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#1
Update fails after hard drive replacement
My Dell 1525 W7 laptop had begun to experience more and more frequent hard drive errors. So, in an effort to fend off total disaster, I purchased a new hard drive. The new drive was slightly larger than the old one (250GB vs 160GB). With a week old backup in hand, I used Acronis to do a disk CLONE to the new drive in an external enclosure. I was able to do it without any apparent drive errors. I then swapped drive for drive and rebooted. My most frequent apps worked fine, network access was fine, etc. Then I went to do a Windows Update - not fine. The little shield in the upper left corner of the box was red and, when I clicked on the "Check for Updates" box, it replied Windows Update cannot check for updates because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer." I went to Services, started the service, marked it Automatic, and tried again - no joy. So, as it suggested, I rebooted. No joy again. After trying a couple of different backup versions with the same result. I went back to square one and used the original W7 install disk. The install went fine and I was able to use Windows Update successfully. I hoped that having verified that a vanilla W7 worked, I might be lucky enough to just be able to restore my latest backup. Wrong. The system appears to work fine with the only KNOWN problem being Update - there may be other problems, as yet unknown. Differences I am aware of: new hardware partitions proportionally larger than the previous disk Anybody have any ideas? No, I don't want to go back to the old hard drive. Elliott