The System Setup Woes.

After some searching, I did find a helpful article on how to fix the issue - a hack disabling all the system hardware parts that might cause driver issues (which were the reason for the hang-up). I tried this-but to no avail. So I tried again, disabling more and more things, and at one point it did work.

I had to get some other things done at that point, though. So I tried to access the Windows Easy Transfer file I had created, in the hope of leaving my data over smoothly - only to find out that the external disk drive that I had saved it on did not work anymore. So not on the list of things I had needed!

So what to do? That was easy: find, buy and install a recovery programme, scan the drive to find that all files can be found, then go into town the next day to get a new external drive, and wait for the file recovery programme to finish so it can copy the found things to the new disk.

Which was a good plan, but after almost 36 hours of scanning for files to recover, the new installation of Windows graciously treated me to an automatic update with a system restart, resulting in all scan data being lost. Meanwhile, though, I had a) dis­covered that there is indeed a programme designed to migrate things, including working programmes, from one computer to another - and remembered that we actually had used that before, with good success. The only little problem about this was to find the license Code again-and then, it turned out, we had to ask for a reset of the code from support (which went very quickly and smoothly); and b) I really needed to get some work done for which I needed the programmes on the old version. Which meant I saved the system as it was then, did a rollback to my old Windows, and got some work done there. In addition, I discovered that the "broken" external disk was still working fine on the old system. Weird - but not unwelcome; I could do a checkdisk now, fix the issue that had caused the trouble, and save the long scanning time and recovery process.

Then I did a system backup again, prepared the migration file, and started to do the installation thing of Windows again. Whatever I had done the one time it did work, though, I was not able to reproduce it. After the second try, I gave up, went back to the system backup I had done just in case (good thing I had!), and went on from there, first updating, then cleaning up the new system and then migrating. Which took insane amounts of time.

So basically, there was an enormous amount of waiting interspersed with deep sighs, tries to get things working, more sighs, and even more waiting. There were numerous rollbacks and system restores. There were plenty of backups at different stages (and what a good thing, too!), and about three days of work-time lost to these shenanigans.

Now things seem to be more or less back in working order. I'm quite sure I will find some more glitches and problems in the next few days or weeks, but for now, I'm able to start the most important programmes, my mail is running, my browser data (except for the auto-fill in of some passwords, which were not migrated) is all there, and it mostly feels like my old familiar home system again. Whew.

I am dreading, though, the day when I will need to migrate to a newer version of Windows, as support for Win7 is ending this year...