Restoring a Dell Laptop
I’m working on a Dell Inspiron N7110 running Win7 Home premium. It’s about 8 months old and won’t boot. I ran the Dell diagnostics from the diagnostics partition. It ran but found problems on the hard drive at the boot sector. I booted with my handy Paragon Partition Manager PE DVD which allowed me to recover all the documents on the old drive to an external USB drive.
I’m replacing a Samsung 750 Gig 5900 rpm SATA with a Hitachi Travelstar 1TB Sata600 7200 RPM drive
If I backup the diagnostics partition and restore it to the new hard drive before installing Windows from the Dell Installation disk, is there a special process I need to follow to make sure the Diagnostics process starts up normally as it did on the old hard drive?
I’m replacing a Samsung 750 Gig 5900 rpm SATA with a Hitachi Travelstar 1TB Sata600 7200 RPM drive
If I backup the diagnostics partition and restore it to the new hard drive before installing Windows from the Dell Installation disk, is there a special process I need to follow to make sure the Diagnostics process starts up normally as it did on the old hard drive?
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Then I'd just use those DVD's to restore the system to the new disk. If I'm not mistaken the recovery partition should also get rebuilt via those DVD's.
ASKER
OK, here is an update on the situation.
This is Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit
1. I installed a new 1TB HD, hooked the old one up to my desktop, ran Paragon Partition Mgr, and backed up the C & and Recovery partitions to an external drive.
2. I booted the laptop with Paragon PE DVD, restored the C partition only. It found an integrity problem in the file early on, I told it to continue and it completed properly.
3. I tried booting the laptop but it said the BCD and Config.sys were corrupt, so I ran a Windows repair from the Dell Win7 install DVD.
4. Booted the laptop: It says user profile is corrupt. There is only one profile for the user.
5. There was network connection found. Device Mgr shows drivers missing. I download the Lan driver from my desktop and installed it on the laptop. Still no network adaptor is found on Network & Sharing.
6. Renamed the user's profile to –old and restarted. Same temp profile message is displayed and no network adaptor is found in Network & Sharing.
The owner has a lot on this system. I would rather not perform a clean install.
Any suggestions?
This is Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit
1. I installed a new 1TB HD, hooked the old one up to my desktop, ran Paragon Partition Mgr, and backed up the C & and Recovery partitions to an external drive.
2. I booted the laptop with Paragon PE DVD, restored the C partition only. It found an integrity problem in the file early on, I told it to continue and it completed properly.
3. I tried booting the laptop but it said the BCD and Config.sys were corrupt, so I ran a Windows repair from the Dell Win7 install DVD.
4. Booted the laptop: It says user profile is corrupt. There is only one profile for the user.
5. There was network connection found. Device Mgr shows drivers missing. I download the Lan driver from my desktop and installed it on the laptop. Still no network adaptor is found on Network & Sharing.
6. Renamed the user's profile to –old and restarted. Same temp profile message is displayed and no network adaptor is found in Network & Sharing.
The owner has a lot on this system. I would rather not perform a clean install.
Any suggestions?
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You have obviously copied over errors caused by the bad original disk to the new Disk.
Although I agree that HDDreg mentioned by nobus is a very good tool and it may help, at least temporarily, it'll probably take very long (it can easily take days or even weeks, depending on the disk's size, and the severity of the errors). Personally I wouldn't bother.
Even if the owner has lots on the system, a fresh install from the recovery media, it in my opinion a great chance. I have found that most users, even if they have lost installed, usually don't really use a fraction of it. Most of the time such software is a result of having tried out things, or even a result from crapware that got installed when he installed something else, and because he didn't use the manual install settings of that program where you can deselect the added crapware from getting installed.
You can also take the chance to get the newest versions of software he needs, or replace something with a better software. I have found that in most cases only very little software actually has to get installed. Most things I can replace with PortableApps, which is a tool that you can get lots of OpenSource, free software for, and it includes software for almost any task needed. An advantage of PortableApps is that you don't need an installation, you can put it on a USB stick and carry it along with you, so you can use it on any windows PC you get to access. It pulls the software you select, and it manages updates, so you don't have to manually take care of every software you have installed:
http://portableapps.com
Like that, your customer ends up with a cleaner, better installed PC that probably runs faster and smoother...
Although I agree that HDDreg mentioned by nobus is a very good tool and it may help, at least temporarily, it'll probably take very long (it can easily take days or even weeks, depending on the disk's size, and the severity of the errors). Personally I wouldn't bother.
Even if the owner has lots on the system, a fresh install from the recovery media, it in my opinion a great chance. I have found that most users, even if they have lost installed, usually don't really use a fraction of it. Most of the time such software is a result of having tried out things, or even a result from crapware that got installed when he installed something else, and because he didn't use the manual install settings of that program where you can deselect the added crapware from getting installed.
You can also take the chance to get the newest versions of software he needs, or replace something with a better software. I have found that in most cases only very little software actually has to get installed. Most things I can replace with PortableApps, which is a tool that you can get lots of OpenSource, free software for, and it includes software for almost any task needed. An advantage of PortableApps is that you don't need an installation, you can put it on a USB stick and carry it along with you, so you can use it on any windows PC you get to access. It pulls the software you select, and it manages updates, so you don't have to manually take care of every software you have installed:
http://portableapps.com
Like that, your customer ends up with a cleaner, better installed PC that probably runs faster and smoother...
you can do a factory restore on a new disk - and repair the old one when it suits better
ASKER
here is an update:
I'm logged in as the new administrative user I created. no temp profile messages.
I ran chkdsk /f and sfc /scannow on the new drive.
Chkdsk ran clean and restarted.
SFC ran and created a log that is massive. It mentioned it found errors but could not repair them all.
Still no network adaptors found. I reinstalled the dell drivers for chipset and adaptor controller.
I'm going to try another windows repair. It looks like I have a cooked registry or other system related file(s). Any other suggestions?
I'm logged in as the new administrative user I created. no temp profile messages.
I ran chkdsk /f and sfc /scannow on the new drive.
Chkdsk ran clean and restarted.
SFC ran and created a log that is massive. It mentioned it found errors but could not repair them all.
Still no network adaptors found. I reinstalled the dell drivers for chipset and adaptor controller.
I'm going to try another windows repair. It looks like I have a cooked registry or other system related file(s). Any other suggestions?
ASKER
Windows repair did not find any problems.
Running sfc /scannow again
Running sfc /scannow again
did you run chkdsk?
update the drivers? ....as i asked?-->see my post above
update the drivers? ....as i asked?-->see my post above
ASKER
Yes, it just started back up a few minutes ago. Chkdsk and SFC did not resolve the issue. I had to up an in-place upgrade of the same O/S & service pack level.
This worked: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html
I'm still checking it out and applying updates. No confirmation if it's out of the woods yet.
This worked: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html
I'm still checking it out and applying updates. No confirmation if it's out of the woods yet.
ASKER
As I mentioned before, I would have just performed a clean install on the new drive, but she had some apps that neither of us had the DVD's for.
After cloning the old HD and having not boot, here is what I did:
1. Ran windows repair - didn't work
2. Ran Windows Install and selected upgrade - Win7 to Win7 - This worked
3. Created a new profile
4. Ran sfc /scannow & Chkdisk /f - three times - each time something was found
5. Had to uninstall and reinstall Anti Virus, Adobe Reader, Flash player & HP printer
6. Rechecked with Sfc /Scannow & Chkdsk /f - remained ok
7.Copied her docs from the old profile to the new one.
This was a long but successful process.
After cloning the old HD and having not boot, here is what I did:
1. Ran windows repair - didn't work
2. Ran Windows Install and selected upgrade - Win7 to Win7 - This worked
3. Created a new profile
4. Ran sfc /scannow & Chkdisk /f - three times - each time something was found
5. Had to uninstall and reinstall Anti Virus, Adobe Reader, Flash player & HP printer
6. Rechecked with Sfc /Scannow & Chkdsk /f - remained ok
7.Copied her docs from the old profile to the new one.
This was a long but successful process.
tx for feedback
ASKER