Dell Dimension Desktop Computer

Hard drive failure. What I did

Yesterday I had to change my hard drive and had a few issues that I was able to fix.

The problems started in the morning when my wife called me and told me that the computer would not boot. We have been having trouble with our hard drive for a while now and I was able to fix each time by just reseting the PC. This time though the computer was not seeing the hard drive. Using tools and knowledge that I had I had to do the following:

Install new hard drive

First of all I had to install the new hard drive. I was able to do this by disconnecting my CDR and leaving myDVD drive, two old hard drives in the machine, plus a new 80 gig drive with a 16 meg cache. I was unsuccessful at loading Windows though as I kept getting an error as the Windows setup was starting, after loading the drivers I would get an error that it could not load the setup. I switched to my CDR from the DVD drive and had no problems.

Setup Windows

I successfully did a quick format of the new drive (thanks for that new feature Windows XP) and successfully loaded Windows XP. This is pretty basic as I use a CD that not only has Windows XP on it but also has Service Pack 2 for XP slipstreamed onto it.

Rebuild hard drive partition table

After I booted to Windows I saw that my old drive was not showing up as a drive or a partition. If I right clicked on the partition in Disk Management it knew that the drive existed but could no longer find a partition on it. Windows Disk Management said that the drive was healthy, My first attempt was to create a partition but not to format the partition as I did not want to lose the data for good. I fought with this for a couple of hours as I did not back up lately and the wife would kill me if I lost all of her data. In the end I was able to use Test Disk from the Filesystem tools of the Dos Ultimate Boot Disk. It ends up that the partition table had a start but not an end and the program was able to fix this….whew I would have been in trouble….

Migrate Windows and Office data

After I had the old drive back I went into the BIOS and chose to boot from that drive. I was able to boot to the old Windows XP installation easily enough and did not want to keep any of the data there but thought it would be a good idea to transfer my Windows settings using the file and settings transfer wizard in Windows. I saved the settings using the wizard and chose this as the old computer and in the destination I chose a folder I created on the new hard drive called “transfer files”. I then decided to transfer only my settings as I knew that I was going to have to reload my software and would be manually copying over the file structure from the old drive to the new drive.

I also moved all of my settings for MS Office using the Save my Settings Wizard from the MS Office 2003 tools section. I was able to copy the settings, which come across as an OPS file to the same place as my Windows Transfer Files and Settings.

After I had moved the settings and files over I rebooted and went back into the BIOS and changed my first boot to the new hard drive and it’s windows XP installation. I was very happy to see that after running the wizrds for transfering the settings and after reloading MS Office 2003 I was able to move over my mail folder and saw all of my email, contacts, and best of all my email addresses (Still had to fill in the passwords for email but that’s OK). After a relogon I also had all of my desktop settings back includig the background picture of my daughter and the animated Pingu cursors.

Copy data from bad drive

Next I just did a blanket move of all of the files from the old hard drive to new into a new folder that I created in the root of the drive. I did this simply to save time as I am not sure about the stability of the old hard drive and fear that I will lose it again.

Reload software

I have started reloading software but as usual I am going to be slow about the move this time. I will install some of my favorite freewares and will install Streets and Trips, Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop Elements and that’s it.

I have roughly followed about half of my Reloading Windows tutorial but since I have both drives functioning at the moment I have tried to cut some corners and make this work well as well as getting my wife up and running quickly for her work stuff this morning.

Dell Dimension Desktop Computer stuff to buy

Pal Pc Tracker - Stops Computer Theft!
Computer software that allows you to find your Pc anywhere in the world if it's ever lost or stolen!

How To Make Money Working From Home!
A practical, Step-By-Step guide to start making money on the Internet using your computer!

Cleaning Computers - Secrets Exposed!
How To Start Your Own Profitable Computer Cleaning Business - Step By Step Business Kit!

Dell Dimension Desktop Computer Recent Stories from around the internet

dell dimension desktop computer

During a tour of Australia, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made some news, rejecting a new bid for Yahoo, and dismissing Google's Android phone project. Now, an apparent throwaway remark regarding WebKit , an open-source browser rendering project ...

Read all 'Consumer software and hardware' posts in Microsoft - CNET News

Dell announced today that it will begin selling a Dimension desktop PC through Wal-Mart and Sam's Club locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. It's hardly a major rollout; only the Dimension E521 will be sold beginning June 10 at 3,400 Wal-Mart ...

Get Your Dell at Wal-Mart - InternetNews.com

The Dell Dimension E510n desktop is an Intel Pentium 4-based PC with a base configuration featuring 512MB of RAM, a 128MB ATI Radeon video card, a 80GB SATA hard drive, a Sound Blaster Live sound card and a one-year warranty. The n Series of Dell ...

Dell Expands Open Source PC Line - InternetNews.com

In 2005 Brian Reale and inventor-partner Alex Tejada discovered a way to shine light on the contours of a dancer's moving body without casting shadows on the stage. Called Spotlesslight, the system used a computer and an infrared camera to track a ...

Computer Hardware Terms You Should Know - Forbes

My colleague Louise Lee, who covers Dell Inc., is looking to hear from Dell customers about their experiences with Dell’s customer service and product support. So if you’ve got a Dell and have had a recent experience, good or bad, we’d like to ...

Gotta Dell, Dude? Tell us about it - BusinessWeek

Dell continues to win market share and turn out record quarterly profits, but two recent surveys show that the company has slipped, when it comes to a more subjective measurement: customer service. According to two new reports that rate the ...

Dell dips in support ratings - ZDNet UK

Every innovation, every business process improvement, comes with an IT complexity tax that must be paid by CIOs in time, money and sweat. Here are strategies to mitigate the increasing complexity of IT as it enables new business. Every innovation ...

Dell embraces Ubuntu, plans to install OS on some PCs - Computerworld Australia

Fast; inexpensive; runs many different OSes, including multiple versions of Windows. Apple’s switch to Intel CPUs, however, means that running Windows on a Mac is suddenly much easier—there is no longer a need to emulate an entire CPU, as new ...

Parallels Desktop for Mac - Mac Central

Now, to be fair, one of the rebuttals to the above argument has always been, “Well, what if I don’t want all the extra features that come stock with the Mac? What if I just want a cheap, limited computer?” And it was a valid point. But with ...

The Mac mini: Comparing Apples and Oranges - Mac Central

Keeping up with multiple RSS feeds can be tough. Yeah it's r eally s imple, but that s yndication bit is what always gets me. Google has introduced a fresh way to analyze both when blogs you subscribe to are posting and when (and if) you're actually ...