Techies, I need your help.

Blackdownboy_2

Hello techies, a friend suggested that I may get some help here.

DELL Dimension 3100 Service Tag: HC2V62J

HDD has died, I have a new replacement. All my stuff is backed up on an external drive, thankfully. I cannot find my DELL recovery disk, the machine was running XP Home edition. Can anybody help with a recovery disk, the machine has a valid XP Home COA sticker.

Thanks a million if you can help me get this machine up and running again.

Strider590

The recovery partition was on the old HDD, you need a copy of WinXP home OEM and to then authenticate using the key for the old OS (on a sticker underneath). Your recovery disk probably won't work.

You can download the ISO file and create the CD you need (perfectly legal as long as you have a genuine key already) or rather you could until the idiots blocked all the torrent websites. Failing that you could get a CD on eBay.
You'll need to get onto the Dell website and download ALL the drivers you need too.

phona

As Strider says, you need an ISO for XP. It doesn't matter that they blocked the torrent sites; you should be able to find it pretty easily through google. In any case, the blocked sites are pretty easy to find by searching "<name of site> proxy" - the proxies spring up as quickly as they can block them.

You could consider using Linux instead. It's much more up-to-date than XP and is free. It usually manages to grab the right drivers for the main things (might miss drivers for some webcams, SD card readers etc) so is a lot less fuss. You can grab a live CD from any major distro and have a go. A good place to start is probably Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop).

NiftyDigits

A friend eh? The disc is in your Inbox.

Ainsley1

I do not question your statement that the HDD has failed but I would ask how you know this as it seems from various posts on this site that HDD failure, though it does occur, is not very common and can often be recovered once the reason is found for the apparent failure. If you find that your original drive really is OK and a bit of boot software has been corrupted or something similar you now have another drive to use!

Some posters have sensibly suggested recovery disks and backups from specialist but easy to use software to make this situation much less hassle via images or clones of your original disk so when back up and running why not consider that free approach.

Blackdownboy_2

NiftyDigits wrote: »

A friend eh? The disc is in your Inbox.

Thank you for your help NiftyDigits, my friend was right, I have been helped. :beer:

PS Your inbox is full NiftyDigits, I am curious as to what..."Another option" may be?

GunJack

Ainsley1 wrote: »

that HDD failure, though it does occur, is not very common .

I've found that they tend to go in batches, and have seen probably around 10 in the last couple of months, so yes it can be common....

Quiet_Spark

Ainsley1 wrote: »

I do not question your statement that the HDD has failed but I would ask how you know this

Dell's (along with quite a few others these days) have the decency to tell you.