Considering putting win 10 TP on my old Dell

[Moonsurface]

Yep it's well and truely gone. I can get to the repair menus by using the DVD I burned, but it says the drive is locked... however in command prompt under diskpart the drive appears to not actually exist..... though I do get an X: drive which appears to have programfiles/windows folders on it????

Anyway I think I'll be removing the harddrive and wiping it/reformatting it via a caddy to restore this one!!

 

[Moonsurface]

OK, so I'm now wondering if the harddrive is actually coincidentally dead.... we managed to boot linux Ubuntu from a USB thumbstick and could see the partitions on the drive so erased them all but even in Ubuntu we can't read what's on the disk. The windows installer is adamant there is no drive present when I try to reinstall win 10.

So I took the drive out and put it in a caddy and my windows 7 computer can't see it at all, I went to disk management and nothing appears there - windows is making noises when I plug in and unplug the caddy though. ...

... I've ordered a new hard-drive for the laptop.

 

[GreyFox7]

OK, so I'm now wondering if the harddrive is actually coincidentally dead.... we managed to boot linux Ubuntu from a USB thumbstick and could see the partitions on the drive so erased them all but even in Ubuntu we can't read what's on the disk. The windows installer is adamant there is no drive present when I try to reinstall win 10.

So I took the drive out and put it in a caddy and my windows 7 computer can't see it at all, I went to disk management and nothing appears there - windows is making noises when I plug in and unplug the caddy though. ...

... I've ordered a new hard-drive for the laptop.

I take it from that you didn't get an SSD

 

[Moonsurface]

No I didn't want to spend that much on this laptop, so just got a western digital pretty much straight replacement drive.

 

[Moonsurface]

New hard drive and new battery now installed in the laptop and Win 10 TP has reinstalled fine. I've put it down to a coincidental hard drive failure caused by the installation and heavy restarting on my 4 year old laptop hard drive. New drive is better than the old one still and should be good to go - at least to stop the lappy being binned

 

[GreyFox7]

Congratulations, it's always nice to have a sandbox to play in.

 

[Moonsurface]

Yep it's nice to have the laptop back up and running. I'm sitting here typing this on my Win7 desktop. With my Surface in front of me (8.1) my phone to the side (win 8.1 phone) and the laptop on the floor to the side.... I think I'm a bit Windows'ed out!!