Need image of freshly set up Win 7 laptop HD before Dell tech swaps out

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Dell sent me a replacement laptop, a Studio 1458. Out of the box, it made 2-4 sounds at boot up like a DJ scratching records. I contacted customer support a few times, who had various explanations (needed to update audio driver, etc.). Finally, after tons of hours of work, I have set up the laptop to my perfect settings, but the scratching noise got louder. So now Dell says the hard drive is failing and they're sending someone out to swap it tomorrow morning. They said since it would still be the same laptop, and the hard drive is only physically damaged, to save myself time I could image the hard drive, and then just copy it back over after the swap.

I went to Micro Center, where everyone told me something conflicting. I then went to Fry's, where they helped me pick Acronis True Image Home 2011 and a 1TB Seagate external hard drive. I said that I had made an extra partition for files, in addition to Dell's hidden ones.

The Fry's guy said this would be so easy and obvious to use, but after reading for hours I'm completely turned around. I saw on here something about making a new Bootable Media, but then it said it doesn't work with Dells. Maybe I'm just missing something obvious, but this is seeming far less "super easy" than the Fry's guy said it would be.

All I want to do is make an image of the finally set up hard drive, and then after the Dell tech swaps the drives out tomorrow to be able to copy this image over and start using the laptop. Please help and advise!

Thank you in advance :)

Lun, 09/20/2010 - 06:05
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First thing to do is to create a bootable cd and then boot from it and see if it works. You can perform your backups from it. With my external drive TI takes a few seconds to analyze it after the initial TI screen appears. If the boot disk works and can see all your disks and partitions then I would make a full disk image to your external drive and in addition I would make seperate images of your C partition and any others you have created (possibly D in your case).

You can do these backups from within TI in Windows too if you like but at least you will know the boot disk works before you need to restore. When you have the new HDD installed, use the boot disk to restore C and then any other partitions. Then restart normally. This should work no problem but keep these backups including the full image in case you need them.

If everything is ok, I would make another full disk image and a backup rescue cd.

Lun, 09/20/2010 - 07:51