Re: Not homebiult - but maybe a diy fix - Dell Desktop failed hdd!

HI Folks

Just to follow-up and say 'thanks' to all who responded....

Found a Hitachi 250Gb hard drive at the local computer place -
and downloaded TrueImage2....

30 minutes later - (and much nervousness <g> - and we seem to be up & running again) without all the grief and aggravation of reinstalling everything....

From a brief read of the instruction manual it looks as if TrueImage can also look after my backups for me - so the money's not wasted...

Dell's service policy is limited to getting the machine back up & running, as delivered, - so no chance of them doing anything helpful like cloning the hard drive....

Thanks to all for your help and constructive comments

Regards
Adrian - West Cork, Ireland

Adrian wrote:
HI Folks

Just spent a total of 2 hours online & on the phone to Dell support -
at the end of which they agreed that the HDD on this Vostro 200 is faulty ! Grr !

Anyway - hard drive is currently running OK - but as soon as the PC is powered down, it'll take possibly 20 attempts to re-boot - each time the is invisible in the bios, it 'clicks' but doesn't seem able to spin up & read the drive...

Dell are sending an engineer, sometime... with a brand new hard drive.
I already have backups of all the data - but reinstalling the s/w and config is going to be a right pain!

So - I got to thinking - how about cloning the hard drive ?

The dodgy disk is a Western Digital WD1600 AAJS (160gb) - but only 90gig or so currently in use...

So - could I buy a 100-or-so gig hdd and clone the disk to it - and then, maybe, clone it back to the new one that the Dell Man is bringing ?

Recommentations for suitable software welcomed...

Thanks
Adrian
.

Relevant Pages

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