Today, I noticed my first problem with Windows 7. A weird bug.

This evening I added a new SATA 640GB hard drive to Tammy’s new Dell SX8000 (commonly known as XPS 8000 ) machine and the drive appeared fine in BIOS.

However, when I booted into Windows 7, the normal process of formatting the drive wasn’t working. That is, going into Computer Management then Disk Management. Usually, the unpartitioned drive will appear here. It didn’t! After several reboots, complete shutdowns, nothing worked.

So, taking the advice of others who suggested using a Linux CD to partition the drive, I instead used a Windows 7 setup CD and booted from that. From there I went ahead and partitioned and formatted the drive without issue.

Great! Well, I thought. I booted back into Windows 7 exiting Windows 7 setup CD and discovered the drive still would not appear. Ugh. So the troubleshooting began.

The answer:

Start -> Right Click Computer -> Properties
Device Manager (on left side)
Click the Disk Drives arrow to show the list
Find Your Drive You Installed Here
Right Click on the Drive -> Uninstall
After the SATA HDD disappears, click the Action menu -> Scan For Hardware Changes

This will rescan your system and reinstall your SATA HDD drivers.

After I did this, the formatted drive letters appeared for me under “Computer” because I had already partitioned and formatted the drive in the Windows 7 setup CD. For most others, you’ll just need to go back into Disk Management where you SHOULD discover the drive now where you can partition and setup the drive like normal.

Let me know if this helps.

Categories: Computer Tips
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Hi all,

Thought it would be a good time to post a quick computer tip since I haven’t done one in months.

For anyone stuck with a computer problem, check out techguy.org.

If you’re looking for free technical support, they have it! This site is run completely by volunteers and paid for completely by donations and sponsors. There is no charge to you (although they do appreciate donations). To get started, check out the Tech Support Guy Forums.

Other than that, I always recommend typing in your problem into google and see what comes up. This is what I do when I get a weird error I don’t understand or a problem I can’t seem to fix/resolve. Usually, google has the answer(s) I need when I need them.

Of course, it always helps to have a spare working computer when you can’t get online to figure out some major problems. Enjoy!

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Digg is an excellent site that offers user submitted stories that members “digg” to the front page. A hot concept even netscape has copied. I’ve been reading digg since it first launched and absolutely love it for my tech news.

Anyways, there is a great website that lists all of the top stories of each category over the term of a month. Check it out!.

Categories: Computer Tips, Fun on the Web
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I’m not sure if this entry will help anyone or not but I figured it is better to post it than keep this helpful information to myself.

Recently my wife had to format/rebuild her computer. After reinstalling Microsoft Publisher 2003, every time she went to modify a publisher file with WordArt, she would receive the error:
“Publisher cannot launch or communicate with the OLE server program needed to complete this task. There may not be enough disk space, or there may be a problem with the server program. To make more disk space available, delete some unneeded files on your hard disk. If you suspect a problem with the server program, try reinstalling it. Then try this task again.”

Since these files were crucial for her internet business on Buehlerfam.com, we had to find a solution and quick!

Thankfully she ended up finding a notepad text file with the answer she needed to fix the issue. Apparently, we’ve had this same issue over and over again.

Anyways, there has to be something wrong with what Microsoft is using in their Publisher distributions. Reason being, after uninstalling Publisher 2003 and reinstalling Publisher 2000 then upgrading from 2000 to 2003, the problem goes away.

Perhaps if Microsoft offered a WordArt downgrader that allows you to install the older version of WordArt for copmpatibility reasons, this problem might go away? Not sure.

So if you happen to have an older version of Publisher like Publisher 2000 and you are experiencing the same issues we were, give it a try.

I should also state that Tammy spent a good 3 days looking for the solution to this issue online. We tried many solutions found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base and various other websites but none of them fixed the problem. A lot of the solutions say it was Norton Antivirus but we do not use NAV, we use NOD32 as explained here. That lead us to disable NOD32’s plugin scanning capabilities just to find that wasn’t the problem either.

If this helps you in any way, please register and leave a comment. Thanks!

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Yep, being a long time fan of the Norton line of products, I officially hate Norton Antivirus and hope everyone uninstalls and switches to a new antivirus product.

Did you kow Norton Antivirus is now sub-par in virus detection compared to other brands? Take a look!

Once I uninstalled Norton Antivirus from my computer and installed NOD32, my computer runs way faster than ever before. That’s right, huge difference! NOD32 has such a small footprint on your system resources, you will easily see an improvement on your computer’s responsiveness.

I hope anyone who reads this considers changing. I will never install another Symantec product again for myself or anyone I help that has computer issues.

Do you own research and you’ll find many are leaving the Symantec line of products in favor of the cheap/free alternatives out there that actually do a much better job.

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I swear, as soon as I wrote that blog entry that my problems were cured, boom, I froze again. LOL.

So, back to the drawing board. The drive I thought was the problem was now in Tammy’s computer and I was still having problems.

I then rebooted with that hard disk utility program and went to bed with the software scanning my 70GB drive. It held my software, audio files, and restore files.. That’s right, restore files. Irony eh?!? lol

When I got up in the morning, the software was reporting bad sectors all over the place. I think this drive was causing all the freezing problems.

So, I took my new Seagate drive and copied all my files from that drive to my 250GB drive in Tammy’s computer via the network. This took the better part of the day… transferring 200GB of files is no small job.

Once done, I repartitioned my new drive to smaller drives including a new 20GB drive for Software.

Once I had that done, I copied all my Software files from the old drive D to the new 20GB partition. I shut down. I unplugged the old drive from power. I booted back up.

Now there’s a missing drive D that had all my program files. In otherwords, 50 errors on booting up that everything is missing.

I loaded the disk manager I changed the drive letter of the new 20GB drive to drive D: and rebooted. Believe it or not, after the reboot, it worked!! No errors and all the software from what I can see is working.

Hopefully this will be the end of this computer problem issue!!! So tired of it. Now I will transfer my other 250GB drive from Tammy’s computer back to my computer and install her new 250GB SATA drive there. Once done, we should have plenty of storage for a couple years.

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Remember my blogs from a week or so ago where I said I was having computer problems? I have been struggling since to get this computer working correctly.

2-3 days ago, I unplugged the power to one of the HDDs I just added recently and my computer became solid as a rock. Ah ha! That hard drive (non system disk.. no formatting required) was the culprit I thought!

So I went to newegg and bought a couple new HDDs at 250GB each. I bought an SATA one for Tammy’s computer since she is running out of disk space again and I bought another 250GB for me.. this time, a Seagate one with a 5 year warranty.

Last night, I finally opened my computer, installed the new 250GB disk drive, hooked up the old bad one again, and disconnected my CD-Rom since all 4 IDE ports were now taken. From there, I immediately formatted my new disk using the Computer Disk Manager that comes with Windows XP (thank God Microsoft made this available, I hate FDISK with a passion!).

After formatting the disk, I realized in the disk management screen, that the “bad drive” had a partition with a swap file on it. WHAT!?!?! I don’t know WHEN I thought having a drive P with 70GB disk space would be a great candidate for a 1GB system swap file. So, I removed the swap file from there and drive C and placed a 3GB swap file (fixed size) on drive D.

I then started copying about 200GB worth of data from the old disk to the new disk. I chose to copy instead of move because if the disk failed, I wouldn’t know where to pick up the new transfer or what files may be corrupt. Wouldn’t you know it, not one BSOD, not one crash, not one error, NOTHING!

One last thing I did before going to bed was I downloaded a Drive Fitness Test from Hitachi. I let that run all night as I went to sleep and everything checks out fine.

So, now, I will probably put 2 250GB disks in Tammy’s computer. I moved all the HDDs around in my computer to allow more space for heat and removing the swap file from drive P, my computer is solid as a rock again. Even with 4 HDDs going right now.

Hopefully this disk will hold up in Tammy’s computer. If not, I will claim the 3 year warranty on this retail drive and send it back.

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