Yeah, finally resigned myself to biting the bullet, and am heading over to Fry's at lunch for a new hhd.
Is there an advantage to using your recommended DriveWire over my drop-in docking station for retrieving data off the old drive? I'm seeing user comments about it that say it won't work with Win 7 64bit OS?
Last edited by chris24; 30 Aug 2010 at 13:09. Reason: updated info
Well, toaster would work just fine as all it does is provide power and connection to the bare hdd. My DriveWire works with all OS systems, and I'm sure the toaster would as well. Go ahead and test out your toaster before purchasing other gadgets. :)
Chris,
Go into the bios and make 100% sure that you are set to boot 1st from CD/DVD.
Insert the win 7 dvd. Power ON. Remove power cable. Reconnect Power Cable. Power up.
Now when you see that very first screen on the display, use the SHIFT + F10 key combo to get to a command prompt.
Insert a USB stick. At that command prompt, you will be able to-via good old dos commands-copy your data from your computer to the usb. Perform a DIR on the USB to make sure you copied what you need.
Now use EXIT command to return to the WIN 7 DVD. Now you can do an install of WIN 7.
Hi Karl, thanks for your reply,
Unfortunately, the files that need transferring are too large to fit on my usb drive, & sadly, I'm a bit dim on DOS commands anyways these days.. (it's been a while lol)
My plan is to install a new hdd, do a clean install on it, then put the old hdd in my usb docking station & see if I can pull off the stuff i need from it.
The stuff I'm most worried about is getting all my emails & book marks off the C partition...FFox/T-Bird
Thanks Karl,
I must admit my DOS skills are weak, it's been quite a while.
My plan is now to install a new drive put Win7 on it, then drop my old one into my usb docking station & hopefully pull off the files I need. The ones i need on the C partition
(emails & bookmarks) are the ones I'm most worried about
Chris,
Sounds like a good idea.
It's a little late now, but one of the main reasons I prefer google's mail, gmail, is that I can never lose my email and also my email is always accessible anywhere I have an internet connection.
For bookmarks, tags, I use XMarks. Once again then my bookmarks are accessible from anywhere.
I use Roboform for the same reasons for passwords and still more.
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