Death of a Hard Drive

So the hard drive in my computer at work finally found itself in a near non-working state. Technically it was still booting Windows but it wasn't running well and there was much noise and clicking.

First I wasted time tying to reimage the dying hard drive thinking it was just a Windows problem. Reimaging, for those that don't know, is reloading the OS and other software. There's more to that process but all you need to know is that it's like starting over. Since I don't have a custom image of my personal machine I had to use the generic lab image. The image process was not working correctly at first but I eventually got it. The hard drive was really not happy and so I pulled a new hard drive out of the parts closet and did the reimaging process again. That was most of yesterday.

Today I came in and it still wasn't acting correctly and telling me there was a "duplicate name on the network." Fine. So I decided to reimage the machine again and remove it from the active directoy list hoping running sysprep again would fix it. Same problem. Finally I figured out that at some point I set up one of my virtual machine installs with the same name as mine and that was causing the problem. For the time being I just renamed my machine and all was well.

Then, because this was just a generic image, I got to spend the rest of the day reloading my software and admin tools. The computer does seem to run a lot better now. It no longer crashes if I try to look at printer settings and things like that.