change the hard drive from th dell 4100

No matter what I do I can not get more than 9% free space on the 20GB drive. I want to change it to my 40gb drive from my other computer.. But I need a system restore disc, But I do not have one. So Tried to do this and of course it did not work,. I tried making a back up but it would not do this to cd, so i bought some floppies, it made the ms dos floppy and started copy all the files after 9 floppies it was still complete, I am obviously an idiot. I tried calling dell and talked to 10 different people that knew even less that I did, I talked to a supervisor and they said they could have me one in 6 - 8 weeks , unless I wanted express service at a very nice charge. and still would take 7 - 10 days for that. Is there anyone who can advise me where to get this disk or let me use thiers I will return it, or explain how to get this done..PLEASE!

 

Hi Phil.

I don't quite understand what you are trying todo with floppy disks.

Are you trying to backup your current system?

If so using floppy disks would take thousands of them!

The only way you could do it is by using cloning software like Norton Ghost or Acronis.

But todo this you would need both drives plugged in.

If you are not very confident with this I would wait until you can get a set of recovery disks from dell and then start a fresh.

Tom

 

What brand is the 40GB HDD? A few manufacturers offer a utility to copy an old HDD to a new one. For example, these are the instructions for a Seagate or Maxtor HDD
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/installation_assistance/tutorials/
(and have some specific information about Dells).

It sounds like you are making boot floppy disks. They are only necessary when you cannot boot to a CD, but you still need the CD.

Matt