Quote: "Why are his thumbs up blurred out? Is it considered offensive in some cultures?"
lol
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News. I'm finally upgrading to 1080p for my monitor. HOORAY! Getting a
BenQ RL2455HM 24" gaming monitor [for anyone considering purchasing this monitor, get it from eBay - it's $24 cheaper].
BE GONE, ~720p! And
if my old(er) GPU sells for a decent amount, I may also buy a 250GB SSD (
Samsung 840 EVO) so that BF4 doesn't take 5 minutes to load each map and then stutter severely because it can't load stuff from the hard drive fast enough.
So. About a week ago, I decided to fix my sister's laptop. It's an ASUS something-a-rather, but it came from the factory with two partitions (hate much!). I knew it was possible to merge partitions, but I'd never done it before so I started doing research. Apparently there were quite a few programs that could do it, but most/all were commercial pay-for. In the end I "obtained" the highest recommended one (forget which it was exactly), and ran it, checking the settings very carefully.
I must say at this point that I decided (against my better judgement) not to bother doing a backup. Baaaaaaad. I would have done it except that I had no external drives available that had enough space to backup to.
Well the partition thingy seemed to be going fine. It restarted Windows and ran at boot because Windows was using the main partition. I left it and went with Dad and my brother to climb a mountain in the Land Rover and chainsaw some wood for our fireplace.
When I got back, my sister (Poss, short for Possum, the nickname she's had since she was tiny) said her laptop was restarting constantly. I said, "Ah drat, the MBR's corrupt, gimme a sec and I'll fix it". I was wrong. For a start, I couldn't run startup repair, despite having the correct Win7 install disc; it told me Windows was the wrong version. I spent the next several hours researching this problem and eventually downloading and burning the
Easy Recovery Essentials (which, despite its appearance, is definitely not scamware and really does do its job). I booted into the small version of Linux included and ran auto repair. The laptop locked up. I then ran the partition manager (GParted) and it told me the MFT was corrupt. Noooooooooooooooooo.
I'd never fixed a corrupt MFT (let alone seen one before), so I started off on another round of several hours of research (I think this was the next day, though). Eventually I learned that NTFS stores a backup copy of the MFT on the centre of the disc.
Skipping a bit of the story, I discovered Hiren's Boot CD. Amazing piece of kit, now a permanent addition to my IT toolkit. I ran CHKDSK on its Mini Windows XP, and it did some stuff. It took hours to finish, but actually restored some of the files. I was quite relieved that at least some of the data was back, but also worried that it had failed to get all of it (Possy had lots and lots of photos and Bandicam/FRAPS recordings, most of which were still missing). I was surprised when she wasn't even slightly angry at me for breaking her laptop, but she said it was the partition software's fault, not mine. I didn't say that it really was my fault for not doing a backup.
More research, and I learned that TestDisc was the best way to restore broken partitions, so I ran that. I had to do a deep search, so it took ~10 hours.
Next day. In the massive list of found partitions (most of which were nonsensical), I could find the original D:\ partition (the second of the two merged partitions) with all its data on it (AMAZE), but still could only find the SYSTEM, RECOVERY and C:\ partition with its mostly missing data that CHKDSK recovered. Bad. I could have written the new partition table to the disk with that much, but I was loath to risk losing any more data, and decided to wait. I accidentally pressed Q too many times and went back out of the deep search results. Not sure what to do next (it was 1am), I started another deep search and went to bed.
Next day. The search finished, but I still didn't want to write the new partition table without more research. I thought it might be worth trying to get Startup Repair to run, so downloaded several different Windows 7 ISOs (which is completely legal, btw), but they all refused to run. I was confused and annoyed, but decided to look elsewhere.
I was getting fed up with working on a laptop in my sisters' messy room, so I decided to take the hard drive out and put it in my PC with the intention of doing a clone before working on it any further. I was sitting there, horrified at the task ahead of (that is, trying to move enough data around to create an empty hard drive somewhere that I could clone the broken drive to), when I suddenly decided I was sick of having no fix and would just run CHKDSK again; sometimes it's necessary to run Startup Repair three times with reboots, so I thought "why not, I'll just try CHKDSK again".
I watched it start, and realised it actually seemed to be fixing things this time. It was doing better than before. This gave me hope. The CHKDSK finally finished (several hours later), and... lo and behold the files were back! Wonder and joy! And relief!
I shut down my PC, took out the drive and raced inside (
my brother and I live in a bus next to our house) to try booting. It booted first go and the Windows logo came up, but it crashed with a very specific BSOD just before the login screen would have come up. I searched the internet for a while (all the while not really caring how hard it would be to fix because all the data was back regardless), but it got late and I was tired.
Next day. The BSOD was, apparently, common after changing partitions around or sometimes adding new drives on Server editions of Windows. Using a Win7-compatible registry editor (the install was on a flash key - it only took 10 seconds to install so I just installed it every time I booted) - I wasn't sure if the Mini-XP RegEdit would be compatible - in Mini-XP I fiddled with the AutoMount value in the MountMgr key and the MountedDevices key for hours, but could NOT succeed. If I disabled AutoMount, the BSOD was fixed but then Windows would just end up with a black screen and a movable mouse cursor. Close, but not quite there yet.
I then became convinced that I needed to use Startup Repair, so spent hours researching why I couldn't boot the Windows 7 disc.
Next day. I started searching again, and almost immediately came across a
somewhat obscure post that finally solved the problem for me: I had to boot the disc as UEFI! Finally, Startup Repair could run! But... it couldn't fix anything.
Skipping another long part of the story, I finally came across another obscure post that listed the exact symptoms I was having... and the fix. It was getting the black screen with the mouse cursor because the permissions had been reset on most files on the drive by CHKDSK!! YES! I just opened the drive in Mini-XP (thank you Hiren's!) and set the owner of the drive from a long string of random letters (which indicates a non-existent user) to the Admin group. I don't know whether it was necessary necessary or even why I did this, but I then proceeded to set the permissions for the files on the drive the allow the admin group Full Access. And it booted!
WOOT! FIXED!
Well, it booted, and most things worked, but... not quite fixed. When I opened explorer of any kind (I couldn't do anything with the drives), it crashed and restarted, citing a .NET DLL as the problem. I decided to do a repair install, but when I tried it, the installer said the installed Windows was newer than the disc. I realised the disc we had didn't have SP1, so I downloaded the correct Windows 7 SP1 U (Media Refresh) ISO and finally started the repair install.
And then, after resetting the theme, the laptop was fixed. After a week of spending most of my time stuffing about with that, it was finally back to where it began. The partitions had even been reset to C:\ and D:\. Then my brother said he had enough space on his external drive to take all the data from D:\ (and we'd recently upgraded to a fully gigabit network, so it would be fast), so we decided to do what I should have just done from the beginning - cut all data from D:\ partition, delete it, expand C:\ (which can even be done while Windows is running) and cut the data back.
That's it. Done. That was a wasted week of my life, and stressful to boot. I have learned my lessons. 1) Never, ever merge partitions. 2) Always backup the data before playing with partitions. 3) Never, ever merge partitions.
