Hardware > Troubleshooting Hardware Problems

Replacing a hard drive and reinstalling software

By Lasa Information Systems Team

In September 2007 Lasa’s Ian Runeckles started to notice that his personal Sony Vaio running Windows XP Home was taking longer and longer to boot up. After some serious investigation he decided it was time to bite the bullet, replace the hard drive and reinstall everything. This is how it went…

Slow was not the word for it. At worst, it was taking up to 8 minutes for the hard drive activity to stop and for the computer to be useable. Applications were then taking a long time to load – once loaded into memory they were fine. Cursor movement was jerky and sound was degraded when using services like the BBC’s Listen Again.

Possible causes?

So, what was causing it? I could think of nothing that had been done apart from an update to Adobe Reader which did not want to install properly. I uninstalled Adobe Reader. No difference. The AVG anti-virus was up to date and repeated scans showed no virus issues – to check I also used an online scanner, Trend Micro’s Housecall and also McAfee’s Stinger program. Windows Defender anti-spyware wasn’t showing any problems and I also ran AdAware, SpyBot Search and Destroy and HiJackThis, which all came up relatively clean. I checked the hardware as I thought it might be a memory problem; both modules were removed, re seated, run on their own and checked out OK. Curiouser and curiouser.

Scanning and defragging

I defragmented both partitions with the Windows Defragment tool to no avail. I scheduled scandisks which didn’t run suggesting deeper problems. Maybe it was a registry issue – I used Windows Registry Repair Pro which found around 600 errors and fixed them but made absolutely no difference to the performance. I also used CCleaner which found a few other issues but nothing that helped. Hmmm. I then used msconfig (Start > Run > msconfig) to see what was being started up and disabled a few unimportant programs – again no significant difference. Time to delve deeper.

Monitoring

Microsoft produce a few tools which go beyond the performance and process monitors which are part of Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del, Task manager) – these are Process Monitor and Process Explorer. I was seeing a lot of Deferred Procedure Calls which suggested to me that there was either a driver problem or a rogue piece of software was taking up too much CPU time. After Googling around I was not much wiser. I tried using BootVis, a boot streamlining tool which is now no longer available direct from Microsoft but can be found on the web. It first analyses the boot and then will attempt to speed it up – it worked once and then refused to find any hard drives after that. Maybe it was trying to tell me something...

Back it up

I then did my weekly back up to an external hard drive. By now I was used to things taking ages so it was no great surprise that it took over an hour and a half to back up (using Microsoft Backup) 8Gbs of data. But I was also starting to get error reports of files not being verified and found a few pictures that had corrupted. What to do next?

Next steps

There were two options that I could see – reformat the hard drive, reinstall and see what happens or replace the drive and reinstall. I decided the safest option would be the latter even though the original disc was not quite 2 years old which didn’t seem too long. Also, as my partner uses the laptop extensively for work it was important to ensure that data was not lost and if corruption was occurring, I didn’t want that to affect future data storage. Laptop drives have come down considerably in price, so for less than £60 I bought a nice new Seagate 80Gb drive.

Preparation

I identified a suitable weekend to put aside to work on the machine and started preparing for it. In addition to backing up the data which resides on the D partition, I also backed up the user profiles under the Documents and Settings folder so I would have Internet Explorer favourites, Firefox bookmarks, Outlook archives and auto complete settings (a NK2 file). I recorded mail settings (account names, username, password, pop and SMTP settings), FTP settings for our websites and also the computer name. I ran Belarc Adviser which provided me with system information in case I needed to download drivers. I also noted all the applications which were installed. Having satisfied myself I had enough information, I turned off the machine, removed the drive and put in the new one.

Replacing the drive

Booting the machine showed that the drive had been accepted and I then inserted the system recovery DVD-R which I’d made soon after buying the laptop. I was very glad I had as there were no other discs supplied with the machine so I’d have had to buy a whole new operating system…

I selected the option to return the laptop to its factory state which installed a 30Gb C partition for the operating system and application software with the remainder being allocated for user data. Half an hour later the recovery software demanded the application recovery DVD-R and after about another 45 minutes the machine was up and running. I added two users to Windows. The wireless connection kicked in and I input the WEP security key (which I had written down separately), checked Internet Explorer and we were back online.

Tidying up

Next job was to uninstall software which I didn’t want or need – trial versions of Norton Internet Security 2005, Norton Security Centre, Office 2003 SBE along with Yahoo Messenger and Adobe Reader 6.

Having set up Windows Updates to run automatically the shield on the system tray popped up and the first of around 80 updates started to download. Anti-virus software was the first to be installed and also updated followed by office software.

I restored the files from the back up to the D drive and received warnings of corruption on one of the Outlook pst files. I Googled for Outlook repair and found that there is an application named scanpst.exe located in a C:\program files\common files sub folder. I ran the file on the pst file and it showed no errors. All good. I started Outlook up in each profile and added back in the mail settings, ran the mail test, all OK. Time for lunch!

Updating

Back at the desk I noted that Sony’s Vaio update feature had kicked in so I visited the update site which recommends driver and other Sony proprietary software updates. Some install automatically while others download and need manual installation. The site gives full instructions on how each update has to be done.

Reinstalling external hardware

External hardware was the next to be installed – the printer had been correctly identified and installed by Windows but was missing the HP management software which I find quite useful at alerting low ink levels and so on. I use a wireless trackball mouse which was working (along with a USB mouse and the trackpad) but again it was useful to have the additional functionality from the manufacturers software. I had driver software of the scanner on the D partition so that just required installation. I copied over favourites and bookmarks and then waded into other application installations such as Roxio and Paintshop.

Security

Unlike Windows 2000, when XP Home is installed you don’t have to enter passwords – I’m very security conscious so these were quickly added back in through Control Panel, User Accounts.

Final niggles

What did I forget? Well, I needed to change the paths for My Documents to point at the D drive to save having to keep changing paths when opening or saving files. I also forgot to move the Outlook NK2 addressing auto complete files over. I did lose some Outlook rules but they were quickly reinstated. The laptop was also behaving strangely on starting up when it only recognised USB devices after logging on. This then got worse by not recognising any USB devices at all and seemed to be attempting to load them, then unloading them. I removed all the devices, went into Device Manager in System in the Control Panel and removed the USB Hub Controllers. Restarting Windows reloaded the controllers and I then added each USB device at a time. This appears to have sorted the problem. Otherwise, it’s back to its old self again which is hugely relieving!

Lessons …

Rounding up some lessons learnt:

• Be thorough about trying scanning, maintenance and fixing tools – you might not need to reinstall everything
• Google is your friend – be prepared to spend time researching the problem
• Create recovery discs if the computer manufacturer doesn’t supply them and keep them handy and safe
• Give yourself plenty of time and don’t rush – don’t attempt to do it if you (or another user of the computer) have a deadline coming up soon
• Warn other users what you are doing
• Be prepared – write down all your passwords, settings, usernames, license keys etc
• Backup your data and test it can be restored before wiping the disc!
• Run an inventory tool so you know what hardware you have
• If buying a new disc, check it’ll interface with the computer
• Update everything
• Eat lunch!

Good luck!