Please forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere on here.
My wife's Inspiron 15R 7520 has been running very slow recently.
The 1TB drive is only 20% full.
Taking ages to boot up and shut down.
Malawarebytes revealed a few little trackers but nothing serious.
It got worse with a bluescreen saying it can't boot up now!
I took the drive out and backed-up her user data (she had a lot of stuff stored on the Desktop), using my desktop pc and a free sector by sector recovery ("Recuva", I think).
I got all her docs and spreadsheet, photo's safe on my desktop.
I bought a new Seagate 1TB SSHD and used their DiscWizard (Acronis) to clone her slow drive onto.
The cloning "failed".
Put the new drive into the 7520 and tried to get access to the recovery partion's files without sucess.
The recovery files are there but F8 would work!
So I put a new Win7 onto the new SSHD (my desktop's OEM instal DVD) for a fresh install to see if the hardware is ok. It runs normal speed but has none of the Dell's wifi or drivers etc and i've got 3 days to activate it.
I can't do that 'cos the licence is for my desktop!
Now the questions :-)
The Dell came with no recovery disk. Can I purchase these?
Could I download an image or iso to restore this laptop?
Could I fix the MBR or whatever to re-use the original 1TB for a proper clone?