Dell M1330 upgrade...

Just to give some background info. I'm going to put it in a quote so that you can skip it if you want.

I've had it up to my ears in problems with my M1330 in recent weeks. Beginning with something causing Firefox and Spybot not to work at all, Beginning with something causing Firefox and Spybot not to work at all (click for link to my post in the spybot forums), which ultimately left me to reformat and restart my laptop with a 'clean' build of Vista after I backed everything up.

Just as things were going back on track with my most recent install, I remembered that I needed to update to Vista service pack 1, which was a huge mistake. I ended up getting the oxc01a001d error which is detailed here and here. Which has rendered my laptop unusable, even in safemode where it'd hang on crcdisk.sys.

Since no recovery options worked, even a manual attempt at a system restore via the WinRE command prompt. Eventually this has led to some startupv2 error according to the startup repair, or I'll get a BSOD describing nothing more than "stop: c0000142 dll inmitialization failed initialization of the dynamic link library". So I think its safe to assume that there is no hope.

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So now, I figure as I've always had insufficient room on my default 160gb hard drive, I'd upgrade to a 500gb hard drive. The original plan was to clone my 160gb drive to the new drive, but that's out of the window now as I'll have to do a clean install regardless.

With regards to a clean install on a brand new hard drive, is it as simple as using the Dell Vista installation, and I'm guessing the driver installation CD too so that I have all the basic stuff like media direct and quickset. Not entirely sure how I'll get a new recovery drive though...or if it's possible to create a new one.

I plan on getting a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade from this place and upgrading my copy of Vista to Windows 7. Apparently Vista SP1 is required to make this upgrade as well...from what I've read anyway.

If anyone has any experience with this, it'd be great.

Since my old hard drive is still usable as a slave drive in a caddy, I had entertained the thought of just copy and pasting the C:\Windows folder from one PC with Vista to the Windows folder of the slave, and praying that could be a fix?

No you'll need to do a fresh install off your Dell DVDs or from a Windows 7 DVD you purchase. You can copy your data back from your old drive to the new one once you have windows up and running.

Trap05 said:

No you'll need to do a fresh install off your Dell DVDs or from a Windows 7 DVD you purchase. You can copy your data back from your old drive to the new one once you have windows up and running.

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Thought so.

So I guess I'll be doing

With regards to a clean install on a brand new hard drive, is it as simple as using the Dell Vista installation, and I'm guessing the driver installation CD too so that I have all the basic stuff like media direct and quickset. Not entirely sure how I'll get a new recovery drive though...or if it's possible to create a new one.

I plan on getting a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade from this place and upgrading my copy of Vista to Windows 7. Apparently Vista SP1 is required to make this upgrade as well...from what I've read anyway.

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This?

Also, does anyone know how to keep things like the dell recovery partition, I'm guessing the Windows reinstallation disc doesn't do much more than that.

Why not just buy an OEM copy of Win 7 and do a straight install instead of installing vista then sp1 then upgrading it to 7?