that can make your computer "feel" faster, a solid state drive is at the top.

I would say if you do choose to stick with a mechanical drive, don't ever use a computer with a solid state drive. Once you've used one, it's a painful experience to use a mechanical drive.

[vision]

Regarding your motherboard, disabling Secure Boot should allow you to install any operating system you want. I hope to never own a copy of Windows 10, and I'll hold on to Win7 for dear life, just my Win98 laptop and my WinXP virtual machine. ★■◆● Win10.

Regarding hard drives, I agree with Vander. SSDs are the way to go. The popular setup is to have your operating system on a smallish SSD (128 GB) and use a large platter drive for your data (1TB+). Some hard drives are hybrids and look like a traditional hard drive but have a secret solid-state partition, so having one of those would be cool if you only have a single drive bay.

Sorry this has been so frustrating for you. Computers are hard, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Culturally we are expected to know how to use one, but they aren't washing machines or toasters -- they are super sophisticated devices.

[Krom]

Generally good advice, except nobody should be buying 128 GB SSDs in this day and age of affordable TLC flash, too small to be useful and for double the price you can get 4 times the capacity. A good 500 GB SATA SSD like a Western Digital, Sandisk or HP can be had for $60-$65. Even some decent 1 TB SSDs from them are around $100.

[woodchip]

Regarding your motherboard, disabling Secure Boot should allow you to install any operating system you want. I hope to never own a copy of Windows 10, and I'll hold on to Win7 for dear life, just my Win98 laptop and my WinXP virtual machine. ★■◆● Win10.

The only problem is it appears the newer mb only accept win 10...as does the mb I bought. Hence the frustration with getting win 10 downloaded to a flash. Else I would continue using my old hd.

[woodchip]

Went with the 500 gb hd as I still have 800 gb free on my old hd. Don't seem to need the larger hd. Reason I went with the mech was the local vendor had some reasonably priced so now I got everything I need to put the old comp back together. Thanks all for the help. Hopefully the rebuild goes smoothly or I'll be back here hat in hand again.

[vision]

The only problem is it appears the newer mb only accept win 10...as does the mb I bought. Hence the frustration with getting win 10 downloaded to a flash. Else I would continue using my old hd.

Ok. It makes sense to take the path of least resistance. If you get curious, this web page shows a workaround for disabling secure boot. The concept of secure boot is a a good one, but the implementation leans heavily toward Microsoft. I'm hoping one day there will be a certificate authority like Let's Encrypt, but for operating systems, instead of the proprietary bull-crap we have now.

[fliptw]

Was the issue formatting the hd from the windows 10 installer or putting the installer onto a flash drive?

[woodchip]

Was the issue formatting the hd from the windows 10 installer or putting the installer onto a flash drive?

I got the installer onto a flash drive...and nothing to do with formatting from win 10. Issue was trying to format the win 7 hd via the command prompt.

[Vander]

Windows won't let you format the drive that holds the system files it's using. (looks like what you tried to do, though you didn't say how you got to the command prompt) You would need to boot off alternative media, such as the Windows 10 USB drive. From the Windows 10 install media, you can either launch a command prompt in recovery options to format the drive, or simply format it during the step where you choose the installation location.

[Tunnelcat]

Now I've got a question. Is it prudent to reformat the OS drive on a Win 7 computer before installing Win 10? I've got a RAID SSD setup for the OS on the one computer I need to upgrade, so 2 drives would need to be reformatted.

[Krom]

Reformat if you want a clean slate to work with, otherwise the windows 10 installer can usually do an in-place upgrade and preserve most of your settings and programs. There is usually some program that gets nuked in an upgrade anyway though, or other junk gets left over which is just taking up space like windows 10 will move all the windows 7 files into the windows.old directory which will consume like 10+ GB of space, so I usually say just format and be done with it.

And yes, windows will not let you format the OS drive while it is running.

[Tunnelcat]

So I gather the Windows 10 install media gives you that option? I've got the ISO on a flash drive, not the OS drive.

[woodchip]

I finally got things to work. Yeah I was using cmd prompt in win7 so that was one problem. Looks like I won't need to format it as I got the new hard drive. Will use the win 7 hd to replace the winxp hd in my backup comp (which I'm using to post here).
For TC, just got done using a bootable flash drive to install win10 on new hd and worked flawlessly (except to start I used the wrong fd that had nothing on it thinking it was the bootable drive and wondering why nothing was happening...doh)

Also found out on the old system everything checked out as good as I had mb and cpu checked at local shop. So why did it die? My only thoughts now is the bracket where you plug in things like the pwr switch and then plug into mb may have come loose or developed a short. Not sure if a short in the plug would of cause the comp. to reboot continuously as that was happening a week or so before it died.

Initial impression of new build. Downloaded 64mb proggy and it was like instantaneous. Much faster than old system under win 7. Want to compare fps in Eve Online, i'll make a separate post later on. Thanks to all who offered advice and input.

[Krom]

Also found out on the old system everything checked out as good as I had mb and cpu checked at local shop. So why did it die? My only thoughts now is the bracket where you plug in things like the pwr switch and then plug into mb may have come loose or developed a short. Not sure if a short in the plug would of cause the comp. to reboot continuously as that was happening a week or so before it died.

Sounds like a power supply issue. PSUs can wear out over time, in the last 10 years I think I've had 5 in my house that have given out and been unable to boot or hold a machine up. Also worth noting that warranty periods are often pretty generous on them. I was able to get all of mine replaced free of charge on warranty. Most recently an EVGA supernova 850w G2 was on year 4 of its 10 year warranty when it became unable to boot the machine it was in and EVGA sent me a brand new full retail box replacement.

[woodchip]

Nope Krom, that was 1st thing I suspected. Had it checked by comp. people and it was good (running rebuilt comp with it now). Even went so far as to borrowing one of their ps and same thing...no turn on.

And checked fps in Eve. Old read undocked was 60 or less. Now it is 165. So a pretty good improvement.

[Tunnelcat]

I finally got things to work. Yeah I was using cmd prompt in win7 so that was one problem. Looks like I won't need to format it as I got the new hard drive. Will use the win 7 hd to replace the winxp hd in my backup comp (which I'm using to post here).
For TC, just got done using a bootable flash drive to install win10 on new hd and worked flawlessly (except to start I used the wrong fd that had nothing on it thinking it was the bootable drive and wondering why nothing was happening...doh)

Yeah, I had a spare 16G FD lying around. The only thing it had on it was a motherboard firmware update for my old Win 7 gaming comp that I never installed. I reformatted that FD to make sure it was blank and put Win 10 on that. When I install the new OS, I'm going to back up everything and then overwrite all of the old OS information and files. I want to start with a clean slate and it looks like I got rev. 1903 when I downloaded the OS from MS too. The particular computer I'm upgrading the OS on has an issue with Firefox, so I don't want any old registry info anywhere. I installed it on a separate account way back when and forgot to name the default printer to the one I'm currently using. Once Firefox locked in on that, I could never get it to work right, no matter how much I uninstalled and removed things and deleted things in the console. The best I could get was to have it to use the side tray of my printer, but for the life of me it won't use the main tray, which is a PITA.

I can relate on the speed on a new system. My old Win 7 comp wouldn't even run some of the newest games the Intel processor was so old. But hey, I kept that thing going for 8 years with a couple of videocard and memory upgrades, so I got my money's worth. My new rig has more memory, a bigger case and it's much faster, cooler and quieter. It does have an ASUS sealed water cooler for the main processor, which is the only thing I've got to keep an eye on.

[Krom]

Nope Krom, that was 1st thing I suspected. Had it checked by comp. people and it was good (running rebuilt comp with it now). Even went so far as to borrowing one of their ps and same thing...no turn on.

And checked fps in Eve. Old read undocked was 60 or less. Now it is 165. So a pretty good improvement.

Nice improvement!

Hmmm, if it wasn't the PSU, then I wonder... I've seen plenty of crazy stuff, like even in my own computer once I had dust short out some video RAM (back when the pins were still visible) that caused a system to not POST, which obviously got better once I went over everything with compressed air. PSUs are nice because it is usually an easy fix and easy diagnosis, but once you have verified it is good then there are a billion other things that can go haywire and make a system start acting up like that. Lots of invisible stuff that is an epic pain to track down, probably for the best you just went ahead and upgraded. Systems that start doing that are getting "cranky" in their old age and it was bound to start needlessly driving up your blood pressure.