Whether it’s connected or not, shortly after the January 2020 patch for Windows 10 I started seeing boot drive errors on my PC at home. For some reason the Crucial MP500 m.2 127 Gb boot drive started throwing corruptions and disk repair started coming up every other day.

Then another update stalled so I tried a repair – bad move. Part way through this process Disk Repair was run automatically and this stalled. I watched it for 20 minutes and restarted to see what would happen. That appeared to corrupt the contents of the disk.

So I scrambled around and created a bootable Windows 10 USB key on my work laptop and fired up the PC. Not a good story – the M.2 drive was showing as corrupt. So I went for a clean install and wiped the drive and resintalled.

The good news is that it took the reinstall, though in the meantime I’ve ordered a 512 Samsung 970 pro from Amazon as a replacement and will rebuild later. The MP500 is still a fast SSD but I’m now a bit wary of it and will swap it out soon. Fast SSD means really fast install so I had basic windows up and running in 15 minutes and fast internet and an Office 365 subscription means I had basic computing in 30 minutes.

Ultimately I’ll wipe the other two SSD drives (a bit of a long story, involving impatience) when I install the 970 but with another exam looming at the end of the week I wanted to get it up and running with base functionality as soon as possible.

One thing I struggled with for longer than 30 minutes was getting my printer up and running. I have a rather old but excellent Canon ip3000 printer which just happens to hang off the back of my similarly old QNAP TS-109 NAS Drive which gives me network printing. Unfortunately I couldn’t see a thing and no matter what combination of settings I thought I couldn’t see it. I took a break from proceedings to lament my fortune and then had a think. I started wondering about SMB and right enough, SMB1 is disabled by default in the recent builds of Windows 10. I dropped to PowerShell and enabled it and voila – the NAS box appeared on the network. I was able to add it and point the machine to the driver (which was still on one of the SSD data drives which I hadn’t wiped yet).

I’m now uploading a bunch of random stuff to OneDrive for Business in lieu of a rebuild at a later date. AZ-500 preparation beckons…