dewie93

In my system I have 2x 1TB NVMe drives, a boot drive which is a Toshiba 1TB, and a Gigabyte 1TB which is used for the majority of my games. A couple of weeks ago steam showed a number of my games were not installed and this is the first time I noted this issue - My drive, called Games (H:), was showing in Windows Explorer, I can open it, and browse to a certain sub-level, then Windows throws an error 'a device that does not exist was specified'. I switched the SSD's around as my board has 2 M.2 slots and voila, it has worked for the past couple of weeks without issue, games loading fine, read/write tests show good performance etc. I've come back to my system today after using it fine on a couple of games yesterday and I am getting the exact same message. Is this a Windows/driver issue, a motherboard or BIOS issue, or a drive issue? I'd like to switch them back around but it is a huge faff with removing the glass door, removing the GPU, removing both SSD covers/heatsinks for the issue to just come back or not be resolved at all. Specs: i9-9900k Maximus XI Hero (BIOS updated to latest) 64GB Corsair RGB PRO 3200 RTX3080

Hi folks, looked at all my usual sources with no luck. I have this laptop here with a deep scratch but all fully working. The panel is what looks like a regular slim edge, IPS FHD glossy display used in thousands of laptops, however this particular screen also has touchscreen capability which is invisible. I only found out by touching it by accident. The display works, but just has a deep scratch so I'd rather not remove the stretch release tape which I do not have replacements for to remove the display. If anyone has experience with these, please let me know

SSD is perfectly fine, just the end user has no way of connecting an M.2 SSD to their replacement machine and an M.2 to USB adapter is out of the budget. I'll try a migration though, see what happens then. Thanks!

Kind of confusing title I know. Customer has damaged laptop with an SSD. He wants the user data backing up onto an external drive to use on replacement computer. Boot SSD into another machine, everything shows up and is accessible/readable but when you copy anything onto an external drive, the drive shows the size as being correct, but the folder shows as empty. I believed this was some security issues i've not come across before, but with the external connected to the machine running the original SSD, the files still do not show. Any tips to get this data to show would be amazing. Cheers, Jordan

Thanks guys, sent for a quote on Alibaba, we'll see what comes back. Surprises me this stuff isn't more common with most 2018/19 Lenovo's and now a number of Dell laptops having this stuff in.

Do you have a link?

Hi folks, Not sure where to put this but I hope someone may know. A number of laptop displays are now held in place by, what I believe to be called stretch release tape - The same as what some phone batteries are held in place by. I'm looking for this material but preferably on a roll to cut to size for use on a number of laptops we repair but my efforts of finding anything has been fruitless. I hope someone on here has an idea of where to purchase this from. BTW we are in the UK! Cheers

This printer isn't a usual 'printer', it prints large metal plates for use in creating magazines and takes up half the size of a room but there is no other connections I could find on the machine other than the cables going from the main module with the brains to the actual printer mechanism. It doesn't necessarily need to be USB, it would be handy, but if we can find a PCI card for that it would be great.

Hi guys, A new one on me who usually deals with laptop and PC repairs, we have a customer who is wanting to backup/upgrade an old HP ML150 G2 server which runs Server 2002 used to send plate printing files to the printer. I am planning on using Disk2VHD to create the virtual disk, then running the system with HyperV on an i5-8th gen HP workstation with a 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM with Windows 10 Pro. The connector for the printer is what looks like a SCSI but i'm running out of knowledge of where to get a SCSI to PCI-express card or whether HyperV can even communicate with PCI interfaces. I'm just looking for some advice if any of you clever folk have more experience in moving old systems and hardware (despite the printer only being a 2006 unit, I'd have expected USB interface to be an option) I have attached a few pictures of the connector we need to have. Thanks in advance! Jordan

Probably a little too specific for most folks but I've hit a dead end. Hi folks, I'm an IT tech and we work next door to a commercial printers who are running into more and more problems with their ageing HP Proliant ML150 G2 server running Server 2003 with software called Trueflow V4. This software was made by a company called Screen who stopped support for this software many years ago and according to them, was configured to the specific server and plate printing machine. This is the backbone of the business and when there is an issue with the server, they can't print. This has been happening more and more times of recent. They want some sort of backup of the system so if this dies, we can fire up a secondary machine and operate uninterrupted with that. We bought a second identical system which proceeded to blow the PSU and mobo upon connecting it to power for the first time. The hard drive is connected via a RAID card and is using a U320 SCSI connector with only one drive. My first plan was to clone the drive onto a spare we purchased, but neither drive is picked up with any cloning software I can load up. This is one of the priorities, just to keep the data safe in case of HDD failure. The company has all the installation disks and I'd love to start afresh on a newer machine with something like Windows 7, install the software onto that, but it appears it is only compatible with Server 2003. A new up to date set up with the latest software and hardware has been quoted at over £20,000 which is not feasible in their current position as a business. Anyone with printing knowledge would be greatly appreciative of your help!

I know one does for sure as I've dealt with the customer previously, but the other two are unknown. Going for a transfer of data to external drive, reinstall and copy back over for now. I'm working on a roundabout way to try and force it to run the upgrade again. Create a USB drive with the Windows media creation tool and follow these instructions. Boot into the blank desktop Insert your windows USB drive CTRL+R, type CMD, hit enter. Type E: into Command prompt (or whatever drive letter you expect the USB to take up, usually E: on laptops) Type setup.exe and hit enter. Follow the on screen instructions and see if it will 'upgrade' itself and put the files back where they should be! Worth a go at this point as the only other option is to reinstall Andel, Rollback is not an option, it just fails immediately.

It's really strange. Both laptops are Acer, desktop is a custom build - Not really any similarities other than they are all Intel, 3rd Gen, 4th Gen and 5th Gen units, so its not the chipset. Just doesn't seem like there are any ways around this - Just appears everything has totally self-destructed!

Hi folks, Working in a computer shop I'd like to say I'm fairly handy at sorting the little niggles Windows 10 throws when it has a wobbler - Today is a different story. Before 10am I had 2 laptops and 1 PC that all have the same issue after updating to Windows 10 1803 'April update' whereby the machine initially boots to the blue troubleshoot page after selecting the keyboard language, but either proceeds to boot into the dekstop but with a totally black screen, no icons, no background and seemingly no drivers since the network and audio both have the red X, or just continuously boots to the troubleshoot menu with no passage into the operating system at all. Nothing on the taskbar works, and none of the recovery options (startup repair, rollback, restore,boot to the other visible partitions) has any effect whatsoever. Can someone please wave their magic wand and give me a CMD command or something that will save my day? Currently have 3 disgruntled people that don't want their data to be lost! Both laptops are UEFI windows 8 upgrades, and the desktop is a Win 7 upgrade with a legacy BOIS, but they seem to have the same options on the troubleshoot screen. Probably makes no difference but may be useful to know. Here's hoping *crosses fingers*

I work in a PC repair shop and I have 2x Acer laptops and 1 Desktop PC that has been brought in just this morning with this same issue - All boot into the blue troubleshoot page where you select the keyboard language, and if I can get them to boot, I get a black screen with a non-responsive taskbar, no network, no icons or anything. This must be affecting thousands. I need a solution! Having to backup data and reinstall 3 machines isn't really an option.

Hi guys, A family friend runs a dance studio. She currently has an Ipod classic with a machine that can alter the tempo of music on the fly to dance to. They have recently purchased 2 HP laptops running Windows 10 to run iTunes and they want some software to be able to slow down the tempo on the fly to simply connect to a speaker to play in the studio. All of the music is held and played via iTunes so this is what the software would need to manipulate. I have no idea if this even exists, but if someone knows something, even if it's a USB controller or something, that would be great. Cheers, Jordan