Cloning A Drive...

[broken flyer]

Hi, everybody... I've got a bit of a situation and could really use a hand. My father has a old dell dimension 4700 that he has been using for his businesses finances for ages. The problem is that the hard drive is completely shot. It barely runs the computer and has rendered it completely useless. I got a replacement drive for it that should work but i need to find a way to get windows XP on it so that it'll run his quick books software. I was reading online and it looked like i might be able to just clone the drive onto a CD with a disc image burner and then load that onto the new drive but i really don't know how to best go about this. I'm not even sure i'll be able to make a copy of the hard drive or download the software to do it for that matter with the way this thing is operating. It is in really, really rough shape. Any advice/suggestions? Any and all help is greatly appreciated...

 

[broken flyer]

Now it just got even more complicated. The drive has stopped functioning completely. We waited almost an hour for this thing to boot up and finally we got an error message saying to try and re-install the application. We don't have any restoration disks for this computer for some reason so we're really in a fix. I have an OEM copy of windows 7 home addition but it won't run his quick books and i doubt that computer would even run windows 7. I could put Linux on it but he only wants it to run his quick books software so he doesn't want me to do that.

 

[johnb35]

You will need to find someone with a dell pc about as old as that one and see if they have their recovery cd's and use theirs. Windows 7 will run terrible if at all on that machine. Or you may get lucky finding a copy of XP on ebay or something.