Windows 10: Cortana/Search/calendar/mail/weather/groove music/moviesTV not working

The only thing I would be concerned about at this point is getting a good image from a failing drive. Sometimes you can, but sometimes you won't be able to. You should be okay at this point, if it doesn't get any worse.

I recently had a drive which was at 4% health and Macrium would not image without errors. I had to copy the drive using ddrescue to another healthy drive first, then put that healthy drive through a recovery program to get the data off it.

Once you get the new drive in and restore the image to it, you'll need the W10 ISO to run the repair install.

Oh yes - you'll also need a flash drive or DVD to make the boot media, to recover the image onto the new drive.

 

*Ditto But we have no idea what his system is (nothing is filled out) so I just went with what's currently in there.

 

I'll just jump in and jump right back out.

I've used Macrium to completely image every partition on a drive to an external, with verify. NOT cloning, partition imaging. Then replace the main drive (SATA 0), plugged external back in and drag 'n drop using Macrium back to the new empty drive. Nothing done to new drive to prep. Booted right up.

It's not hard, but a little time consuming.

Time is what you do not have a lot of right now. The longer you wait to do the process, the greater the risk. That risk is going to increase geometrically.....meaning tomorrow will be twice as risky as today. 2 days out, 4 times., etc., etc. Do as simrick and dalchina advise. Get a decent spinner replacement and external. Do the process before you can't. If it's borderline too late already, simrick's plan B is in order.

 

Unfortunately it seems I can't create an image disk using Macrium. I got an error right off the bat at 1%. At this point should I just back up important files and wait til my hard drive dies to buy a new one?

 

Yup, means your disk is going down.

Now, have you already got backups of your personal files? If so, you're heading for a reinstall with a new disk.

If not, oops. I'm afraid it's just a question of how much you're going to lose, and you will discover rather painfully how useful it will be in the future to use disk imaging and a good backup strategy.

You now need to try to copy what you can of your personal data from your disk by hand to external storage. If you try to copy huge folders you will probably find this fails part way- or you may be lucky. it all depends on how your disk is failing.

Do whatever you can to not write anything more to your failing drive.

Have you created any partitions on your failing drive?

 

What's on the drive besides Windows? If it's just programs, those are things that can be reinstalled after you get a new drive in there.

On the other hand, if you've got data that needs to be saved, then we've got some work to do.

 

I have two full external hard drives with the important stuff, roughly 4 TB of data. My current PC doesn't have anything meaningful. Most of the space is actually taken by porn and VM workstation virtual drives that are actually empty. I was joking about the porn btw, who the hell downloads porn in 2017. My concern is that windows runs smoothly until the drive dies and I replace it when that happens. Hopefully continue working for as long as possible, I doubt this errors just appeared now, they might of existed for years and I just didn't know about it.

 

Sounds good news... hope you've got your external drives backed up!

And hopefully you know all the license keys for your installed programs where relevant.

But it is likely to be unreliable as a PC.

 

Okay, glad you haven't lost any data off the bad drive.
If you need any keys, you might try installing Belarc Advisor (free). It will give you a complete system inventory, and in there will be software keys. It doesn't grab Office 2013/2016, but you can get that when you log into your MS account.

Please keep on top of your externals, and don't expect them to last forever. All data needs redundancy. I had a friend tell me all important stuff was on an external, and had been for years, so it was "safe". When we plugged it in to write a backup to it, it wouldn't write anything. The drive, (or the PCB inside), was failing. Luckily I was able to pull all the data off before it bit the dust.

 

p.s. CRC errors can sometimes be corrected with multiple runs of CHKDSK. But a failing drive is a failing drive.

 

Have the external hard drives backed up? This is actually one big concern I've always had at the back of my mind. All my important stuff are actually on those external hard drives and I can't afford to buy another 4 TB just to have 2 copies of everything. What exactly do you mean by back up?

 

That's exactly what I'm saying. Redundancy is key. Drives fail, and they can fail without warning. External drives especially - the internal PC board usually fails first, (before the drive), so you can usually pry the case open and get to your data. However, in the case of Western Digital, they now solder their drives directly onto the PCB, so when the PCB fails, your data is held hostage to a data recovery service (such as theirs).

Redundancy is key. Is the value of your data worth the cost of another drive? What would happen if you lost your data? Could you live without it? i.e. is your data worth this? seagate 5tb drive - amazon.ca CDN$160.

Best practice is 3-2-1: three total copies of data, two local and regularly swapped, one set off-site.

 

If you back up your big drives with disk imaging, for example, the images are compressed, and only contain used data, so will be smaller than the source disk. However, there will usually be a set of significantly smaller images (representing differences with respect to the initial (base ) image, as you update your disk, and update its backup. Reckon on perhaps 1.5x to 2x your used data for an image set, depending on how many different dates you wish to be able to restore to.

Also depends if you use differential or incremental imaging- the latter needs somewhat less space.

If you just elect to keep a single copy (not the best idea) then the storage space you need will be smaller.

There are plenty of backup strategies and tools as I'm sure you know.

Since I started with 8" floppy disks (1.44Mb each if I recall) I don't think I've ever lost anything very significant. Yet.

Of course, if you have super-fast upload speed you could back up to a cloud service if you have enough storage allocated... that would save you the cost of disks, replacements, physically securing them and make your data available anywhere you can access that service. (Might not be so in China, for example).

 

Hi.
Just wanted to mention this.
Hard Disk Sentinel is free today on Bits du Jour. This program monitors all hard drives connected to the system and warns you when a drive begins to show signs of failure, so you have time to grab your data and replace it. I have the Pro Family version and put it on all my systems. Might want to grab it while it's free and try it out. It's available to "transfer" to another owned computer, and doesn't require you to install before the giveaway is over, so it's perfect for you to get now, and install when you get your new hard drive.
Hard Disk Sentinel Standard Edition Hard Drive Software 100%
.

 

Ok, Thanks.





This site reminds of a french website that had a similar model giving different free stuff every day but unfortunately I forgot the name *cry