Well, I never did pull the trigger on buying this setup. As my project designs and the cost/ability of 3D printing merged I opted for a "3d Printer Delta Kossel Diy Kit". It was a slow build and I took time to purchase the right tools and materials for the best build.
So, what happens? Almost done with the printer build my puter goes to crap. Failing to boot, I try cloning my drive. Errors prevent cloning until a "chkdsk /r" execution - it wasn't pretty. Lots of errors. I try booting my most recent clone drive - fail. The next older clone (with the old Vista OS) - fail. I was eating my hard drive backups.
Budget blown on the printer I cranked up an old DOPO tablet and was able to get online with Amazon. Going blind on the tiny screen (I am 57) I scrapped together a workable replacement.
GIGABYTE GA-970A-DS3P FX motherboard
AMD FD6300WMHKBOX FX-6300 6-Core Processor
DDR3 8GB (2 x 4GB) 1600MHz memory
GT 710 2GD3H LP video card
I could probably use my older GeForce 9300 GTX+ video card but why take chances. I knew I had been pushing the useful life of my computer.
It came together alright but hard drives were another story.
I was still pulling boot errors and not consistent. It was boiling down to bad HDD cables. The new board had 2 new cables and with them in I started pulling the system back up. By this time it was a week of fumbling, ordering and rebuilding the hardware. Nowhere could I find my installation disks for WIndows 8.1 (for repair options) or MS Office.
On booting with the new motherboard the drives, the OS detected damage and corruption and tried self diagnoses and repair - and failing to varying degrees.
So here I was with crippled drives and no installation disks. Time to reacquaint myself with (desperate) super-user tactics. For what it is worth here is (a foggy recollection of) what got me back to operational status - YMMV!
After the "
chkdsk /r" on the new system and cables, I could clone using the VULT version of a backup. So a spare drive I've had on hand (that I almost cloned to before starting my 3D printer build - dang) became my trial and error drive and I copied my operational drive to it. It would not boot and the prior clone would boot but leave me a black screen desktop. I copied the windows/system32 files to the test drive and managed to come up with a win 8.1 bootable test drive.
I could get online at least and refreshed myself with the latest recovery options. I speak DOS 3.1 from the old days and the command line options looked like the only way up and out. If I hadn't gotten back online I would have been toast though.
I went through several rebuilds of the test drive before I ran enough things in the right sequence, but these are the best processes I could find. I don't recommend them to anyone not desperate or fully covered on backups.
Somewhere in windows you have to find the "Command Prompt (Admin)" command. I have it on the same menu as the normal restart/shutdown commands. If you have issues, research a little and there are other opportunities to get to the options.
In the command prompt window start out with the "
chkdsk <drive letter> /r" to validate the hard drive and be certain it is stable.
If stable, rebooting and running "
sfc.exe /scannow" can restore system files. In my case it reported failure to do so.
Running "
dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth" was the only option left.
After it (very slowly) completed I again ran "
sfc.exe /scannow". This time it completed. I rebooted to a cleaned up OS. If you use any of these options be sure you study their nature on the internet before using them.
Running "
Windows update" cleaned up the new motherboard driver installations (the included CD was unreadable and running the downloaded software from their website was among the causes of fatal loses of the test drive - which I recreated numerous times as events transpired).
Windows Live Mail would not come up so I still had a big problem. Too much depended on the information stored (since about 2012) to leave off of it. I won't bother with the error messages since a damaged installation could give a lot of problems. I was lucky enough to find a "good" copy of "Windows Essentials".
After uninstalling Windows Live Email and any other installed Essentials software, I rebooted and ran CCleaner with fairly aggressive registry cleaner options. I also downloaded the free registry cleaner from auslogics.com and ran it, with considerably more results.
I then reinstalled the Windows Live Mail option. It gave an initial new error about calendar corruption (which was empty) but I cleared it up with some direction from the internet and/or fidgeting with it.
Now at 9 days recovering, I am "whole again" although my back up clones may never be bootable again. The test drive is now the new boot drive and it is cloned to the last operational drive. I am in the hole moneywise now but I'll go a little deeper and get an SSD drive for the boot / operating system. For a while at least, I will run the mentioned maintenance programs on occasion to monitor the health of the system. They are good, but run a long time.
This may not be a really interesting read, but I have this posted now, somewhere I can find it if I need it again.
I need to get Max or someone to uninstall the license on the "lost" system. If I didn't have 2, I guess I would have been out of luck with Alibre relicense. With the 3D printer on hand, I pulled up Dynamics for another try at the most recent design embodiment which is greatly improved and less complicated. I can work it out in my head but need something more convincing for interested parties. Dynamics is giving me so much whoowie I'll try to find and reinstall it from the website - it
must be corrupted code as well
!!!!
I really want to post up related "stocking stuffers" on Alibre.
I'll post my further adventures in their proper sub-forums if I make it that far.
