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Windows says hard drive problem.


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#1
ttowner1946

ttowner1946

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I have an older Dell Insperion DCMF etc My question is can I purchase an external HD for this computer and does the new harddrive come with a operating system?

Thanks


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#2
phillpower2

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:welcome:    ttowner1946,

 

You will need to fit the new drive internally and then do a clean install of Windows I`m afraid.

 

We may be able to help you do things a different way, post back and let us know if that is what you would like to do.


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#3
RKinner

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You could purchase an external drive but it would not come with an operating system and I'm not sure your PC can boot from an external device.  Some of the older models could not.  Since it's a desktop it would not be difficult to swap out the old drive for a new one.  Depending on how bad the old drive is you might be able to clone the HP restoration partition and use that to reload it.  Otherwise you will need an operating system.  Check with HP and see if they still offer to send you a replacement disk for the operating system that came with it.  Usually they just charge you postage but yours is so old they may have stopped all support.

Not sure how legal this site is but they offer Vista downloads.:  https://softlay.net/operating-system/windows-vista-download.html There's always a free Linux download available from various sites: https://www.linux.org/pages/download/


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