Ever run into those situations where when you find out the cause you think that it was a senseless nightmare?
That’s what I get when I work on Windows (anything). Today was one of those reminders. I’d been given the task to figure out why Windows 10 was reporting a 1tb drive as 500gb. This was on an Acer Aspire laptop. Windows itself revealed no answers. The internet was full of wanna be experts. You know when they provide every different type of solution most of which are way off the mark and you have to wonder where they came up with the idea?
I wound up taking out the drive because the Acer Aspire laptop wouldn’t respond to F2 to bring up BIOS nor any other hotkey to bring up the boot menu so that I could boot from a USB with Linux on it.
I removed the drive and attached it to my Linux workstation and launched “gparted”. This program immediately identified the issue and told me how to solve it.
I solved it and put it back into the Acer Aspire and rebooted only to have Windows report a thread exception error. Seriously? It said it had the error in ETD.sys. I researched the error and that’s where I found all the help from the so called experts.
The solution to this error was that the touchpad from Elan didn’t have the cable plugged in. I’d missed it. I didn’t reassemble the whole of the laptop because of these types of mistakes. The issue really isn’t the mistake of failing to plug it in, it is in Microsoft blue screening the computer refusing to boot just because the cable wasn’t plugged in. So what. It should still boot.
I plugged the cable in and started the laptop up and it came up to the desktop.