I think my laptop hard drive on my Inspiron E1505 is starting to go bad. I get a blue screen maybe 10% of the time I wake it up, which causes me to restart but doesn't cause any further problems. Today I went to wake it up and the computer says that there is no hard drive to boot from. I try a diagnostic and it says the same thing. I try and restart 3 or 4 times and nothing, and then the 5th time it boots up completely fine. I'm backing up files to a USB Hard drive right now. Is there a way I can copy all the windows files onto it so that if the main hard drive fails again, I can boot to the external? Taking that one step further, could I then buy a replacement internal hard drive and copy everything to the new one? I've never ran into this problem before. Thanks!

12/12/2008 2:34:57 PM

it would be easier if you install a new internal drive and reinstall Windows, then you'll have a fresh, clean install of Windows.

Then mount the old drive as an external drive and copy your personal files and documents over.
Don't bother with trying to copy an installation of Windows from one drive to another.

12/12/2008 2:52:28 PM

^ bingo

12/12/2008 2:58:38 PM