Solid State drives

Nice PC, soberbyker!

I'll bet you're loving it! Nice upgrade. The only thing you need to watch for now is any flash drives you have. If they're USB 2 they'll be as slow as ever. If you're like me, most of the stuff you use flash drives for don't really need serious speed.

If you do have anything you do with flash drives that you want to take advantage of those lovely fast ports, make sure the drive is rated for at least 3.0. If the plastic insert inside the connector is not blue it's not fast.

...ken...

I have a mix of 2.0, 3.0 & 3.1 stuff to plug in, I will fill them all and still have a 3.0 hub to put into service. I even have a 2TB SSD drive that will use the 3.1 C slot.

Thanks.

You could improve your backup and computer performance significantly by restructuring your computer and using 2 free programs.
Using a 1TB SSD as a backup drive is sinful. Taking hours to backup is also pretty bad.
My system (C:) drive is a 256GB SSD and takes about 20 minutes to backup as an image using Macrium Reflect free. That is about 105GB, BUT it is ONLY my system.
All my stuff is on my D: drive (a std HDD). It is easy to move your stuff over assuming you have it in the default folders.
I then use SyncBackFree to backup my D: drive to my NAS and to an offline drive. The first backup, I just copy everything. Other backups only copy changed or new files.

The advantage of the system only drive and imaging it is that if I have a problem with the system, I just reimage the C: drive and I am back in business. None of my stuff on the D: drive is affected. Since lots of things change on my system drive, I image about once/month. You probably could do it much less often. My stuff is also backed up once or twice a month depending on activity, but it is only copying a few files.
Use your new SSD in your computer.
I have posted the process here b4, but if you need details you can PM me.

When Windows finally takes over it boots in record time, from "log in" to ready to use. The old PC would take what seemed like forever to load everything at that point.

But, while "Acer' still has control it takes a while if at all when I have any drives plugged into the USB slots to let Windows take over. My guess is it's looking for 'boot drives' but the other drives have never had a bootable OS on them. I would think it's supposed to check the internal SSD drive first. The boot menu doesn't really offer any choices either, first boot device 'hard drive' is set to "Windows boot manager" with no other choice. There are CD/DVD, USB as other choices down the list. I'll have to screen shot it later, getting ready for work right now. It's going to be kind of a drag to dismount my extra drives before turning it off or needing to reboot.

Also I tend to leave the PC running all the time, and a few times, so far, it drops a drive that is still plugged in, including my 2TB SSD drive that's plugged into a USB 3.0 drive until I get a C to C cable.

See https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-stop-windows-10-apps-fro....

I also suggest you not leave you PC running all the time. That was an old practice that was brought on by HDD and long boot times. Disable Hibernation, and when you complete your tasks, go into Standby or actually shut down the PC. Depending on your power settings, the PC may be going into Standby anyway. You should be able to get boot times down to about 20 seconds; if you really get aggressive probably down around 12 to 15 seconds.

prices of ssd's are dropping every year and there capacity is getting larger and there getting faster the writing is on the wall for a regular hd ! usb sicks are also getting cheaper and the capacity is getting larger I have several 128 g and 256 g usb sticks you can do a full back up of your system on them, I put all the star wars movies on one and still have room for more in the future I just plug it in the dvd or blue ray player and watch it on the tv ! things have advanced so much since the commodore computer and the tape drive its hard to keep up with them LOL especially if your old

I can't believe how inexpensive spinning disks have become. I'm waiting from them to put them in boxes of cereal. Some of my fellow old timers will remember the reference. Most modern PCs will support a SSD in place of a HDD and the prices on them continue to tumble. For a machine with a failing HDD, a SDD can be both a good replacement as well as an upgrade that can noticeably reduce boot time as well as program loads. As with all things aftermarket, research what will work with your present system and stick with SSDs that have a proven track record for reliability and are well supported by the seller. Like so many other things, there are inexpensive bargains that aren't such good deals.

Thanks for the link. I had already trimmed the startup items.

I don't think the problem is with the start up, it's with the bios trying to pick the boot up disk. If I unplug all of my extra drives, 3 at the moment, the PC boots with no problem in very short order. However, if I leave them plugged in the boot may not happen at all. It hangs on the ACER screen, I've looked in the bios and there is nothing that can figure out to be the problem. None of the extra drives ever had an OS so I'm at a loss.

As for leaving it running, I do some P2P stuff, that's why I leave it on.

Show us that BIOS snapshot (boot devices section). There must be a way to exclude all devices except 1 (your boot HD) from the list.

My win 7 drive is still connected because I use a portion of it for backup. Every time I reboot I have to do F12 and choose my SSD boot drive or it boots to win7. My bios doesn’t show me my win 7 drive or any way to change the boot sequence. At present it’s a minor inconvenience till I get a chance to further investigate.

https://us.answers.acer.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/46782/~/...

This web page has very simple information, but it does also say that, "...If the steps above did not resolve your issues, your system may have a hardware problem that requires repair. If you are still experiencing a problem, please contact Acer support for further assistance..."

I once had a brand new PC that had a continuing problem that was finally fixed when the manufacturer replaced the motherboard.

Both of my PCs have two external hard drives plugged in at all times. The PCs boot up in 15 seconds with no special BIOS settings. In other words, the default BIOS.

One more thing. I agree with John from PA about disabling hibernation. If hibernation is active, we don't know whether the PC was shut down manually or went into hibernation automatically. If it was hibernating, that is going to muddle up our understanding of what is going on.

There are plenty of posts on the internet that Microsoft fixed hibernation. Well, they did not. I had a problem with hibernation on a clean install of the latest version of Windows 10 on two PCs.

dobs108

This is a different problem than soberbyker because he has no bootable external drive. All three of his drives should not interfere with the boot.

If your Win 7 drive still hasn't been formatted to delete the boot sector, it is a bootable drive and the PC is acting properly.

There is a way to fix this in the BIOS for every PC but that is not the right way to do it. Formatting the boot sector of the Win 7 drive is the best way.

dobs108

If the BIOS checking for drives bothers you, then go into the BIOS and remove all the drives, or perhaps leave only one. BIOS is loaded prior to Windows, so if nothing is there except the drive with your O/S, usually "C", then the PC boots to "C". But if "C" craps out, you can still access the BIOS and then turn on another source.

My belief is that we should not be giving advice on editing the BIOS of a PC. BIOS is complicated and not intuitive at all, and every PC has a different BIOS. Just one mistake can easily create a computer that won't boot.

Disclaimer: Please proceed at your own risk.

This is rather like editing the hidden files of your new Garmin. There have been a multitude of threads about recreating the files of a bricked GPS.

dobs108

Yours is a dual boot system and it is working as expected. soberbyker's problem is different because his external drives were never used as system drive (they're never bootable). It boots a lot faster when ext HDs are unplugged but much slower when they're plugged in. Sounds like BIOS is either looking for boot drive or scanning for whatever (virus or something), therefore takes longer to boot.

Should be ok if the user is either comfortable or very careful. When I'm in an unfamiliar territory, I would take a snapshot or write down the current settings before changing anything. If something goes wrong, I know how to revert it.

Interesting article about How to Copy Your Windows Installation to an SSD

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-copy-your-windows-instal...

Here are the shots.

This is what I see when I hit F12 for the boot menu:

https://i.postimg.cc/63DGCp7X/1.jpg

The up & down arrows do nothing.

This is what I see when I enter the bios:

https://i.postimg.cc/PJsPPVcf/2.jpg

Hitting first boot device (in white in the above photo) brings up:

https://i.postimg.cc/3rXwtBVp/3.jpg

Just a menu to change the order.

If I go down the list to "Hard Disk Drive Priority" the only choice is Windows Boot Manager.

https://i.postimg.cc/0yB5zHKg/4.jpg

That said, I think I found the problem. One of the 3 external drives came up with an error, "The recycle bin is corrupted" or something like that and asked if I wanted to empty it. I did. But not the drive comes up in my PC but with 'no access'. so I unplugged it. I have a recovery program I'll try on it this weekend.

When I rebooted to take the screenshots it appeared it was going to boot up normally and fast.

I wanted to type all this up before I forgot what the screenshots were. I'll reboot again and report back in a few.

ETA, it does take a little longer with the other two drives attached, I can hear them being queried, but it does not hang, so the corrupted drive was my problem. Just a coincidence that drive corrupted about the same time I hooked up to a new PC.

Try a reboot on the drive with "no access". If Windows at least recognizes the drive, open an elevated command prompt, and run the following command:

"rd /s /q H:$Recycle.bin"

where H should be replaced by the appropriate drive letter.

RD is the command to remove or delete a directory. /S removes all directories and files in the specified directory in addition to the directory itself, in your case the Recycle Bin. /Q is Quiet mode, do not ask if ok to remove a directory tree with /S

If the problem returns, and the external drive happens to be a WD, there was a known issue I think in Win 7 and Win 8.1 that occurred with WD External drives that had a password set. Removal of the password fixed things but that obviously wasn't the best fix. Ultimately a Windows patch eliminated the issue.

While I can dual boot it as you say, there should be a way in bios to change the boot order to be my win 10 as 1st and win 7 as 2nd. Same as making a CD drive the 1st boot order so you can boot from a CD. By the way this is a home built unit by a friend. I should not have to keep going to my F12 boot order.

If your boot order says "windows boot manager" and it is at the top, you have UEFI installation. AFAIK you can't choose a device (ie. CD/DVD, Hard Disk or Ext USB) if you have EFI installation. See if this article helps you change boot order:

https://www.itechguides.com/windows-boot-manager-how-to-edit...

No luck, see screenshot. Guess I'll have to try my recovery software.

https://i.postimg.cc/gJbqG4y8/Image2.jpg

.

If you can remove the contents to some other media, I’d just do a full (not the “Quick” option) format on the drive.

My recovery software was able to retrieve my stuff, mostly music, MP3, WMA, etc. It's now on a new drive and the old drive went through the full format process, and is once again usable. Both processes were very long, took all night to recover and a few hours to fully format.

Thanks all for the suggestions and info.