Bill in Co. said:
But if he runs the Dell Restore Utility, it puts his system back into the
originally shipped condition, and he loses access to all his other stuff
on that drive (i.e., any other partitions, or programs and data he's added
will disappear from that drive, due to Dell's very basic restore image).
Yes. He says he has to replace the drive and is looking for install CDs.
Those things often indicate that a clean install is desired.
So the OP is likely looking at doing this anyway, since he's talking about
install CDs and a new drive. There's no loss, especially if the old drive
is functional.
The problem is that he doesn't have install CDs and the new drive doesn't
have the Recovery Partition (the Restore Utility) that the old drive *might*
have.
So the practical question becomes, how to move the Recovery Partition to the
new drive so that the clean install can be done?
All of this assumes that the original drive actually runs (even if the
Windows install doesn't).
If it doesn't, there's no choice, he has to contact Dell.
Unless he afterwards can somehow run Acronis True Image to overwrite the
existing new partition image(s) on his new drive.
That would be one thing you could try, but if you were doing that, there
would be no point in cloning the restore partition. And it carries risks.
Is that what you're getting at?
No. We don't know the OP's reason for replacement, but if the drive is
being replaced, it's quite possible that the reason for it is disk damage,
resulting in system file damage.
Cloning damaged files won't fix them, and without an install routine you
can't install clean and overcome this.
We do know that the OP does not have install media, but we don't know if
there actually *is* a restore partition on the original drive.
But if there is, *and if the drive spins and is accessible*, the idea is to
clone the whole old disk to get the restore partition moved cleanly to the
new disk so that it can be used to do an initial install. At very
least, clone just the recovery partition to the new drive.
The cloned system partition is going to be wiped, yes. You could try
booting from it, but if it was damaged on the old drive, it won't be
magically healed by cloning.
Hopefully the restore utility will recognise the full size of the (probably
larger) new drive, and not create a pre-determined-size partition.
Yes, programs will have to be reinstalled and data restored from backup
(i.e. the old drive). But if there's no immediate way to get optical
install media, and the new drive is at hand..... this will not take long and
may well get past the problem. The OP still has the original drive.
Risks and costs are both low.
I realize that this is a bit of a juggle, something you'd only do as a
workaround when you can't get the parts you really want right away. Hope
this clarifies it somewhat.
-pk
