Replacing Hard Drive

The hard drive errors came back - CHKDSK ran without me asking it to, then boot failure. I removed the HD & connected it as a USB storage device on my laptop, but I cannot access the files. Says disk not formatted. I had moved everything but my pictures.

I got a new 1 TB hard drive at Best Buy & restored the Dell computer from the back-up. The restore was successful, but I ran into a problem with HDD size. The old hard drive was 150 GB & the new HD was 1 TB - only the 150 GB was accessible. I followed the directions but was unable to increase the size of the partition. Problem solved - there was an extra unused partition that I had to delete. Dell E-510 restored with 1 TB hard drive. I can try to reformat the old HDD, but I think it is toast.

Hard drive failure is not fun, but it was a challenge solving this problem.

My Dell E-510 PC that I bought in 2006 had a major crash this morning.  I had run Windows 7 back up to external hard drive yesterday. This morning, it froze and would not reboot.  First, Windows prompted me to do system repair, then system restore.  Then I tried to restart normally - would not start. I reconnected the external drive, and got out the Windows Restore CD - not sure if it rebooted from the CD or from the hard drive, but it finally did complete the start up.  Running very slow.  I don't plan to replace it, but I think I need to get the files moved to the laptop.  I have the back up files, but not sure how I would access them if the PC completely fails.