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Dell 147 W 2 500G drives having issues
Hi
My 4-5 year old much used Dell is starting to give me issue What I thought was an audio program making slight noises in background appears to be my HD "Grinding" ob occasion As soon as I hear this grinding Explorer shuts down?
Anyway, I am running Windows 7 Professional 64 BIT
Is there a simple way to transfer everything to the unused drive in case my primary one decided to stop grinding and quit?
I have no idea where my windows key is so can I find that within system somewhere if needed
Thanks for any help and, please keep it simple At one time, 25 years ago during the days of Win 3 and DOS I did pretty good, today I'm a turn on and hope kind of guy :-(
Mary G
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August 20th, 2014 11:00
Run the pre boot Diagnostics and select the Extended hard drive test on both drives. Only one of the 2 drives is the Primary and can boot the computer. The second is for storage. You would have to physically swap drives. I don't know about that model but that might be possible. Check your manual. Copy all your files to external media and also do a backup before the drive fails. Copies are better than backups because you can save for operating system upgrades which don't recognize older backups. I would also make copies of all your personal files on the second hard drive if it checks out OK.
Tomas090D
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August 20th, 2014 12:00
Hi Mary
Thanks for the information but: Would you care to walk me through this step by step? I was following you right up until you said "run pre boot diagnostic" :-(
I believe the HD's are interchangeable on this model (It is a 1747, I see I made an error in title) Are there any sub model numbers or anything that would assist?
When you say "copy" to external, do you mean simply drag files to an external USB or DVD and what kind of backup?
When you copy to another drive and reinstall that drive where primary was does windows recognize that and OS works from beginning?
'Thanks and sorry I don't know more :-(