[Dave Rice]

My son has done the counting in quite a few elections now and from what he tells me I can well believe they are knackered. Tired people make mistakes.

There have been some really close ones, Amber Reed only just held on. Even in my safe seat the majority was cut from 10,000 to 4,000. Bristol (I live outside) is now all labour. Bristol West was the Greens best hope but they got a kicking, as did the Lib Dems, and all of that and more went red.

[Dave Rice]

It should be able to see a USB as a target for backing up to. Paragon’s more flexible than W10’s backup and says:

Supported Computer Bus Interfaces
Complete UEFI Support
Parallel ATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment)
SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment)
External SATA (eSATA)
SCSI (Small Computer System Interface)
iSCSI
USB (Universal Serial Bus) 1.x/2.0/new3.0
IEEE 1394 (FireWire)
All types of RAIDs (hardware and software)
PC or PCMCIA Card (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association)

[Dave Rice]

Predictable comments all round. Tories defending TM for this morning at least.

John Redmond is still in fantasy land. There is still a mandate for his Brexit because lots of people voted Con or Lab and not Lib Dem.

But again vote share vs seats shows that first past the post is broken.

[Dave Rice]

It’s a minefield John, I’m having the same issues with an Asus Transformer. You may well be able to boot from the DVD if the media is set up to boot from EFI. Yes it’s not just the BIOS settings it’s a whole lot more involved. If you have a mix of old and new you’re stuffed.

The important thing is that you’re up and running on the SSD.

[Dave Rice]

The Lenovo is the better choice by a mile.

“Looking good Dave I just hope the Lenovo sees it on boot.” John, there is no reason why not but Windows won’t see it until you install the drivers. Leave it all unplugged when you install the SSD, get basic W10 working with just the SSD plugged in then start adding things.

I’m using ToDo backup free to do the backups of my laptop (to a server share). It manages the old backups for me. It’s setup to do a weekly disk image and a daily file backup.

Each job has an image reserve strategy and this is what the daily one looks like, it’s set to preserve the last 7. You can see where I’ve missed a few days. It’s deleted the older jobs for me.

It’s dead easy to set up, it manages itself and best of all it’s free ?

But that’s for later. Get the SSD working first then we can figure out the best way to keep it all safe.

[Dave Rice]

Dwynne, I don’t know why I keep forgetting I do have an AMD system. Just tested a pci-e card for JB and it was a Doh! moment.

Anyway the checking the mobo FAQs it can take the 965 so send it down with the ram too so I can check if that works (I had real issues with mine). It’s the Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 and EB and Amazon have them for £68

If you don’t have my address email me.

[Dave Rice]

OK, with the drivers installed from Startech it’s recognised by W10.

Here it is shoved in one of my PCs with an SSD (disk 1) on the motherboard and an old W7 drive (disk 0) from the laptop I’ve just been setting up on the pci-e card. On it there’s two Windows data partitions, a Linux dual boot partition and a Toshiba recovery partition on there (there won’t be in a minute ?). So your setup will end up looking very much like this John.

Whilst it is possible to boot from this card it just adds needless complications. Boot from the SSD, have the internal DVD on the other motherboard port and your old drive on the card. Job done.

Now I’ve lost your address John!

[Dave Rice]

Found the pci-e SATA card will try and test it this afternoon.

John, you won’t need to swap cables. There are two on the motherboard and two on the card = 4 drives. Personally I would have the SSD and DVD on the motherboard and any data drives on the card.

[Dave Rice]

Well spotted! I think it may be a 500GB partitioned up, I’m sure John will tell us.

[Dave Rice]

Don’t worry about booting from a pci-e card, you won’t have to. You have 2 SATA ports on the motherboard so you put the drive you want to boot from, the SSD, on one of those. If you think that booting from your internal DVD will be important then put that on the other. The HDD will only being used for data so who cares if you have to wait for Windows to load the drivers? You’ll only be accessing it from Windows anyway, you won’t be booting from it.

I am setting up a couple of laptops at the moment, after that I am going to look for the SATA card.

EDIT your screen shot just sunk in. How are drives D:, E: and F: connected?

You appear to have 4 HDDs, one 250GB, one 220GB and two 1TB. Or have you partitioned a much larger drive?

[Dave Rice]

Have you really got that much data that a 120GB isn’t big enough?

[Dave Rice]

John, I believe I may have a 2 port SATA card that would run from the pci-e slot.

It’s of no use to me but let me test it first. You could use that to plug the internal DVD drive into. Meanwhile check and see if you have enough spare SATA power plugs on the PSU. If you haven’t I have lots of molex to SATA convertors / splitters and bucket loads of SATA cables.

I can’t see why (in theory) you couldn’t boot from a USB DVD drive, but it could mean also sorts of messing about with CSM and legacy settings in the UEFI so let’s not go there. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the Lenovo E50-00 I bought, it’s in the local womens nick (a terrifying place).

EDIT as an aside I’m just installing W10 pro on an old Toshiba laptop with a T4300 2.16Ghz CPU, 4GB and 5,400 rpm spinner. It’s busy doing the Creators update at the moment but first impressions are it’s going to be very usable.

[Dave Rice]

Just let John do the thing in front of him first before adding tweaks. All this is doing is confusing matters.

IMO 120GB is more than enough to run Windows 10 happily for years unless you have huge Steam folders. If after installation and running for a few months John feels he has an issue with space we can cover that then.

[Dave Rice]

That SanDisk would be fine too.

[Dave Rice]

My Novatech account managers first name is Blessing.

[Dave Rice]

Barriers have gone up Evening Standard

 

[Dave Rice]

I had the PM as well so it’s probably widespread. No errors though.

[Dave Rice]

The Lenovo is SATA only and only has 2 SATA ports. You need an normal 2.5″ SSD not an M2 version.

SSDs are so light I regularly only use 1 or 2 screws to mount them. As JCD says sticky pads would be OK. If you want to mount it in place of the HDD (or even in the spare space above it) you can get around the problem that it uses a bottom mount (as opposed to the usual side holes) by using an adaptor like this one Screw the SSD into the adaptor and then screw the adaptor to the mounting holes on the case.

The last few builds I’ve used these £45 DREVO X1 Series 120GB SSD. They are fine.

When you are installing W10 in the SSD make sure you have unplugged the old HDD to avoid accidents. Once that’s done, if you need to copy data from the old HDD, use the DVD’s SATA and power cables to plug it in.

[Dave Rice]

If you go to Settings – Updates & Security – Recovery you’ll see an option called Reset this PC.

This reinstalls Windows as if from a USB stick except that you can opt to save your data files. Any drivers and applications will need to be reinstalled, but these days Windows seems to do a good job on drivers itself.

I’m running W10 on many machines that are the dual core equivalent of your quad core J2900 and they are fine. But they all have SSDs (I only use spinners in servers these days). I also have a customer with the J2900 All In One desktop and that is running OK too.

[Dave Rice]

John, once you’re on W10 you can forget all about recovery partitions. In W10 the reset option does the same job. By and large it’ll sort all your drivers out as well, in your case I’d say 100% of them.

If you’ve bought a key from E-Bay I’d just put the hard drive to one side and do a clean install of W10 on the SSD. Once it’s working you can copy the data from the old HDD then put it in a drawer just in case.

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