Just spent the last 3 hours making system image discs of hard drive.  Process was spelled out in Dell Backup and support on computer.  12 DVDs of hard drive system image. Unfortunately it would only create the same Dell hierarchy partitions I already had. Figured I could live with that if I could just get it cloned.

After last disc it asked to create a special start-up disk to be able to restore the system image. Fine did that.

Pulled hard drive out of computer installed the new blank drive. Upon start-up repeatedly pressed F12 to get it to boot from DVD drive. I had loaded the start-up DVD before switching out drives. 

It asked to put in last system image disc from the set. I did and it read some stuff and then asked to put in the first disc of the system image.

The only saving grace was I put the original drive back in and it was still normal and okay.

Here is where it goes all wrong.

After putting the first disc in It says there is no disc in the drive to read from !!

This right here is the reason I hate creating discs instead of having an original  install copy of the operating system because they never seem to work. Now just imagine I had done this and not checked to see if they could load anything to a new drive. 

There was an option to try and install drivers from the Dell driver disc.

The deal there is it asked for drivers but in the Dell driver hierarchy there is a whole pile of file names tried clicking some and could get nowhere with that. Also tried doing the auto-run on the driver disc but could not get that to install them either. 

So where do I go from here. I'm thinking this method of recovery is mostly designed for overwriting a corrupted but original hard drive where the drivers would have already been installed ?

Somewhat frustrated with the whole process I had hoped a simple clone would have been much simpler and straight forward.