An expensive lesson was learned and one I should have known all along but because of laziness, arrogance, and hubris I ignored my better judgement. The following event took place a couple of weeks ago so some of the details may be fuzzy or forgotten but the general frustration and lesson remain.
My Asus GL704G ROG laptop was starting to underperform in certain tasks like running multiple Virtual Machines I needed for my Cyber Security class, as well as rendering 3D design for my 3D printer. So, I decided it was time to upgrade the 16GB of 2666mhz RAM to 32 GB and 500GB of SSD storage to a faster 1TB. NVMe.
Updating the RAM was the first thing I needed to do and the most important because it was essential to running the VM’s without my PC freaking out and lagging. The process was as straightforward as it gets and saw a noticeable difference in performance, but something was still off as I was still experiencing small glitches while doing routine tasks. Nothing that made it unusable but worrisome none the less. Especially since I’ve been using the laptop for 6 years at this point and feared the SSD was getting closer to its life cycle.
I ran Crystal Disk Info to confirm my suspicions of a failing SSD and though it reported it had a 90% life cycle remaining I felt it was not enough assurance especially since it stores my files and runs my OS.
My plan was to replace it with a Samsung 990 Evo. First, I had to clone my old SSD using Rescue Zilla. The process was somewhat smooth even though I had never used this app before (my experience was with CloneZilla) but figured it should be a similar process. I copied my old SSD into an external SanDisk SSD. Now I had to remove the back panel, disconnect the battery, unscrew the old SSD, put in the new one, and screw it down and started the restoring process. I felt confident that I had done everything right, yet when I went to bootup my system, BSOD!
I muttered some expletives and started the troubleshooting process. And this process is what lead me to my biggest mistake.
I went through the normal process of Windows recovery and troubleshooting but nothing seemed to work. So, I decided to reimage the laptop with another copy of the original SSD.
I removed the back panel of the laptop, disconnected the battery, unscrewed the new SSD, put back in the old one, screwed it down and started the cloning process once again. This time though I followed the documentation making sure I would do it right this time. Once the cloning process was completed, I removed the back panel, unscrewed the old SSD, out back the new one and tried to screw it down and it was at this point that the universe or my tiredness took over the situation and the screw got loose from the screw driver bounced on the mother board and fell in the right spot to bridge a connection leading to sparks, smoke, and my defeat.
I had not disconnected the battery. I had screwed up because I either forgot or was tired of the process and wanted to run my new SSD to just work.
At this point it must have been 2 or 3 in the morning so I resigned myself to just going to sleep and figuring out what I would do in the morning.
#Cloning #Maintenance #RescueZilla #CrystalDiskInfo #Virtual Machines
