My prize of the month repair!

[coffee]

Ok, Every now and again we get those unbeliveable repairs that make you sit and go "WOW." So, Here is mine. Customer called and said their laptop was having all sorts of problems and they thought it was a virus. "Can you get it finished by tonite?".

Get a load of this!

I mean really.... I had to take a pic of this as its so wild!!

 

[anglian]

So did you find the virus

 

[coffee]

Cannot defrag because no room.

Cannot uninstall because uninstall's error out probably because there is no room on drive to do it.

This is really wild!@

 

[PCX]

I would suggest a HDD upgrade if it were feasible, but its really not. The work around I would do is this.

1. Clone the HDD onto a bigger drive.
2. Expand the partition.
3. Clean up the partition as much as you can. Get rid of crap. Do a tune-up.
4. Defrag partition. Do not use Windows Defrag, Auslogic is way better. Do not worry about optimizing it, its not going to help in this case.
5. Shrink down partition to fit on original drive.
6. Clone back to original drive.

And no, you cant get it back to her tonight.

EDIT: I kinda like these types of repairs. They make me think outside the box.

 

[Cambridge PC Support]

Over a gig free, I don't get it, what's the problem?

 

[alluseridsrejected]

Can you delete anything to frre up enough defrag space? like temp files.

 

[Vicenarian]

or boot into linux, delete temporary files, delete internet explorer cache, etc. and then manually delete program files folders that are being unused?

 

[coffee]

Got a bunch of posts here so Im gonna reply to them all at once here..

I talked the guy into a new drive. What we actually are going to do is just reinstall winxp on the new drive. Start fresh. Otherwise the amount of work involved would be too expensive for him. I will transfer over any personal files which they really dont have alot of on it.

Problem with keeping original drive is that if I ghost it its gonna take some hours to do. Im not sure such an old drive would survive it. Better to just start him out with a brand new install. I will grab the drivers directory though that ibm has on it.

That screenshot is after I got rid of about everything I could. Originally it had about 388Meg free space. But Defrag will not work on it. Also the uninstall will not work. Probably because its too fragmented or not enough temp drive space left on drive.

But I do have to ask - Now isnt that the worst fragmenting you have ever seen??? I know that takes the cake with me. I was absolutely floored when I saw it!

also --- > Be better off with a bigger drive anyways. No sense in it happening again.

 

[coffee]

or boot into linux, delete temporary files, delete internet explorer cache, etc. and then manually delete program files folders that are being unused?

Thanks, Ill file this away for next time. Good ideas.

 

[Rob_NNCC]

Wow, over 300 MB free space Thats living big! I had a sever about 6 years ago that had less than a megabyte free. SCSI RAID 5. I had to move them to new bigger drives. That was a fun job. Additionally, it being a server, they wanted it back ASAP. Linux boot disks and Aronis True Image came to the rescue.
Most wild job for me was a laptop that had gotten into a car accident and they wanted their data back. One corner was bent at a good 60*, Case, motherboard screen and all...

 

[andcorptech]

If you ghost the hdd it defrags it while cloning. I didnt know this happened until I had the same issue as the OP and cloned to a bigger drive , went to defrag and it was already done. I assume if you did a sector by sector clone it would not be the case though

 

[coffee]

If you ghost the hdd it defrags it while cloning. I didnt know this happened until I had the same issue as the OP and cloned to a bigger drive , went to defrag and it was already done. I assume if you did a sector by sector clone it would not be the case though

Well, Being a sunday and day off I thought I would do a clone to a 160 gig drive. Nothing better to do. Im using clonezilla bootable disk and doing it now. Shouldnt take too long. But Then I have to expand the partitions.

I guess after a disk to disk clone I will get rid of the restore partition and grow the O/S partition and then add the restore partition back in.

I would love it if I didnt have to defrag it but I think its gonna need it. Also run a chkdisk before defragging.

Thanks for the comments!