I use my laptop (Dell Latitude E5420) at work a lot. It rides around in my truck, and when I’m using it, I’m on one of three large walking draglines filling out reports. These machines have various normal vibrations in the course of their activities, some of which can be large scale. The Dell has Free Fall protection, and has hesitated from time to time.
Yesterday I saw a black screen with the title message three different times. A couple of times I got the Windows sad face light blue screen saying that Windows had encountered a problem and had to shut down. Each time I managed to reboot, run diagnostics, get a couple more error screens, then it would boot normally and allow me to finish what I was doing. My laptop is 4 years old and has had some rugged use.
After work I went to Office Depot (Amazon would have been cheaper, but I didn’t have time) and picked up a Toshiba Q Series Pro 256GB SSD for $189.99US. When I got home, I booted my laptop with my Image For Windows Rescue USB stick, and created a full drive image with validation (root and all 8 partitions in one fell swoop). That took two hours sixteen minutes. I have images of the laptop, but the full disk images I had were too old to use for my purposes. Had I been unable to get a fresh image off the failing drive, I could have used one of the older images and retrieved newer data from partition images, but that would have taken longer.
After the image was complete and validated, I removed the 240GB Seagate spinner that came with the laptop, replaced it with the Toshiba SSD, powered back up and booted my Rescue USB once more, and restored the image to the new drive. No format needed, just ticked the box in the restore menu for “Align to target”. The restore took thirty six minutes. After the restore, I removed the Rescue USB and rebooted. The SSD is quick; boot time cut in half, more or less.
On boot up and login, I clicked on Windows Update (to check if my Windows Validation was still good) and Windows had two important updates and one recommended update (Windows Defender definitions). I ran those (one failed, but after the mandatory reboot on the one that took, ran the failure a second time and it installed successfully). No validation issues; but then it was just a hard drive change.
All in all, a little over three hours for the swap, no complications to speak of, no validation issues. Toshiba offers a cloning download, but I decided to stay in my comfort zone with something I know works, Image For Windows, and I’m not in the least disappointed. So, back to work today for a road test. I think I’m gonna be alright, though.
