efellows...

I'm not generally one to throw the baby out with the bath water, but you might want to reconsider "cloning" the old drive to the new one.

While it is a bigger pain in the arse, you may want to - as the tech suggested - purchase an external USB enclosure for the existing hard drive.

After reinstalling all your critical applications, you can plug in the old drive and move your documents from the old to the new.

Using this approach, you still have all your data but you also have a "fresh" copy of your OS, your apps, your documents and your registry. Overall, a much "cleaner" way to bring the computer back to life.

Take care,
Ric

Thanks Ric,

The only problem with this is that I have to send the old Hard Drive back to Dell within the week.

-Eric

Well, if you're not opposed to cracking the case you can put the old drive in the new computer as a slave drive and accomplish the same thing.

You'll just have to make sure that the drives are the "same" - i.e. SATA, ATA133. You mentioned SATA in your first post, so I'm going to assume that's what you're dealing with.

Depending on where you live a computer parts company (Circuit City or BestBuy) may have these enclosures. Sometimes office supply stores like Staples will carry them. Certainly NewEgg or Geeks.com have them for ~$30.00.

If you get an enclosure that already has a drive in it, simply open up the enclosure, remove that drive and replace with your old drive. Once you've copied the data off the old drive, replace the drive that came in the enclosure and now you have an external backup drive.

You can send the old drive back to Dell within the week as required.

Hope this helps,
Ric