dpilot83, Omar, guessrow, & others

Much thanks for all of your help and assistance and especially the time you took in looking up links and helping me troubleshoot my issues. It's been the better part of a day messing around with this plus all the time I spent prior to his on my own but in the event of a hard drive crash it's take out 4 screws plug in 2 wires and I'm backup and going vs. trying to figure out how to recover and going through this whole learning process in a panic.

I think I was able to finally take the ISO file I downloaded and burned using ImgBrn hit F12 and got setup to begin.

Then all the confusion about setting up partitions below. I ended up doing the screenshot attached. Made a 100GB partition where I installed Windows 7 left the 100Mb empty and the partition 3 for the balance of the drive. I formatted the partitions and began the install. Windows 7 loaded looked a little funny at first, put in my CD for the monitor drivers and the CD for the rest of the system drivers and it looks about the same now as the original drive. Downloaded the burner software from Dell that was in my downloads section. Am currently installing Office via download and also ordered a hard copy of that on DVD as a precaution.

Will still need to get my Antivirus up and running and re install the Acronis software.  I think at this time rather than risk wiping the Dell original drive at least until the warranty is up. I'll just buy a 3rd hard drive and try cloning what I just created to it. 

Can never have too many hard drives and cloned copies in my book. 

Am so grateful for all the expertise here on computer talk to walk me through this.

(0414031926.jpg)

0414031926.jpg (23KB - 230 downloads)