Dell rant. Sort of.

[superdave1984]

We ordered 6 shiny new Dell Optiplex 755's. They are very nice. Opened up a couple of them and installed the apps that were needed and set them up for the users. These are, of course, pre-built and pre-loaded with our corporate XP Pro and many other apps. So one of them runs for about 14 hours and poof. Windows splash screen, black display and the mouse pointer. That's it. I had taken considerable time getting all documents moved from the old PC to the new one. Notice my error there. MOVED, not copied. This thing would not boot to safe mode, and putting in the CD and booting got me as far as "Starting Windows" and BAM. BSOD. Fantastic. Hard disk failure. Great, so I'll just slave the drive into one of the other new ones and get the data. Again. Well no. Only ONE power supply in the thing. No way to have multiple H/D. SATA connection for the cheap as can be DVD rom, but no power plug. After much use of language that is not acceptable in the workplace, I crack open my computer to find the required power plug and SATA port so I can get the data. So much for being shiny and new.
On the positive side, Dell will have a new drive in my hands by noon tomorrow. But I'll have to load everything. Unless somebody knows how to ghost a SATA drive.

 

[KSoD]

You can ghost the drive with just norton ghost or acronis. I have SATA drives and have done it multiple times.

 

[superdave1984]

You can ghost the drive with just norton ghost or acronis. I have SATA drives and have done it multiple times.

Without a way to slave the drive into the box? I'm always ghosted disk to disk with one slaved in the same box. This is not possible in this case unless I could put a drive from one new PC and the new blank drive in MY computer and boot to the ghost disk?

 

[Lexluethar]

Thats what you get with Dell

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Our vocational school has the mini 755 series, very buggy *******s, they dislike ANY decent software that is installed on them...

 

[KurrentEweser]

Without a way to slave the drive into the box? I'm always ghosted disk to disk with one slaved in the same box. This is not possible in this case unless I could put a drive from one new PC and the new blank drive in MY computer and boot to the ghost disk?

Imaging can be done as restorable files. Imaging doesn't have to be done on-the-fly.

 

[NightSurge]

I'm pretty sure I have done disk-to-disk ghosting with 2 SATA drives. I just plugged them both in on the motherboard and I'm pretty sure Norton Ghost saw both and let me ghost as normal. That was like a year ago, but I know we did like 20 computers that way.