Re: Dimension 4700 needs hard drive - HELP!!

Jane,

Unfortunately, a blank drive is what they commit to in the warranty. It's
ugly, but consistent with other vendors.

I don't know your financial situation, but any solution is going to involve
a little money.

My suggestion is to purchase the least expensive external USB2 drive that
you can find. For example, OfficeDepot has a 200GB Maxtor external for $90
(after rebate) this week. That would be perfect. Maxtor isn't my first
choice, but for this purpose it is fine.

After that, you need a copy of Acronis TrueImage Home. You can purchase and
download it from www.acronis.com

Install it the hard drive by plugging it in to a USB2 port. The drivers
should all load just fine. It will then have a drive letter in My Computer.

Then install TrueImage. Create an image of your entire hard drive onto the
USB2 drive. You'll have to follow the instructions, as it is too detailed
for here, but it is pretty straightforward. If you have to, find a
technically oriented friend to help. It should also create. It will also
create a bootable disk (CD or floppy) that allows for the restore.

Once this is done, you have your 'base image' as it is right now. Right
before Dell comes, do another backup, with just changes, so you have it
current as of that moment.

Then, when Dell installs the drive, boot the recovery disk. It will then
restore your entire machine to the new drive, exactly as it was backed up.

You can then use TrueImage to regularly backup to the external drive.

Drives fail. If you don't backup, you WILL eventually lose things you
treasure.

Hope this helps.

Tom
<googlemail2003@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1148991679.824032.255810@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
A few days ago I learned about Event Viewer. Before that I never knew
it existed. I looked at the System messages and there were disk errors
- bad block errors.

I did some research, ran hard drive tests and contacted Dell and they
tell me I need a new hard drive.

This is a real nightmare for me. I have a serious back injury and
cannot sit at the computer for more than 15 minutes at a time.

They told me they would send someone to install the blank drive but
that I would have to reinstall ALL the software (OS, drivers,
applications) with their "help" over the phone.

Has anyone out there ever done this? Isn't there some utility or
download from Dell that restores it to the way it was when I bought it?
I had quite a lot of software on it when I received it (Norton
Internet Security, IE, Microsoft Works, DVD software, Musicmatch and
God only knows what else).

I would have thought it would be their responsibility to at least
restore the system to the way it was when I bought it.

Of course I also have lots of stuff that I have installed myself which
I know I will have to reinstall.

There are nine bad blocks on my 160GB disk. My Event Viewer log goes
back one month. There are disk errors every day from the first of the
month. For all I know there were disk errors from the day I got the
computer one year ago. Most of the errors happen during a virus scan
which runs daily. Occassionally there are errors from other times but
not ever day.

What are the chances of things remaining as they are? That is, what if
I don't change the hard drive?

I have had absolutely no problems with the system at all and am tempted
to just let things go since the work to restore will be the same if I
do it now or wait until something goes wrong.

Guess it's true what they say about "ignorance is bliss".

Please tell me what I have to look forward to if they install a new
drive. I'm scared!

Jane



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