Last night I tried to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 only to get stuck in a continual cycle of rebooting because it said the install hadn't succeeded. Anyway, I repaired it by booting from the Win7 disk, and moving some files to a temp file location, and am back to Vista (no data lost). Sadly, it seems that there are plenty of others who have been through this, and Microsoft is telling people like us that it is better to do a clean install rather than trying to custom install.
Anyway, I received a SMART report when I turned my PC on today, saying that a hard drive reports that it could fail.
I'm wondering how best to save all my data (I'd only saved the necessary stuff before the attempted upgrade--like my Ph.D. dissertation that is 7mos from completion!)
I'm not much of a 'computer guy', so here are my questions to you:
Is there an easy way to clone my drive quickly? (I assume there is software I could buy?)
Should I then do a clean install of Win 7?
Is there any way to repair my HD before/after a clean install?Thanks in advance for your collective wisdom....
BTW: I have a Dell Inspiron 1525, 32bit, 2Gig ram, 2Ghz Intel Duo Core Processor and Running Vista Home Premium SP2
