Well my Dell XPS laptop keeps throwing a "reseat hard drive" error message, despite reseating etc. It did it before and after my motherboard replacement, so they are sending me out a new hard drive.

However, the courier collects the old hard drive, so I need to back up everything, or perhaps just image it.

Can anyone think how best to do this? Do I need some software??

Cheers in advance

buy an external usb hard drive and acronis

:+1:

Acronis True Image FTW

Steve

buy an external usb hard drive

Check.

and acronis

Off to google it

+1 for acronis.

Might want to delete your pr0n first... will make the copy faster

Who saves pron? With 16MB connections these days surely streaming makes sense? :P

Saying that I did aquire a large pron collection when I bought a hard drive from a friend Thats long gone though.

Acronis is downloading as we speak, not sure if the 15 day trial is a full version though, heres hoping.

Am I right in assuming that I'll still have to install the OS on the HD first?

Who saves pron? With 16MB connections these days surely streaming makes sense? :P

Saying that I did aquire a large pron collection when I bought a hard drive from a friend Thats long gone though.

Acronis is downloading as we speak, not sure if the 15 day trial is a full version though, heres hoping.

Am I right in assuming that I'll still have to install the OS on the HD first?

No, you should be able to get acronis to make a boot-cd so you can image straight back to the new drive... although if i were you id reinstall windows from scratch without any of the dell bloat installed - oh and partition it too..

TBH the only dell thing on here is the diagnostics facility thing which I think is quite handy. When I ordered the machine I ticked the "no bundled software" button :P

Saying that though, if anyone has a Vista Home Premium disk they wanna lend me then that would be ace!

And why/how would I partition it?? :confused:

you should have got a recovery disk with the lappy?? :confused:

Partitioning it is just a good way to keep things separated, so if you had 2 partitions a C: and a D: you could keep all your personal stuff and "media" files on D: which makes them easier to find and backup.

Personally i have 3 partitions (spread across a few drives) equalling 1.2tb - O/S and programs C: Games G: and Storage S: - i also have moved all the my documents, my pictures folders etc to S: so i can easily blitz the O/S if i need to (this is windows remember)

well, technically 6.. i also have a Win7 partition, a OSx partition and a SuSE partition

Geek!

I did get a recovery disk yeah, just assumed that would already have the bundled stuff on there?? :confused:

Maybe not though, as I do have separate Utilities and Drivers disks.

Geek!

I did get a recovery disk yeah, just assumed that would already have the bundled stuff on there?? :confused:

Maybe not though, as I do have separate Utilities and Drivers disks.

If its like any other dell ive used, the vista cd will be just vista...

Excellent news.

Cheers Col.

Cheaper than Acronis (though Acronis is good), because it's free, and has worked for me:

Clonezilla

It's a bootable CD.

The 15 day acronis trial lets you do everything except the actual clone IIRC.

It says its fully functional. Will find out tonight though!

It says its fully functional. Will find out tonight though!

A beer says it lets you make a boot CD then the boot CD will do everything except let you complete the image operation. As for the application I don't know.

What make is the HDD? If Seagate or Maxtor, they do a prog called Disk Wizard, which is actually a free fully functioning version of Acronis from:

Seagate Technology - DiscWizard

Other HDD manfrs. do similar tools, try checking out their sites, although I can't speak for them personally as these days I use Seagate or Samsung almost exclusively.

I think its a Dell specific jobby.

Regardless, thanks everyone for your help.

I have the trial Acronis, seems to be a full version albeit for 40 days only. If it comes to it I'll buy it as it seems pretty slick.

Dell will use other peoples hard discs.

If you go into device manager what is the model number?

Its a M1330 you got tomtom isnt it... iirc they still use 5400rpm drives :thumbdwn:

Get your hand out yer pocket and buy a 7200

Its a Samsung drive.

Well the clone has just complete, so ready for the drive to be collected tomorrow

Its a M1330 you got tomtom isnt it... iirc they still use 5400rpm drives :thumbdwn:

Get your hand out yer pocket and buy a 7200

Yep, M1330.

For browsing and watching the odd dvd, I'll make do with the stock HD methinks