Ok,

I have a Dell Latitude E6400 that I've had for 4.5 years for college. It started acting sluggish and harddrive space started disappearing suddenly. IT at school suggested replacing the harddrive. I bought a copy of WIndows 7 Ultimate 64 bit from the bookstore ($8 ) as well. So I put the new HDD in and put in the new disk. It keeps saying "windows setup could not configure windows to run on this computer's hardware." I tried the Vista factory disk and same thing. What am I doing wrong? Do I need to do a backup from my old HDD?

 

What exact hard drive did you buy?

You have a PM.

 

Thanks George, I bought this one


I'll check it out over there when I get a chance

 

The drive might be defective. Is it seen in the bios? What brand drive did they send you?

 

They sent me a Toshiba one and it showed up as partition when I went to pick where to install Window. Is that what you mean?

 

Are you sure you have a 64 bit processor? What exact OS did it come with (read the COA sticker on the bottom)? Do you know the exact CPU model? Do you know how much ram it has?

You may want to try to clone the old hard drive - what brand is it? Do you have a SATA to USB adapter cable?

 

It's not a good idea to make multiple changes at the same time. Your case perfectly illustrates why. If something happens you have no idea what caused the problem!

My advice is to put your old drive back and in and find out what's wrong with it and fix it. THEN clone that drive to the new drive. When you have the new drive installed and running then install the new OS. That will also leave you with a GOOD original drive with all your data as a back up!

Sounds like you have a virus and/or spy ware on your old drive. There are a lot of forums and websites that can give you better advice on cleaning it up than this one.

Just as a precaution, you could clone your old drive to the new drive and keep it as a backup while you clean up the original. After you get the original cleaned up and working make sure that you completely erase everything from the new drive before using it. You con't want to take a chance of the infection remaining on it.

 

Thanks for the replies fellas! I'll check it out tomorrow as I am working shortly and I'll let you know. Thanks a bunch

 

Joe, there has to be a hardware issue somewhere in there if he puts a brand new hard drive in and Windows won't install.

 

Well , what happened lol. Yea, I would confirm a few things first.

Hit Bios /system default settings / save changes

Reboot w/original Vista copy.

Will Vista at least, run now?

 

Oh yea, Is your Vista 64 bit? Well try that first see what you get.

 

I'm going to give it a go tomorrow again. My old HD works, just slow as hell and shows no space. I've scanned for viruses etc frequently so I don't think it is that. Vista and Windows 7 both give me the same error message when I try to boot from the disk. It makes it up to the very end and then gives the message about not being able to run on the systems hardware. I think my Vista is 32 Bit, but I'll double check and post back tomorrow.

 

^^^

A bunch of unanswered questions.........................................

 

GLC, I'm 32 Bit, Windows Vista, 4gb Ram

Update: I did some googling and found a post that mentioned loss of HD space. A poster said to check their Norton AV settings due to large backups. Low and be hold, 48 GB on my drive (148 GB HD) were stupid Norton Backups. I uninstalled Norton and deleted the massive folders and all is well. I still want to figure out the HD, but I'm not as worried now. Back to over 50 GB freed up. No more Norton for me, what a hog that is.

 

Wow. Yea, I would never use Norton, too many problems.

MSE is all you need, been using it for a few years now, it's great!

Anything Norton gets deleted right away...Seriously.