Tech Forum

Well, I've got myself a fun one. A ward OptiPlex 7010 won't boot. I let it sit for 10 minutes (timed) at the Win10 startup screen. Very little hard drive activity. If I hang the hard drive off the stake machine (same model) as a second drive, I can't browse the drive. Access denied. I managed to run ChkDsk /F multiple times. I did see were it found some errors with security descriptors. Those were fixed, but it still won't boot.

I took the stake hard drive and hung it on another ward machine, and I could browse no trouble. So I don't think it's a "new feature" of Win10 that's preventing me from browsing it.

Anyone else have any ideas on fixing this short of a re-install?

If not, it appears my options (after saving the data) are:

• Create recovery media on a "twin" computer and see if it can fix it. However, I tend to doubt it will offer me any new options my generic install didn't already offer.
• "Reset" the computer. Apparently it will re-install windows while keeping my files. This will probably be my next step after creating the recovery media.
• Use disk image software to copy the hard drive of a working computer of the same model. But I'm not sure what kind of Win10 licensing issues I may run into.
• Start from scratch - use the church Win7 image and then install Win10 on top of it. This would be the most work.

Any other ideas?

Looks like I'm one of the first in this territory. Here's what's happened so far:

• Creating recovery media to a thumb drive took about an hour - but ultimately didn't help.
• Resetting didn't do anything. Even the option to not keep any files. The process errored out after a few minutes

Using Clonezilla to copy just the partition from a working machine ended up with a odd situation. The computer could apparently boot, but all I saw on the screen was my cursor. Nothing else. So I ended up imaging the entire drive from the donor machine. Just to be sure, I ran the imaged drive on the "source" machine. It tossed an error, rebooted and was fine. I then moved the drive to it's normal machine and all seemed to be fine. I checked the windows licensing and it said it wasn't activated, but connecting it to the network and clicking the link fixed that. No sweat.

Of course as this point I had a clone of the stake machine. I had to rename it, change the data-backup, mls files, document files, desktop, etc. But that should be something fairly obvious to anyone who has had to transfer a computer. I need to return it and run it though it's paces, but it looks promising.

If all you have done does not work then it sounds a lot like hardware problems. The hard drive may be marginally operational or there may be some hardware problems on the OptiPlex 7010 machine that originally created the problems on the hard drive.

jdlessley wrote:If all you have done does not work then it sounds a lot like hardware problems.

The thought crossed my mind. One of the first things I did was run Spinrite on the drive - it came back clean. Plus the other symptoms of a failing hard drive didn't seem to be there. Once I imaged the whole drive, it seemed to be OK. I just have to complete the clean up.