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Windows 7 update stuck on constant "need to restart" - end of my tether

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Carol Haynes:
On another note:
While the interface of Windows 10 is not everyone's cup of tea, it is not that bad in my opinion. Having said that, Google reveals quite a lot of links that can make your Windows 10 installation look and "feel" like Windows 7. In that sense you would have the best of 2 worlds and you could get rid of dual-boot altogether. From Gizmo's Freeware or find your favorite link with this search term: make Windows 10 look and feel like Windows 7
-Shades (July 21, 2018, 01:57 AM)
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Trouble is I have some stuff I need that does not work well on Windows 10 so need Windows 7 at the moment.

Its not really a look and feel thing (I can live with W10 style) but more importantly the thing that winds me up about Windows 10 are the constant updates that break things - the last major feature update (Fall Creator Edition) left my system completely unbootable (including Windows 7) and it took me days to get anything working again and involved reinstalling Windows 10 from clean as it wouldn't even start recovery from USB or CD. I haven't let it install the Spring Creators Update and don't trust it too but I can't stop it forever so I am thinking of simply dumping Windows 10 on this machine. I have fixed too many customer computers recently that have had problems with the Spring update (two of them needed wiping and starting again).

I just bought a 1Tb Samsung SSD and graphics card and plan to unplug all the existing drives and do a clean W7 install on the SSD and then connect by dual booting with my exisiting Windows 7 until I can transfer everything and make sure it works. That is a long term project though - and to be honest I am not sure all the software is still installable (eg. I have an old copy of Quickbooks 2012 and don;t need to pay a monthly subscription to pay for features I will never use - just not sure I can get that activated and all the updates - if not there is no support for recovering data from my QB file so I may just need to clean up the existing install and make it minimal to use odd bits like this).

IainB:
...No I don't have a useful backup as my stupid 3Tb Seagate drives packed up (one of the heads stopped working and a second drive purchased at the same time also had a failing head). I will never EVER buy Seagate crap again! I have been burned before but never again. ...
-Carol Haynes (July 20, 2018, 08:35 PM)
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I know it's pedantic, but it seems to me that it could be useful here to note three points which could stand in the way of learning as much as one might be able to from this discussion:

* Objectivity: A hard drive being simply a manmade electro-mechanical device, it would be incorrect and an anthropomorphism (the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, animal, or object) to call it "stupid".
* Statistical validity: Without further substantive data on relevant hard drive failure-rates and performance, it would be incorrect to attribute statistical significance to one person's anecdote/experience of eventual failure of only two drives of the same brand.
* Logical fallacy: The fallacy of the availability heuristic may also be in operation (prediction of the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind) - e.g., "One swallow does not a summer make".
The engineers who design and manufacture hard drives would be well aware of both the statistical validity and relevance of the data on their manufacturing processes (they would generally be processes in statistical control) and of the performance characteristics of their hard drive equipment in testing and in operation out in the field and would have amassed much statistical performance data on their hard drive componentry and on that of their competitors.
The ordinary user can avail themselves of some this data from their HDDs today, which accumulate/log (in on-board counters) self-sensed/reported data - the S.M.A.R.T. variables - and which can be analysed to provide performance reports for the HDD in question - e.g., using various software tools including (say) SpeedFan or (better) Hard Drive Sentinel.

Left undisturbed, operational HDDs don't usually "suddenly fail", they tend to progressively fail in incremental fashion, all the meanwhile logging their gradual deterioration in their on-board SMART data accumulators. Analysis of HDD failure can be quite enlightening and can enable the user to predict HDD failure, when they avail themselves of SMART monitoring to detect when it is time to migrate from a failing drive, rather than risk blindly waiting till forced to recover from an already-failed drive.

Some potentially relevant/useful links on DC Forum:

* (a) Brand Reliability: Hard Drive Brand Reliability Data (also see other references in the DC Forum to Backblaze analysis).


* (b) Monitoring Hard Drive deterioration:Hard Disk Sentinel PRO - Mini-Review


* (c) Using SMART analysis to predict failure: Re: Hard Drive SMART Stats - from the BackBlaze Blog.


* (d) Ease of migrating (for a novice) in planned fashion from a known failing HDD:
I downloaded and installed the smaller file, then executed AOMEI Backupper. Click-click-click with the mouse - and in less than 20 seconds I had started cloning my failing Seagate drive to the new WD drive.
It was by then Saturday 2AM. I sat with it for a couple of hours, interested in seeing its progress reports, and making sure that the laptop would not go to sleep and set the screen to switch off after 2 minutes of no keyboard activity (so as to keep the temps down inside the laptop). I estimated that at the rate it was going it would take about 8 hours to complete, and so I went to bed. I was awoken at about 8AM by the HDS alarm gong telling me that the health of the Seagate drive had deteriorated another 1% to 54%, and I noticed that AOMEI Backupper was still busy making the clone with apparently no problem.
-IainB (November 23, 2013, 05:51 AM)
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Carol Haynes:
Statistical validity: Without further substantive data on relevant hard drive failure-rates and performance, it would be incorrect to attribute statistical significance to one person's anecdote/experience of eventual failure of only two drives of the same brand.
-IainB (July 21, 2018, 02:38 PM)
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The drives I bought were subject of a large class action lawsuit because they were notoriously unreliable and gave no warning of sudden failure.

Its not the first time seagate drives I bought had this reputation  within months of product launch.

Whether my experience is statistically relevant I no longer trust Seagate drives.

f0dder:
Left undisturbed, operational HDDs don't usually "suddenly fail", they tend to progressively fail in incremental fashion, all the meanwhile logging their gradual deterioration in their on-board SMART data accumulators. Analysis of HDD failure can be quite enlightening and can enable the user to predict HDD failure, when they avail themselves of SMART monitoring to detect when it is time to migrate from a failing drive, rather than risk blindly waiting till forced to recover from an already-failed drive.-IainB (July 21, 2018, 02:38 PM)
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That's not the experience I've had as a consumer.

In some cases, I've seen "reallocated sector count" or some similar stat go up before an eventual full breakdown - but mostly, it's been "worked fine yesterday, now I can't get my data". And I've had disks with reallocater sectors that kept trucking along for years without flaw, and just ended up being too small.

SMART is a mess. The values are opaque, and you can't really compare them between brands. There's no guarantee you'll get reported errors before a failure, and reported errors are no guarante of a failure. And, moving from spinning magnetic platters to solid state drives, failures tend to be "oops, logic board died, all data is lost".

IainB:
@Carol Haynes:
Wow! Did Seagate lose to the "large class action lawsuit" (that would be in the US, I guess)?
I did write: "Without further substantive data on relevant hard drive failure-rates and performance,...", but presumably there would have been substantive data aplenty to back up a class action lawsuit - no?

Double-Wow!: "Those drives "were notoriously unreliable and gave no warning of sudden failure" - see, that's what I meant by "process in statistical control". If Seagate production processes had been operated as being "in statistical control", then such glaring defects as to cause failure without warning (i.e., no SMART problem alarm triggers) couldn't have got out the door - à la Deming/Shewhart.
From experience, I have enormous respect for the ability of design engineers of this kind of technology. I reckon they could never have allowed such garbage to get out the door and be shipped to customers, thus I would presume that management probably screwed up big-time - e.g., maybe time-to-market had to be short to generate quick revenues, so they had to save time and money by short-cutting on quality control, or something.
Shambolic. A recipe for corporate suicide.

Your experience, coupled with the rest of the members of the class action would surely have to be statistically relevant  - if they won the class action.

"I no longer trust Seagate drives" - I don't blame you. Neither would I! Would have left a very bad taste in the mouth.

Ah, just found it here: <https://www.hbsslaw.com/cases/seagate>
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images; some emphasis is mine.)
Seagate Hard Drives
DEFENDANT NAME: Seagate Technologies LLC
CASE NUMBER: 5:16-cv-00523
COURT: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California
PRACTICE AREA: Consumer Rights
STATUS: Active
DATE FILED: 02/01/16

KEY ATTORNEYS: Steve W. Berman
                          Jeff D. Friedman

RELATED DOCUMENTS:
Order 02/09/17
Consolidated Complaint 05/09/16
Complaint 02/05/16
Complaint 02/01/16
CONTACT: [email protected]

COURT ISSUES ORDER, UPHOLDS CLAIMS
Judge Spero of the Northern District of California ruled on Seagate’s motion to dismiss on Feb. 9, 2017. In so doing, he refused to dismiss (1) plaintiffs’ consumer protection claims based on Seagate’s statements as to the drives’ annualized failure rates and suitability for use in certain RAID configurations, and (2) plaintiffs’ unjust enrichment claims. Plaintiffs will continue to pursue these claims vigorously. Read the order »

Did you buy Seagate’s Barracuda 3TB Hard Disk Drive, Backup Plus 3TB External Hard Disk Drive or another Seagate hard drive with model number ST3000DM001? You may be entitled to reimbursement under consumer laws.
FILL OUT THE FORM TO FIND OUT YOUR RIGHTS »
Hagens Berman and Axler Goldich LLC are investigating Seagate Technologies for selling hard drives that routinely failed at exceptionally high rates, leaving consumers with broken hardware and significant loss of data. Consumers filed a national class-action lawsuit, and the law firms are seeking more information from affected consumers.

These particular hard drives were marketed as innovative, fast, powerful, reliable, dependable, and having extremely low failure rates, when in reality, the failure rate of the drives was substantially higher than advertised. Consumers report them failing as an unprecedented rate – sometimes even days after their first use.

According to the firms' investigation, Seagate promised purchasers that it would replace the failed hard drives, but replacements were also defective, and failed at extremely high rates, leaving Seagate’s warranty promise unfulfilled, and consumers without working hard drives.

Consumers have reportedly lost tons of data unexpectedly, as Seagate’s hard drives failed to live up to the advertised promises, violating consumer laws.

If you purchased Seagate’s Barracuda 3TB Hard Disk Drive, Desktop HDD 3TB, Backup Plus 3TB External Hard Disk Drive, GoFlex 3TB External Hard Disk Drive, or another Seagate hard drive with model number ST3000DM001, you may be entitled to damages including replacement costs and damages from loss of data and data recovery expenses.
Note: the internal model is called Seagate Barracuda or Seagate 3TB Desktop HDD, but it still has the same model number as the Barracuda.

Find out your rights. Fill out the form to contact our legal team.

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Very interesting.

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