Goodbye C Drive

Off-topic Chatter
1

I have a laptop and a desktop.

My mom has a laptop.

I'm in charge of the computers.

Yesterday, I upgraded my mom's laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

The upgrade worked, but the boot time was very slow.

So I Googled the problem, applied many fixes, and now it boots quickly.

One thing I did was install was TweakBit Driver Updater, which updates drivers very quickly.

It worked great on her laptop, so I installed and ran the program on my desktop.

After updating many drivers, I restarted my desktop, and it would not boot.

I have spent many hours trying to fix the problem.

As a last resort, I am reinstalling Windows 10 on my desktop, but in the process I am losing everything on the C drive!

I think just about the only thing on the C drive was Windows and almost all of the programs that I installed.

I don't even know if this will work, but that's where I'm at right now.

Anyways, the moral of the story is:

Do not use software to update drivers!

2

By the way, this is the first time in many years when I have killed a computer.

I don't usually have problems like this, and so far it really sucks.

3

Next time, make a bootable Ubuntu USB drive, and back up the important data onto an external drive.

4

That sucks! Hope you’re not losing a lot of data in the process. If not, might be an opportunity to start fresh and clean.

5

A clean install will wipe your files and installed programs but you can also reinstall Windows on top of the existing one which won’t delete existing files.

6

Always a good idea to backup important data externally before doing any kind of system update.

7

Periodically making a clone or an image of the drive is also a good thing to do. I prefer doing that rather than backing up files since I can plug a cloned drive into the computer and be up and running in a few minutes with no need to install the o/s.

8

What was wrong with win7 ?

“if it aint broke, dont fix it”

9

Although I don’t disagree, Win7 is very close to end of life/end of support. No more patches.

10

Right now I am trying to install Windows 7 because that's what the computer came with, and I still have the installation disc.

If that doesn't work, I'm in real trouble.

11

I haven't backed up to an external drive in a long time, but I should have used that backup.

I think I'll do that if I can get Windows 7 to install.

12

I'm aware of that, but that was not an option as Windows would not boot.

13

I really should have done that!

14

I like Windows 10 more than Windows 7.

But I liked Windows 7 more than Windows 8.

Windows 10 seems to be the fastest.

15

I thought that there was a Startup Repair option with the Win7 installation disk. But it’s been a long since I installed Win7 on a PC :frowning:

16

I now have a fresh copy of Windows 7!

I had Win10, and there is Startup Repair, but NONE of the options worked.

17

If you haven’t wiped it out yet, you should be able to get the data (based on the description). If you have a place to put the files, a USB stick, and another computer you can use a “Live” USB (something like Ubuntu as suggested above) to get access to the files and copy them to a safe place.

Anything important on there you need?

I’m happy to help walk you through some of that. This is what I do for a living (well… mostly servers and networks these days, but I do occasionally assist the “Desktop Support” guys)

18

yea you need to back up personal files before upgrading. Also your chrome bookmarks. Maybe registry files of your most used files say on Media Player Classic or bookmarks on pdf/comic reader etc… Also back-up your passwords stored on the PC etc…Windows sometimes does a nice upgrade and keeps old files, but when the updates or patches go back they do a “total refresh” and don’t save your files.

19

It wasn't the upgrade from Win7 to Win10 that caused the problem.

It was TweakBit Driver Updater.

20

I already wiped it out.

I do have a backup from last year that I will try to restore.