Laptop Harddrives

This week was a very busy week where I worked three days for a total of 14.5 hours. I had a few main tasks which took up alot of time over the three days. First and foremost I finsihed pushing the images out to the last ten laptops. Once the images were out I had to name each computer and then put the computer on the network. Since I ran sysprep on the initial image everything else was already setup and I didn't need to do anything further with them. The laptops were replacing an old laptop cart they had in the library so I retrieved that cart and took all of the old laptops out. Last thing for the computers was to just put them in the cart. 

My second major task was the KB teacher's laptop. We have had a lot of problems with her video drivers so I did a clean wipe of the computer and reinstalled windows. I found the ATI drivers without Catalyst Control Center so I isntalled them and used the settings in Windows to configure the video card. It worked alot better so hopefully she is good to go now.

The last major task I had was to swap the principals hard drive in her laptop. We got her a new 250GB hard drive to replace her small 60GB driver. She has a lot of programs in her computer as well as some other things that she could not lose. We decided it would be good to just ghost the drive and re-image the new drive so we wouldn't have to worry about losing anything. This became a major thorn in my side which consumed most of my efforts this week. Her laptop is a tablet PC so it does not have an internal cd drive. It took me a little while to procure her external one and once I did, sure enough, ghost would not boot off the external drive. I fiddled with the BIOS and made several new boot disks for a couple hours before I finally had to give up on it. It seemed logical to just take her hard drive out and place it in another laptop and run ghost on that machine. This worked well and I was able to ghost that drive. It had 55gb of stuff on it so the imaging took three hours. When I was ready to re-image the new harddrive with that image it didn't work. I recieved an error message and after a lot of research found no decent explination of why it didn't work. I fiddled with the BIOS in that computer to no avail. I then tried reformating the hard drive to make sure it was it the NTFS format and it still did not work. Mrs. Dow called her husband, who is a MCST, and he could not think of anything other than to make sure it was NTFS. This new harddrive has been a headache from the start and Mrs. Dow and I both think the best thing moving forward is to just install a clean copy of Windows on the new drive. I will work on this next time.

One issue that popped up was Mrs. Dow's laptop's harddrive died so we had HP send a new one and I installed that. Fortunatly,  her laptop model is the same as the new laptops I just finished with so I could re-image the new harddrive with the image I just created. She was actually giving that computer to another teacher and getting a much needed more powerful one for herself. So I ghosted the image out and set up the laptop for the teacher. 

The danse teacher's laptop's shift key got stuck so I popped it out and put it back on to free it. Unfortunatly, the key no longer worked from the jam so next time I am going to see if I can scrounge up a keyboard to swap on her laptop. There were about 5 other small things that continued to pop up through the week that I dealt with, but they were all simple fixes and everybody is in working order.

Finally, we were completely out of space on one network drive so I worked with the Librarian to clean off her network folder to free up about 9GBs to gain some breathing space before we expand the storage on that drive.