To Windows 10 and Back

JohnZeman · January 05, 2016, 09:31:37 PM

48 hours ago I made the conscious decision to ignore my cardinal rule of never upgrading one of my computers to a newer version of Windows and downloaded Windows 10 to replace Windows 7 in my main PC.

At first all went well, for several hours I happily explored its new capabilities and had Windows 10 configured just about the way I wanted.

And then last night when I wasn't really doing anything significant it began slowing down. Way down, impossible to use down. Just booting up or shutting down then took an hour and I shudder to think how long it would have taken to launch a program like IMatch. I could hear the hard drive grinding away, obviously working very, very hard even though I wasn't really doing anything. So I googled, I fought it, I rebooted time and time again but if anything, the problem just continued to get worse. For 24 hours I fought this head banging problem.

Fortunately being a paranoid kind of guy, before doing the upgrade I had cloned my Windows 7 C: drive to a new spare I had, just in case I had problems and boy I'm sure glad I did. So reverting to my previous OS was simply a manner of swapping out one hard drive for another. Now my machine is humming happily along again just like it had been before this whole fiasco began.

Pity. There are some things I really liked about Windows 10, but I'm going to keep Windows 7 in this 5 year old computer until I buy a new one.

Mees Dekker · January 05, 2016, 10:11:12 PM

This is really a pity.

With me it was just the other way around. I was contemplating buying a new computer (because of the lack of speed), until I migrated to W10. My computer is also 5 years, almost 6 years old. With W7 it was becoming slower and slower, nut now it runs as if it were new. So I'm very happy with W10 and IMatch as well, running very smoothly now. So not all hope should be lost.

jch2103 · January 05, 2016, 10:20:08 PM

Quote from: Mees Dekker on January 05, 2016, 10:11:12 PM
With me it was just the other way around. I was contemplating buying a new computer (because of the lack of speed), until I migrated to W10. My computer is also 5 years, almost 6 years old. With W7 it was becoming slower and slower, nut now it runs as if it were new. So I'm very happy with W10 and IMatch as well, running very smoothly now. So not all hope should be lost.

Similar situation here with an almost 8 year old Dell XPS 420. I had previously upgraded to an SSD and Win 8 (not as bad as some have said) before upgrading to Win 10. Had a few small issues re audio driver (which had also happened under Win

; after that everything worked great and faster than before.

John - Any chance you had a hardware issue? Your situation sounds unusual otherwise.

JohnZeman · January 05, 2016, 10:22:14 PM

I agree my problem must not be a common one, I haven't heard of anyone else experiencing it.

Since my initial post I've discovered what I think may have happened. After shutting down I reconnected the Windows 10 hard drive, which is a new one, then attempted to boot up the computer on Windows 7 with the intent of deleting the Windows 10 drive partitions then cloning it to the Windows 7 drive to have as a spare. Well upon boot up Windows 7 threw a hissy fit at all the hard drive errors it found on the Windows 10 drive. So I had to run CHKDSK to repair all those errors and now have successfully cloned that drive with Macrium Reflect to be a working spare for my Windows 7 C: drive.

Those errors would explain the excessive Windows 10 hard drive use once I started experiencing those slow down problems yesterday. I have no idea why Windows 10 didn't catch those errors but I suspect even if it had there were so many problems to correct that the data on that drive would no longer be valid.

The obvious question in my mind is, what caused those errors?

jch2103 · January 06, 2016, 12:08:10 AM

Quote from: JohnZeman on January 05, 2016, 10:22:14 PM
The obvious question in my mind is, what caused those errors?

Could be impending hardware failure on the drive, or something else (e.g., power failure/surge, etc.). Did you try checking the SMART status of the drive? (See, e.g., http://www.howtogeek.com/134735/how-to-see-if-your-hard-drive-is-dying/)

JohnZeman · January 06, 2016, 12:55:53 AM

No I didn't. The drive is new, only about a week old, of course it could still be going bad but right now it's back up and running Windows 7 without any issues. Just as it was for 3 days before I upgraded to Windows 10.

A side note. The reason I decided to do the upgrade was because the day before I had successfully upgraded my 5 year old laptop with no issues. And so far, knocks wood, the laptop is just fine.

JohnZeman · January 06, 2016, 12:59:00 AM

Quote from: jch2103 on January 06, 2016, 12:08:10 AM
Could be impending hardware failure on the drive, or something else (e.g., power failure/surge, etc.). Did you try checking the SMART status of the drive? (See, e.g., http://www.howtogeek.com/134735/how-to-see-if-your-hard-drive-is-dying/)

Thanks for that link, looks like that will be a very useful tool to have!

heicron · January 06, 2016, 03:00:26 AM

Hi John

I am a long time IMatch and Windows user and have been building my own computers for many years. I now have four desktops and an old laptop in operation. Mine, my wife's, a server for back-ups and now one is a test bed for new "anything". None are high end though. All, except the server have been upgraded to Windows 10. I am a sucker for free upgrades. Installing and reinstalling a Windows OS can be a real pain as I see you have experienced in reading your post. If I understand your situation right you had both drives connected when you tried to boot back to Windows 7. Windows will have a fit with two boot drives connected at the same time without a boot manager which may the reason for the errors.

Here is what I have done to solve that issue.
Over the last few years I have acquired several removable drive racks.
This is the ideal way for me to try a new OS and be able to go back to the original if things go bad. The original gets a back-up and the hard drive then is removed. A new drive goes into drive bay and the new OS is installed. At any time I can shut down and swap drives if necessary to go back to the original OS. All my data is on other drives. I must remember to reconfigure my drive letters on the new OS though. Also with the drive racks I can do a backup and store the drive in a safe place.
Once the system is running I can insert another drive into a drive bay and access all files on it or reformat it. ACHI must be configured in the bios for the drive bays to be hot-swapable.

Your other option would be to have your case open and manually connect and disconnect the drives as needed and or have a usb drive dock so that the other bootable drive can be accessed after the OS is running.
I like Windows 10 but change is always a pain to reconfigure. Especially when we're to old to list our age.

I hope this is helpful, good luck.

JohnZeman · January 06, 2016, 04:13:39 AM

Thanks heicron I appreciate your input. When I did the Windows 10 upgrade I only had the one system drive connected, the other cloned to Windows 7 drive spare was sitting on the desk behind me. However after my fiasco upgrading to Windows 10 I shut down and disconnected the Windows 10 drive and connected the Windows 7 drive and verified I could boot up normally that way. After that I shut down again and at that time I did connect both the Windows 7 drive and the Windows 10 drive when I booted up the computer with the intent to wipe clean the Windows 10 drive. Perhaps that's what caused the corruption?

At any rate my excursion into Windows 10 land on my desktop PC left a lot to be desired. On my laptop it's been a pleasant journey...so far.

DavidOfMA · January 06, 2016, 04:57:39 AM

Are there any "almost must have" features you've discovered on your Win10 laptop? I, too, am loathe to upgrade the OS on a Windows machine for fear something I use all the time will break and I won't discover it until I've wasted a lot of time setting up Win10. If, however, it were significantly faster running the same programs, that might convince me.

David

Mario · January 06, 2016, 09:00:50 AM

I have migrated all my systems to W10 without any issues.

- PC (fresh install)
- Tablet (upgraded from W8.1)
- Notebook (upgraded from W7)
- Dell workstation (6 years old, installed with XP, then upgraded to W7 then upgraded to W10)

All run fine, except for the Dell which has some minor issues. It feels faster under W10 than under W7, but I think the XP->W7->W10 migration produced a lot of 'sludge' in the system which affects Windows 10. This is also a developer PC, which means that tons of software gets installed, upgraded and removed all the time.

As soon as I'm sure that my new PC works and is reliable, I will wipe the Dell and setup Windows 10 from scratch. I have the operating system on a SSD so this should be quick to do from an USB 3.0 stick. On my new PC this took 5 minutes, so on the Dell it should take maybe 30.

P.Jones · January 06, 2016, 11:29:12 AM

Quote from: heicron on January 06, 2016, 03:00:26 AM
Windows will have a fit with two boot drives connected at the same time without a boot manager which may the reason for the errors.

Not true. I have 5 HDs connected to my PC, 3 of them with Win7, Win8 and Win10.

I have no boot manager. You just configure bios to boot to a default, in my case its Win8.

If I require to boot to any other version I just hit the F8 key at boot up and select which drive to mount.

In all Windows installations only the one HD was connected at installation time to avoid any problems.

With Win10 I did the upgrade from Win8 and when I was happy with it I then did a clean install to give a fresh OS.

Info for clean install

http://www.howtogeek.com/224342/how-to-clean-install-windows-10/