Swapping HD

Silly question..

My girlfriends hd is on the frits. I have an extra but neither one of us has a OS disk.
If I took my hard drive out of my Dell 9350 that was formatted with my dell restore disk and placed in her Gateway would it work if I pre isntalled the drivers needed for her hardware?

Thanks
Baralis

 

Not likely. How would you 'pre-install' the Gateway drivers? If you mean that you'd run the HD in your Dell, and install the Gateway drivers there, it won't work. If you try to install a driver, and the actual device isn't in the PC, the driver install won't finish; it will error out and stop loading. You can, however, check your HD for a folder called i386. If you have 2 partitions on your hard drive, and one of them is a factory partition, this folder may be on there. If you have the i386 folder, you can install Windows using it if you burn it to a CD, but it's a fairly involved process, and it's also fairly slow. If you're interested, and you have the i386 folder on a PC, let me know, and I'll give you a step-by-step. Have you tried contacting Gateway for a set of recovery CDs? If the PC was purchased new and you're the original owner, there should be no problem. You might have to pay a small fee for shipping and "handling", but it beats having shell out over $100....

 

Thank you for the clarification, I did not know this. We just didnt have much $$ to spare and I had heard that Gateway wants as much as $30 to ship to Canada. So was trying for the cheapest method possible.

Thank you.
Baralis

 

I decided to contact Gateway and have them send her some new restore disks. After a couple of attempts they still failed to process the shipment (1.5 weeks). So I contacted them again. I was told by the tec that her computer had a recovery partition that I did not need to order new restore cd's.

I was linked to a gateway page that gave directions on how to restore windows. It tells you to create a startup disk using their utility but once a bootdisc has been created you cannot create another. Well her pc is telling her that one has already been created using her machine so will not create another.

Any work around for this? I am positive she has never created one. She has never owned a blank floppy or CD-RW. I am thinking the shop where she bought it from (was a replacement for a bad pc) had used her pc to create a disk prior to sending it to her.

Also is it necessary to have this boot disk? When reading the directions to restore from the partition it never mentions the disk. Here are the two pages of direction that they listed.

http://support.gateway.com/s/SOFTWARE/Medialess/MLXPMC0/MLXPMC0su11.shtml

http://support.gateway.com/s/SOFTWARE/Medialess/MLXPMC0/MLXPMC0su14.shtml


Thank you all.
Baralis