Trouble Cloning Dell Drives

Dell drives have a DELLUTILITY partition that seems to be making it difficult for me to make a bootable clone of my original 40G drive. I am trying to clone this drive to a new 250G SATA drive.

Any advice would be appreciated

Dan

 

I have a Dell desktop which runs a 20GB boot drive. It has an unnamed partition (which is FAT and in EISA configuration) in addition to the familiar C: partition (NTFS).

Are you refering to something like this?

I just cloned it over to a 80GB (PATA) drive, and have been successful in making it the new boot drive for my Dell. (The original HDD is off-line now and serving as my spare.) The unnamed partition was copied over to the new drive. I use ATI-7.

I have no experience with cloning over to SATA, but I guess the process should be the same.

Just to share.

ps. If you are switching from PATA to SATA, then this thread could be useful:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=154901&highlight=cloning

 

Please read this:

http://www.goodells.net/dellutility/index.htm

It seems that this Dell Utility is of no significant after the initial "seal breaking", and hence need not backup into new drive if so chosen.

Gurus in the forum please comment! Cheers!

 

dano8286,

Are you getting the hal.dll error? Would you mind giving us a detailed description of your whole clone process. There are lots of places you can be tripped up.

 

Use the bootable Rescue CD to do the Cloning.

 

There will be either two or three partitions on the hard drive, depending on what and when you ordered your system. They are the onboard diagnostics utility partition (which is, I believe, the one you are referring to), the Windows partition, and if you ordered your system with it the Image Restore (aka PC Restore) partition.

Technically, you don't need the utilities partition if you have either the Dell Drivers & Utilities CD (runs the diags if you boot from it) or have downloaded the diagnostics from the Dell support website (http://support.dell.com).

The only other partition I can think of is the Dell Media Direct partition that is on some notebooks running Windows XP MCE and have Media Direct installed (allows you to use the system like a portable DVD player by booting from the Media Direct partition without starting Windows). There is a utility in the downloads section of the support site for reinstalling that if you wanted to move it over as well.

I hope this answers your question. If not, let me and I'll be happy to get you more info.


Larry
Dell Customer Advocate