When To Dump it all and Reinstall?

[jbar1]

We have many machines come into the shop that have the OS thourghly trashed due to any number of reasons where it will take more than an hour or two and then may not be reliable. We give the customer the facts and an estimate of cost involved including saving as many files as we can Vrs fdisk, format and reload and instructions on how to reduce the chanch of this happening again. (hah) Usually they take the easy and cheap way out(but dont follow our instructions). Our shop is small and busy with a good bit of Mission Critical work for commercial accounts. How do you decide the best method and do you include file recovery if posible?

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If life is a bitch then what is death? I believe I will take the bitch!

[klenard]

dood, if the comp is really junked but you know for certain you can fix it, and the customer is willing to shell out the money, i say do it. but if it looks like the worst thing you have ever seen........ then tell the customer that all of their files are lost and then reinstall, I hate being confronted with stuff like that because it is so time consuming and bothersome...........

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You have to be smarter than what you are working with.

[pga]

Wouldn't want to tell you which way to go... I have a problem of determining when to stop... I always feel like if I just spend "10 more minutes" I'll have it fixed... but an hour or so later I'm kicking myself for not reloading!!! And you're right... there are those times you'll fix the main complaint/problem but there are other underlying issues that creep up later on.

I think it's a problem alot of us techs have... knowing when to draw the line. We just want to fix it, and we can.. in just 5 more minutes.... well maybe 10 more minutes.... no I meant starting now! ... i mean starting now!.... oh crap, I should have just reloaded Windows.

Beware of the most popular virus that has been infecting the majority of computers for over a decade!! It's called "Microsoft Windows" ... it has may strains: 3.x, 95, 95a, 95b, 95c, 98, 98se, me, nt, 2000 etc... and there are other variants such as "plus", CE, office, works, etc...

[shawnMt]

klenard - I know what you mean. I wanna fix it - and i can in another 10 min - on this reboot it should be ok...

But there are those situations when 95A is utterly and hopelessly fried.

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Paint your old laptop!

[sdrawkcab]

I have sort of a list of things I will spend less time trying to fix, like HD controllers with ! or ? in the Device Manager, or VMM32 errors on boot-up. I'll try a short list of fixes for these things, but I know from 5 yrs w/95 and 2 yr w/98 that it's not going to work. Time to tell the customer "Sorry, all your files are lost."

Software problems are my weakness, though. I'll spend hours uninstalling and reinstalling Outlook and tweaking the registry to get it to open w/o that stupid "Illegal Operation" after I've already replaced the entire guts of the computer looking for the bad part. I like to approach it on a case-by-case basis, sometimes I will get a customer's machine working just well enough in Safe Mode for them to backup their files, then they can bring it back and I'll reload the OS.

We don't do backups! Had some a-hole rip me a new one because I ZIPped his workman's comp info to a floppy, then another tech made a boot disk out of it So now, if you do not have a recent backup you better make one, cause dozens of signs all over the shop tell you we are not responsible for one byte of your data...

[CCTech]

Well, drawing the line is definantly a problem for us all. Usually, if i spend 10-15 minutes on the problem and it does not look like something that is too easily fixable, i call em and tell them i can back up their data if they need me to, if not then it will be cheap and easy for me to format and reload. We have the most awesome backup tool ever. Its an external USB hard drive adapter. The thing is freaggin sweet...Call your distributor and ask em about it. It works great for backing up like a gig or less of data...now if they have like 10gb of mp3's they want, then its easier to just plug their drive right up into our machine...however one thing i have been doing lately is just backing up the application data, start menu, and desktop folders into a temp folder on their drive, then blasting the windows directory and loading from scratch that way...it is a little less time consuming...anyways, thats how i beez doin it.

-\ChriS/-

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dir *.* /s > prn - do that in a busy computer lab @ school and see what happens....talk about some hacked off people!

[Jeff the Brit]

My next to last resort is deltree the windows\system folder, ditch the registry files, dump Program Files\Internet Explorer and the Program Files\Uninstall Information (all from DOS mode) and reinstall. Keeps all the emails, address book, favorites, cookies, ICQ and document folders intact. Especially handy when IE5 knackers Windows again. Wherever possible, I hook up their drive to my PC and squirt their files over, it's worth it !. The other useful trick is to keep a copy of BEOS personal edition on your drive .You can mount an NTFS or Linux disk and salvage data from that, beats having to install NT on my kit !
If all those things won't work, though, it's good old fdisk etc again....

[vjason]

Jeff has the right Idea. I NEVER fdisk format a hard drive unless it is definatly the file system that is causing the problems.
I usually do what jeff described but I rename the folders and rename the win.com and the registry if that is the problem. That way if there is some important data somewhere out of the ordinary I can rename them back and get back in to their windows. If the email is not that big a deal I usually just rename the windows directory and win.com and reinstall windows into the windows directory basicly recoring windows and not touch any data.

[CondoPC]

I have to say the best two tools, are a remavable hard drive tray/rack and win2k.
Plug the customer's drive into the tray and slap into my box, go to device manager in win2k and detect new hardware. Done up to 20GB drives without a sweat or reboot.
Do the directory deletion (really fast in 2k) or better yet, use drive manager to format and partition on the fly. I keep a folder template that I drag their data into so that when I copy back, I can drag it all to C: and say yes to cop over. Quick and painless.
Only thing easier is ghost6 with an image of only windows cabs stored in windows\options folder. 2 minute ghosting and ready to install with bootable drive partitioned and clean.

[Gumby]

At our shop at least half of the machines we repair are data is mission critical situations for small businesses. The solution that we have is if the Windows load is so hosed that we will spend more than an hour of labor time we will do a dump and load usually. The way we preserve data is to copy their data to another HDD via a drive duplicator machine. (we have an 2 ImageMaster Machines awsome Equipment IMHO) then on their original HDD we restore the OS. The duped drive is then added to the machine as a second HDD. The entire drive is then copied to c:\old data. If they have several partions then we make those into sub-directories of the old data directory. They have to reload most of their apps but the files are intact. But really we prefer to fix the OS if at all possible. The other thing we do sometimes is add a network card to the machine, run it on our network and burn cdr(s) of all the files on thier computer. We have one machine on our network of which the sole purpose is to have a shared CDRW. very handy for lots of situations.

Gumby

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There are no computer problems that an arc welder and a blowtorch won't fix

[Tech666]

I'm proud to say , that , unless there are files missing (like the entire windows directory), that in 5 years , i have only reloaded 1 machine, and that was at the customers request(HE WAS A SYSADMIN and therefore knew much more than me!). Further more , that machine's reload acted screwy as well, it had bad memory.

Thats not to say , that I havent lost a boat load of money for working ten hours on a machine , and charging the customer for one or two hours...

My only real problem with Fdisking or even wiping the win dir out is that , you arent fixing the problem. I look at it this way , if i spend ten hours chasing down a problem , then , if i ever see it again , ill be able to fix it much faster.

My point to this is : Any motard with a startup disk and a OS CD can wipe a system , and start fresh , but I AM a technician. I get paid to fix it.

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Life is good...sometimes...

[This message has been edited by Tech666 (edited October 06, 2000).]

[sprkymrk]

Lots of good techniques mentioned here. Have you all heard the following advice from self-proclaimed techs:
"Getting error messages? Reload Windows."
"IE crashes twice a week? Reload Windows."
"Media Player won't work? Reload Windows."
"Computer won't shut down? Reload Windows."
"Floppy drive won't work? Reload Windows"
"Arthritis acting up? Reload Windows."
"Windows won't install? Upgrade to 98SE."

[melmo]

grab da magic bootcd
run pqmagic resize move to end of drive convert to logical partition
make new primary part
install windows
options -- drag and drop from logical partition then remove logical partition and resize primary

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what do you mean you chrage more for laptops ??

[JeffyCool]

WIN DOCTOR!!! That is the first thing I try to run on the machine. Norton Utilities 2000's Win Doctor. It's gotten me out of a lot of jams. Also, I always cleanup the startup apps either manually, or using STARTUPCOP. You can download it free from ZDNET.

I actually do like to redo the OS because I can really cleanup the system for the customer, but I agree, it's REALLY time consuming. If they are willing to pay though, it's cool.

[CobraTekMax]

Windows is only reinstalled at my shop if the registry is hosed and there's no recent backup, or if the customer does something really idiotic like deleting all their DLLs or VXDs. And if an OS reload is necessary, I don't fdisk/format unless I can verify that the FAT is part of the problem. I generally just dump the registry, system folder, and Internet Explorer folders, then load over top of what they've got. Explain to them that while their data is still there, they will have to reload most, if not all of their applications. I'm happy, they're happy, and it saves a lot of headaches, plus I don't hear "What happened to all my MP3s?" "Sir, we told you we would have to format and re-install. We explained that you would lose ALL of your files." "Even my MP3s?" "Yes sir." "What about my address book?".....

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Clatu...Verata...nnnn...necktie...nectur...nickel. ...it's definately an "N" word...