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For months now I've been experiencing severe performance issues with my PC at home, and a huge amount of it appears to be associated with Chrome and its infamous "waiting for AppCache" and "waiting for cache" problems. Since I never turn the thing off, I miss some messages from the OS, but lately after a Windows Update and reboot, I've been getting cryptic messages about a file being corrupted on the main hard drive. The file happens to part of my video driver set, so the Windows utilities are completely unable to run, even at startup. The best advice Windows has to offer is to pick a restore point and hope for the best. That's about par for the course when dealing with any MS "product."
Tonight for giggles, lacking anything good on the glass teat to watch, I did some exploring and found a Western Digital diagnostic for my hard drive. Although the SmartDrive stuff reports that all is well, this diagnostic failed to complete because of an unknown error. I think that's a really bad sign, and I suspect that my hard drive is on the verge of failure, even if their wonderful monitoring software seems blissfully unaware of impending doom. I have a nasty feeling that many or all of the performance issues I've been experiencing lately may be due to the hard drive misbehavior. I ran the Performance thingy tonight for the first time since I built the machine, and it dropped the score from 7.6 when it was new down to 5.9 tonight - that can't be a good thing.
So tonight I paid a visit to the Easter Bunny (NewEgg) and ordered a replacement drive. Well, two of them, actually, and a bit bigger than I have now - 2TB each instead of 1.5TB. I'm thinking it might be useful to make a stripe set and run RAID 0 for a change. And while I was there, I doubled the RAM from 12GB to 24GB, on the assumption that more is probably better. Hopefully this will make my Chrome issues go away, and boost the performance of the machine to much higher levels.
The question remains, though - what do I do about the corrupted video driver files? I plan to use the transfer utility that WD offers on their site to copy everything to the new drive set, but that will copy bad data. If I delete and replace it, what will happen to the display when it's been deleted, but not yet replaced? Ten years ago I was an expert in this stuff, but the technology has changed, and I haven't had time to keep up. Will Windows still fall back to basic VGA settings if a proper driver can't be found?
I have no idea what to expect when I pull the plug, but once the transition is done, I think I'm going to love my new machine... 
Will Rogers never met me.
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Is the reinstallation of your video drivers a doable solution?
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
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Probably, but I'm not sure where the original driver disk is this week. There's a lot of mathoms in that room, and dust bunnies to keep them warm. 
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: dust bunnies to keep them warm
How nice from you! 
If you have a NVIDIA or AMD-based graphic adapter, you may just remove what is left as video drivers from the Add/Remove Programs control panel ; a simple Windows Update will be able to retrieve the latest version of the drivers and install them with no harm.
If not, the you're up to try to find a working driver for your hardware ; it can be quick, or it can take time.
I hope you can go the first way. Good luck
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
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In my limited experience (I'm a software engineer, not a computer technician), all video cards come with some superVGA capabilities - 800x600x256 or 1024x768x256 being the most common. If Windows cannot detect the best drivers for your card, it will fall back on this or some similar resolution.
The video cards must have this functionality, or no operating system could boot during installation unless the drivers were included in the original installation package.
Enjoy your new system.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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I'd run Scandisk at boot (before Windows starts), to mark any bad sectors of the disc, then reinstall the video drivers.
Bad sectors don't necessarily mean that the disc is broken; it can just be magnetic anomalies that make parts of it unreadable/unwritable, so if you can replace the disc with a shadow copy, it might be "fixed" by simply formatting it.
If it's only a few sectors, though, it's not worth the effort; just mark them as dead and use the rest of the disc.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Bad sectors don't necessarily mean that, but "unknown errors" reported by the manufacturer's disk testing software (see the original post) may mean that the disk is in bad shape.
Given the relatively low price of storage these days, I wouldn't take the chance. If, however, the OP does decide take the chance, I would use the manufacturer's diagnostics to perform a low-level format before reinstalling everything from my backup. That is more likely than "chkdsk" to identify permanently bad sectors.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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The WD cr@pware always quits with unknown errors, even on new machines. I've never been able to run its complete set of tests.
As you say, discs are cheap, so going with the least time-consuming option would be my preference. If it doesn't work, scrap the disc.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Neither scandisk nor chkdsk will run; both bail out. The recommended fix is to Restore to a date when the problem wasn't happening, but I have no idea how far back that might be. But once I get the new drives installed and the files transferred, I'll reformat this one and make a portable of it.
Will Rogers never met me.
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A real case of the Murphy's -- it's broke, and so are the tools to fix it.
I got one of these[^] for days like that (and for the pile of "spare drives" that has grown way too high, over the years).
It's cool to be able to plug a drive into a different machine without opening boxes and fiddling with cables.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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If you are installing a Western Digital drive: Download a free copy of the WD version of Acronis from the WD website. With Acronis you can make an image of your systems drive from time to time. This means you can restore your systems drive to exactly what it was at a certain point in the past in about 10 to 15 minutes. You can even restore it to a completely new drive. Acronis creates a bootable CD that has all the software to install the image on any drive. It is more dependable than System Restore (and more flexible). I snap an image after every major Windows upgrade. By the way: The free WD Acronis only works if it sees a WD drive attached to the machine. If you don't have a WD drive, you can buy the full version of Acronis.
I must say that I have been using only WD drives in many machines at home and at work, and have never regretted this choice.
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I'm definitely planning to get the Acronis product; that's a tool long overdue on my machine!
Will Rogers never met me.
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I have been using it for many years with good results. The user interface is a little counter-intuitive and takes getting used to, but the software does its job!
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One more thing: When taking an image, it must be stored on a drive different from the drive you are imaging. I have a separate drive that connects through a USB 3 port and that works fine. USB 2 also works, but is slow when doing a 40 or 50 GB image.
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Is a fresh install possible? Since you're starting from scratch, so to speak you don't want to copy over problems if any. Fresh install and copy data!
New version: WinHeist Version 2.1.0
My goal in life is to have a psychiatric disorder named after me.
I'm currently unsupervised, I know it freaks me out too but the possibilities are endless.
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I could probably do that, but I really don't want to take the time to re-install everything, especially since I'm not sure where all the CDs might be hiding. Some of the stuff I have is rather hard to install, like ESRI ARCInfo. What I may take the time to do is to clean things up by removing files I don't need - I can do that in a few evenings after work, I think - then make an Acronis image on one of my portable drives, from there it should be a snap to get it working again.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Yeah I know it's a PITA, takes forever to get things back to the way they were!
New version: WinHeist Version 2.1.0
My goal in life is to have a psychiatric disorder named after me.
I'm currently unsupervised, I know it freaks me out too but the possibilities are endless.
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After taking an Acronis image: Use Acronis to verify the image. Images are large - mine are around 40 GB - and one bit out of place in the image will ruin it. I rarely do get an image that fails to verify, rendering it useless. This is probably due to defect on the drive, more than a fault of the software. It is just worth while to verify!
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You seem to be fairly up to date on this, so I ask, if I'm upgrading to a RAID 1 array using the hardware and BIOS level configuration, will the WD version of Acronis work? The documentation says that this version doesn't support RAID arays, but it seems to me that, if this is done in hardware, the Acronis will 'see' it as a single drive. Is that correct?
Will Rogers never met me.
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let's see... 24Gb RAM and 2Tb HDD.... hmmmmm... *might* be enough to run chrome with a couple of tabs open
"mostly watching the human race is like watching dogs watch tv ... they see the pictures move but the meaning escapes them"
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Quote: *might* be enough to run chrome with a couple of tabs open
You are maybe a little optimistic?
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story said: A plan devised after a few "cold drinks" to drive a snake out of a caravan has not ended well at property in Darwin's rural area.
The opening sentence says it all. 
I might add she lived near Humpty Doo.
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. – Buddha
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
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Pff... this news don't even have a croc in it!
Must have been a slow news day! 
At least she had a drink, that's the local way! 
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