Yup, hard drive took a dump. Yanked it out and date of manufacture says Oct 2013!!

Toshiba. Won't be buying any of those any time soon.

No problem. Went and bought a Western Digital. Installed it. Got my back up drive ready to go and guess what?

I FORGOT TO BACK UP MY OPERATING SYSTEM!!!!!!!

SO.......... Back to the store I go to buy Windows 8.

Up and running now. Good thing I had my Ipad. I was having S&W Forum withdrawals.

Lesson. Back up everything!

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Life Is A Gift. Defend it!

FYI (perhaps you already know this)

As the proud owner of Windows 8 I am pretty sure you are eligible for an upgrade to Win 8.1.

And then you should be aware of this from the Microsoft website:

"Free Upgrade Offer

Great news! We will offer a free upgrade to Windows 10 for qualified new or existing Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 devices that upgrade in the first year!* And even better: once a qualified Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it up to date for the supported lifetime of the device, keeping it more secure, and introducing new features and functionality over time – for no additional charge. Sign up with your email today, and we will send you more information about Windows 10 and the upgrade offer in the coming months."

Now I would caution you to not be in a hurry to upgrade to Win 10. Let the other folks work out the kinks.

Insert obligatory praise for the Mac here....

Backups on the Mac are trivial, as is swapping hard drives. With the Mac's capability to boot any connected hard drive, plus target disk mode (lets you mount your mac's internal drive as an external drive on a 2nd mac), hard drive maintenance is easy.

I recently upgraded the SSD in my mac book pro. It went like this:

Plug in external hard disk, use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable copy of my original SSD.
Shut down, unplug everything, take case apart. Pull out old SSD, install new blank one. Reassemble.
Attach backup drive. Boot mac from backup drive.
Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy backup to new SSD.
Reboot mac from SSD.
Done.

Vastly superior to the boot loader nonsense on Windows machines.

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Common sense isn't so common.

And when you forget to back-up for a few days, you get a pop-up like the one that I got while reading this thread



BTW, I'm a big fan of Carbon Copy Cloner and use it periodically to make bootable back-ups of the drives on my main computers-in addition to using Time Machine(which has been built into OS X since 10.5).

I can't wait to upgrade this machine I am on and if it works well I will probably upgrade my two laptops that are on Win.7.

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I Cor. 10:13 "1611KJV"