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Rexxed
May 1, 2010

Dis is amazing!
I gotta try dis!

A good poster posted:

What's the best way to transfer a Windows 10 installation (that's tied to a Microsoft account) from a 320GB HDD to a 256GB SSD, where the content currently on the HD will still fit on the smaller SSD?

1) Clonezilla wouldn't do a drive-to-drive transfer.

2) Started up a Linux live CD, set up partitions on the new drive with the same flags as the old drive, made sure the Linux desktop was displaying all hidden files, and manually copied everything over, wound up with a drive that errored on boot.

Install Macrium Reflect Free on the HD and image it over to the SSD.

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wolrah
May 8, 2006
what?
I've done about a dozen 250GB HD > 120GB SSD conversions recently using the following process:

1. Reboot Windows at least once to make sure it's happy with the current state of the drive and doesn't need to do any checks, then shut it down properly and install the new drive on a spare connection.
2. Boot to GParted Live, resize partition small enough to fit with some extra space.
3. Boot to Clonezilla, immediately exit to command line.
4. Clear the dirty flag that GParted set using "sudo ntfsfix -d /dev/<partition you just shrunk>"
5. Exit CLI, select advanced mode in Clonezilla menu.
6. Disk to disk copy, select -icds option to not check disk sizes before copying
7. Once it's done reboot back to GParted Live, resize partition up to maximum.
8. Shut down, remove the old drive, put the new one where it belongs, boot back up, and let Windows do its checks.

I think there are some boot disks that have both GParted and Clonezilla in one disk which could cut down on the reboots, but I have a PXE boot setup with both so I do it this way.

c0burn
Sep 2, 2003

The KKKing

Kerosene19 posted:

Spent the morning unfucking a failed 10 installation. It simply will not recognize or load drivers for my video card.
Msi z87-g45
Msi gtx 970

Bought the home version and it did a great job of saving my files and all that but I couldn't get away from the default Windows vga driver.

Ended up wiping the drive, reinstalling 7 and restoring the image with Acronis.

I'm guessing I'll have to format the drive and do a clean install to get this to work.

Did you try DDU?

Factor Mystic
Mar 20, 2006

Baby's First Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

uvar posted:

Just use Chrome or Firefox, maybe on a laptop? Some example screenshots here: http://www.windowslatest.com/2016/1...-notifications/

It's no worse than the various tips to "switch to Chrome" that appear on nearly every Google website (and can't be permanently dismissed without messing around).


Maneki Neko posted:

if you have tips disabled you won't see them


Khablam posted:

Or pro/enterprise, etc.

I am using chrome and Firefox daily on a laptop, but it is Pro, so maybe that's why.

PerrineClostermann
Dec 15, 2012

by FactsAreUseless

A good poster posted:

Shrink it through GParted in Linux, or through Disk Management in Windows?

I'd say do it through gparted. Disk management doesn't like to move things around in order to shrink them in general, and hates resizing the system partition.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
Run a full defragmentation pass on your hard drive, before you try to shrink the partition. It'll result in less likelihood of having problems doing the shrink.

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002

by Fluffdaddy
Or just use Samsung or Acronis's imager programs which auto shrink partitions to fit.

Kerosene19
May 7, 2007


c0burn posted:

Did you try DDU?

Yeah, DDU didn't do poo poo for this problem. Kept running into System Service Exceptions that were failing on second boot.

Once I gave up on migrating files everything came together.

A good poster
Jan 10, 2010

PerrineClostermann posted:

I'd say do it through gparted. Disk management doesn't like to move things around in order to shrink them in general, and hates resizing the system partition.

Macrium Reflect did the trick.

Walked
Apr 14, 2003

Here's one:

Wherever I leave my computer locked; about 30% of the time when I come back to it, the lock screen will either display black with a cursor only, OR the background image but no password prompt. Re-locking or typing the password blind is a no-go.

I've reinstalled windows, updated drivers, checked event logs and nothing.

I'm leaning hardware, possibly motherboard as I've had other issues with this motherboard, but open to thoughts.

I use this for with daily so I do need a stable system that I can leave locked.

Any thoughts?

Col.Kiwi
Dec 28, 2004
And the grave digger puts on the forceps...
If reinstalled windows means a true reformat and reinstall from scratch, that does sound like there's a pretty good chance it is hardware. Have you tried doing a fresh windows install where you don't install any drivers to see if that is stable? Just in case there is a driver bug or something.

When you say event viewer has nothing, do you mean really literally nothing or what is in there is not helpful? If the system is stuck at the lock screen and you have to hard reset it to get back into windows, you're going to have a critical event in event viewer from doing the hard reset. You should usually see kernel power event 41 under critical events, at the time windows booted back up after you hard reset. This just means when windows was booting it noticed it had not shut down cleanly last time. I would expect that shortly before that there is likely to be other events/errors logged but there is no guarantee. If the only thing you can see in event viewer is kernel power 41 then my next step would be to start hardware troubleshooting, ie swapping out parts and testing them in other systems/testing replacing with a known good part.

Walked
Apr 14, 2003

Yes, I mean nothing helpful. I see the expected events re: hard shutdown. Nothing else unexpected.

I did a full format and reinstall, installed fresh drivers from vendor sites, and a minimum of software (really JUST what I need - namely visual studio and VMware).

The way it behaves and only happens had me thinking it was done component going into s low power state, but I've disabled everything for lower power modes both in windows and BIOS to test that, with no dice.

I'd love to reinstall windows and re-add drivers and software one by one, but since I with from home and use this computer for that, I'm not afforded that luxury.

Col.Kiwi
Dec 28, 2004
And the grave digger puts on the forceps...
Well that sucks. Since it is happening at the lock screen, you could try booting in safe mode to take most drivers and software out of the picture and then leave the system locked and see if the issue still occurs. Just reboot into safe mode when you go to bed and check in the morning so it doesn't further interfere with work. To be safe I'd also test disconnecting any nonessential devices, external HDDs other USB devices etc. Another thing you could do to test a more bare-bones software configuration is if you have a spare hard drive, unplug your main drive and plug in the spare to put a fresh windows install on there. That test installation you can test with no drivers, test installing things one by one etc. Do this in the evening/when you have time, and when you need to work you unplug the test drive and plug in the main drive. Another thing that occurs to me is to look for any bios updates/try reflashing bios. If you can keep reproducing the issue through all of this unfortunately I think it's time to figure out which piece of hardware failed.

Arcturas
Mar 30, 2011

Is there a recommended procedure for migrating Windows to a new SSD from an older HD? I've got a 2 TB WD hard drive, and just bought a 525 GB Crucial MX 300. My current partition has about 1TB of crap on it, so I don't think I can just mirror it over. Do I create a recovery drive & then reinstall from that? Do I use the recovery drive to do a clean install (and cry when I try and find my MS Office CD keys and have to reinstall all my other poo poo?)?

PerrineClostermann
Dec 15, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
"Please close programs to free up memory"



What is even going on

biznatchio
Mar 31, 2001


Buglord

PerrineClostermann posted:

"Please close programs to free up memory"



What is even going on

Overcommit. Programs are dumb and will ask for massive amounts of memory they never use because it's a lot easier to write that way. The operating system, knowing that programs do this, will happily commit to telling the program that "sure, you got all that memory, have fun" and will not actually allocate the memory to the process until the program actually starts using it.

This is why you should always have a pagefile configured, even if you think you have plenty of physical RAM (and given the fact you're getting that message you're either running out of disk space or you've manually configured the pagefile to a fixed size instead of system managed). Because the OS needs to keep track of all those promises it made to programs for memory. And even though the space those programs asked for but haven't started using yet show up as 'free' memory; it will stop honoring future requests for memory from that and other applications if it doesn't have a way of actually fulfilling all those crazy requests in the event those programs all want to use the memory that was promised to them. A pagefile provides ample memory-of-last-resort so the OS can continue to honor memory requests being confident that should the unlikely happen and all that requested memory needs to be used, it has storage it can use to fulfill it.

Notice the Commit 30.5/30.9 GB entry in the screenshot. 30.5 GB of memory has been 'committed', but there's only enough space (RAM + pagefile space) for 30.9 GB.

biznatchio fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Nov 27, 2016

PerrineClostermann
Dec 15, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
But it is set to system managed.

isndl
May 2, 2012
I WON A CONTEST IN TG AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS CUSTOM TITLE

Walked posted:

Here's one:

Wherever I leave my computer locked; about 30% of the time when I come back to it, the lock screen will either display black with a cursor only, OR the background image but no password prompt. Re-locking or typing the password blind is a no-go.

I've reinstalled windows, updated drivers, checked event logs and nothing.

I'm leaning hardware, possibly motherboard as I've had other issues with this motherboard, but open to thoughts.

I use this for with daily so I do need a stable system that I can leave locked.

Any thoughts?

I had a very similar issue on my desktop (Win8.1, would intermittently have the black screen with cursor when resuming from idle,, never had the background image version). My best guess from digging around was that it's caused by the GPU getting dropped to a low power state when the PC goes idle and failing to resume later without any errors logged, and the only effective workaround I found was to disable something in the power settings (I think it was the 'turn off display after x minutes' but I could be wrong).


PerrineClostermann posted:

But it is set to system managed.



You have processes using unusual amounts of memory and you should figure out which one(s) it is. There's very likely a memory leak on a long-running app somewhere.

PerrineClostermann
Dec 15, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
Probably Chrome then. It's been running for a few weeks.

beuges
Jul 4, 2005
fluffy bunny butterfly broomstick

Walked posted:

Yes, I mean nothing helpful. I see the expected events re: hard shutdown. Nothing else unexpected.

I did a full format and reinstall, installed fresh drivers from vendor sites, and a minimum of software (really JUST what I need - namely visual studio and VMware).

The way it behaves and only happens had me thinking it was done component going into s low power state, but I've disabled everything for lower power modes both in windows and BIOS to test that, with no dice.

I'd love to reinstall windows and re-add drivers and software one by one, but since I with from home and use this computer for that, I'm not afforded that luxury.

Are you running an insider build by any chance?

Walked
Apr 14, 2003

beuges posted:

Are you running an insider build by any chance?

Not an insider build, no.

I'm going to go ahead and swap the motherboard because I want that sweet sweet nVME booth drive goodness anyways; hopefully it'll mysteriously stop doing this when I make that swap.

Magnus Praeda
Jul 18, 2003
The largess in the land.
I had a similar problem with wake from sleep and it ended up being that my motherboard didn't like the timing of my ram.

Factor Mystic
Mar 20, 2006

Baby's First Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

PerrineClostermann posted:

Probably Chrome then. It's been running for a few weeks.

Open up process explorer, turn on the process memory columns, select & press delete with extreme prejudice.

AbrahamSlam
Jun 12, 2013

Mess with the bull, you get the WANG!
Just throwing this out there; If your system qualified for the upgrade before the free period ended, and you still have GWX downloaded it -WILL- still work, and allow you to upgrade.
If you don't have GWX, your serial key should still activate windows 10 without issue as well.

AbrahamSlam fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Nov 28, 2016

Eletriarnation
Apr 6, 2005

People don't appreciate the substance of things...
objects in space.


Oven Wrangler
Just yesterday I put a Windows 7 Pro retail key on an ancient laptop that had only ever had Vista before and was able to upgrade it to Windows 10 and activate using the assistive technologies upgrade, so that should still be an option too.

chippy
Aug 16, 2006

OK I DON'T GET IT
I just accidentally took ownership of my Program Files directory (I was cleaning up an old drive, stoned, and got them muddled up) . It got about half done before I realised and cancelled it. Windows gave me a dire warning that if it was a mistake, I should re-apply the old permissions immediately. I don't know what they were though, and it was probably a mixture. Have I just hosed my whole world up? Is everything going to poo poo the bed or is this alright?

wolrah
May 8, 2006
what?
If it's a single user system, you probably won't notice much of anything. Possibly a few less UAC prompts from programs that check for privileges rather than just asking anyways, though that comes along with a corresponding reduction of security in that malware could modify the affected directories without needing to get past UAC now.

If it's a multi-user system you're probably going to have issues when other users are logged in. If none of the other users are admins they might not notice.

Assuming it's a single user system and you're not the idiot who opens up UPS_Tracking.pdf.zip.vbs I wouldn't worry about it too much if things seem to be working. Maybe plan to do a backup/reinstall sooner than you might have otherwise.

Fame Douglas
Nov 20, 2013

by Fluffdaddy

Eletriarnation posted:

Just yesterday I put a Windows 7 Pro retail key on an ancient laptop that had only ever had Vista before and was able to upgrade it to Windows 10 and activate using the assistive technologies upgrade, so that should still be an option too.

If you're doing a fresh install, the direct route (installing Windows 10 using a 7/8/8.1 key) should still work as well.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

chippy posted:

I just accidentally took ownership of my Program Files directory (I was cleaning up an old drive, stoned, and got them muddled up) . It got about half done before I realised and cancelled it. Windows gave me a dire warning that if it was a mistake, I should re-apply the old permissions immediately. I don't know what they were though, and it was probably a mixture. Have I just hosed my whole world up? Is everything going to poo poo the bed or is this alright?

The main thing the message warns you about is that if you'd gone and removed existing permissions you could seriously gently caress over the programs. Just adding new permissions, including through taking ownership, generally doesn't mess with anything but certain DRM schemes which your programs probably don't use.

Craptacular!
Jul 9, 2001

Fuck the DH
Does 10 have anything resembling System Restore? I use the backup function on my personal files with my NAS, but I changed GPU teams a couple days ago (always a harrowing experience) and used Display Driver Uninstaller to assist the process, and now my Windows updates won't install. I can't install this latest cumulative update either from Windows Update or as a standalone package from Microsoft. Now I can't defend myself from getting hacked by the Russians.

I just need to erase 48 hours from my system files. System Restore used to be magic at this sort of thing, but it seems to be gone.

Edit: I found it but for some reason I wasn't making restore points. Joy.

Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Nov 30, 2016

Double Punctuation
Dec 30, 2009

Ships were made for sinking;
Whiskey made for drinking;
If we were made of cellophane
We'd all get stinking drunk much faster!

chippy posted:

I just accidentally took ownership of my Program Files directory (I was cleaning up an old drive, stoned, and got them muddled up) . It got about half done before I realised and cancelled it. Windows gave me a dire warning that if it was a mistake, I should re-apply the old permissions immediately. I don't know what they were though, and it was probably a mixture. Have I just hosed my whole world up? Is everything going to poo poo the bed or is this alright?

Permissions are:

Owner: NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller

NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller: Full on everything
SYSTEM: Modify on the directory, Full on subdirectories and files
Administrators: same
Users: Read and Execute on everything
ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES: same
ALL RESTRICTED APPLICATION PACKAGES: same
CREATOR OWNER: Full

Permissions will be fixed everywhere as soon as you accept the changes, as Windows said. Ownership isn't propagated automatically, unless you clicked the Take Ownership option when you got the Access Denied error (which you might have done). If you did do that, just recursively set ownership of all the directories that come with Windows to TrustedInstaller and all the other ones to Administrators. This will break Steam and other such services somewhat. Pick a different folder to store your games in to fix it.

Craptacular!
Jul 9, 2001

Fuck the DH
So it turns out the events described above may not necessarily be related to using a third party driver uninstaller. Some googling reveals that installing KB3200970 is a difficult hassle for a lot of people.

chippy
Aug 16, 2006

OK I DON'T GET IT
Thanks guys. I didn't change permissions, just recursively took ownership. So, if I set everything back to TrustedInstaller/Administrators, that'll sort it? And if that breaks Steam, then what should I set the ownership of the Steam folder to? Myself? What is it normally?

I'm kind of tempted to just rest Windows tbh. It's a fairly fresh install so I wouldn't have to reinstall much stuff afterwards.

Riso
Oct 11, 2008

by merry exmarx

Craptacular! posted:

Does 10 have anything resembling System Restore?

...

I just need to erase 48 hours from my system files. System Restore used to be magic at this sort of thing, but it seems to be gone.

Edit: I found it but for some reason I wasn't making restore points. Joy.

System restore isn't enabled by default in Windows 10.

dont be mean to me
May 2, 2007

I'm interplanetary, bitch
Let's go to Mars


Riso posted:

System restore isn't enabled by default in Windows 10.

It is, actually; just not below a certain size system drive. I don't know the exact minimum size, just that my 120 GiB 2-in-1 starts with it off and my desktop with a 240 GiB SSD starts with it on (both sizes observed rather than labeled).

Craptacular!
Jul 9, 2001

Fuck the DH
I have 70GB free of my 120GB, so I didn't mind dedicating 11GB to System Restore.

The good news is, my problem wasn't permanent, or at least I wasn't alone with it, and it wasn't entirely related to graphics card drivers. Failing to install is apparently a thing that happens a lot with cumulative updates on Win10, and the culprit appears to be Xbox integration of all things.

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

Hey Win10 goons,

If I do a fresh Windows 7 install and get the accessibility upgrade, can I still roll back to Windows 7, or just do a fresh 7 install using the same key, while hanging on to a digital entitlement for later? this suggests I can, but if anyone had any experience doing it I'd feel a lot better.

AbrahamSlam
Jun 12, 2013

Mess with the bull, you get the WANG!

ItBreathes posted:

Hey Win10 goons,

If I do a fresh Windows 7 install and get the accessibility upgrade, can I still roll back to Windows 7, or just do a fresh 7 install using the same key, while hanging on to a digital entitlement for later? this suggests I can, but if anyone had any experience doing it I'd feel a lot better.

I -believe- you have 30 days from your initial upgrade to roll back. You had the option to do so with the GWX based upgrade, so I don't see why they wouldn't let you go back this way as well.

astral
Apr 26, 2004

AbrahamSlam posted:

I -believe- you have 30 days from your initial upgrade to roll back. You had the option to do so with the GWX based upgrade, so I don't see why they wouldn't let you go back this way as well.

They reduced it to 10 days back in August.

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Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



ItBreathes posted:

or just do a fresh 7 install using the same key, while hanging on to a digital entitlement for later?
Your Windows 7 license is never lost in this processs, and once you've had 10 running and activated, the digital entitlement to 10 will be stored on their servers for your specific hardware or associated with your Microsoft account if you've used one.

Instead of installing 7, upgrading it and relying on the limited possibility of a rollback, just do a clean install of 10 with your 7 key. Then, do a fresh install of 7 (with your key) or 10 (without key) on that hardware over and over again at will in the future.

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