Lately, my hard drive has been having major startup problems. It would whir and clackle when trying to start after a night or a few hours off and would usually not get detected by my laptop until after ten or fifteen tries to start. So today, I went over to a good friend’s house and swapped my failing hard drive with an old hard drive that he was no longer using. It ran fine in my computer and mine wouldn’t run in his computer so it was the hard drive that had problems and not my good old laptop.

After returning home, I put in the windows 7 repair disk I made yesterday to reinstall Windows. The first few tries didn’t work apparently because my external hard drive was attached. After it loaded, I plugged in my external, loaded the system image that I made yesterday, and replaced the contents of my friend’s hard drive with the image.

Once that finished (and a couple restarts), I used the Win7 backup tool to get all of the files and directories in my data partition back. That didn’t seem to restore everything (visibly, the positions of my desktop icons weren’t restored, but there were other problems) so I sent my system back to the restore point made during the system image/backup yesterday. That fixed the desktop icon positions, but:
1) my Windows Explorer “Favorites” in the sidebar was empty and I could not modify it or restore its contents to the default,
2) (minor) the folder icons for special folder such as “My Music” and “My Documents” didn’t appear, and
3) (minor) in the control panel, all of the user images except for the guest one were blank – changing the picture did change the picture elsewhere on my system, but for some reason the frame showing the current picture in the “control panel” > “add or remove user accounts” was white, even after creating a new user and selecting a picture.

I dug for solutions on the interwebs and remembered that Favorites actually maps to Links in my Users/ directory (not intuitive at all). Once I made that folder, right clicked “Favorites” in the sidebar, and selected “Restore favorite links,” the folder populated with the three default links and I could modify its contents! I was ecstatic since I use the shortcuts that I place there frequently. Also, moving “My Documents” and “My Music” around and back to my E:\ brought back the appropriate icons. I have yet to find a fix for the user image problem, but that doesn’t really affect anything.

Edit: Also had to make all of my data in E:\ not read-only in order to do certain things. Not sure why it was read-only before.

So in case I ever do this again (likely) or any of you do, I hope this helps. =)

Started around 5:45 or so.

Update 5:50pm – I reformatted my hard drive using the disk utility in the install dvd but was unable to create and resize partitions, which kinda sucks, since I was planning on keeping a separate partition for my OS and for my data. Maybe I can do it after finishing the installation, using the Disk Management Tool? Maybe?

Update 6:05pm (ish) – Done! Now configuring computer settings.

Update 6:10pm (ish) – Windows Update running.

Update the next day – All is working fine and all of the important and relevant files in my life today have been migrated over from my external. I had some annoyances with partitioning but I think it will be okay. The new directory structure and windows explorer sidebar is going to take a little getting used to from XP. The jump lists are pretty cool, and I will probably spend a good chunk of today reading through the many Lifehacker posts on the cool new features in Windows 7. I’ll also be trying to keep my desktop clean and clutter-free as well! Only the recycle bin and very temporarily relevant/important files will be there. I hope I can keep that up. Overall, Windows 7 is pretty sleek and a nice upgrade from XP. I haven’t tried any of the new functionality yet, but appearance- and usability-wise, I like it.

Update the morning after the next day – It seems that adding shortcuts to a folder in the Start Menu is difficult when not logged in as an administrator. I tried to create a shortcut to CCleaner in a new CCleaner folder I made in the Start Menu programs folder, but Windows said it could not be done and asked me if I wanted to make one on the Desktop first. I said yes and it did so after prompting for the admin password, and then I moved the Desktop shortcut into the CCleaner folder in the Start Menu programs folder. It worked (with admin password) and created a new shortcut there. I made sure that the new shortcut pointed to the original .exe file and then deleted the one on the Desktop.

It’s weird that I had to use the Desktop as an intermediate copy area in order to create the shortcut; it probably has to do with problems requiring admin permission for more than one step of the process or creating a shortcut from an admin-only area to an admin-only area. I never used a non-administrator account with XP so I don’t know how that worked before, but this is kinda odd. By the way, I am using a non-admin account for an extra level of security, as recommended by Coding Horror.