More Hard Drive replacements

Had two hard drive replacements to do for a Dell Studio and a Dell XPS computer. This time it was for family but since I am leaving soon for christmas vacation and have lots of things to do had to do these one's in a hurry.. hopefully these make for some supprised faces.. "It's a new laptop" wait it's my old laptop and it works!

Dell Inspiron 5030 - Re-image

Last night's challenge was to backup and restore a Dell Inspiron 5030 laptop. For some odd reason Dell made this laptop a bit more complicated in that it's hard drive does not simply pull out form the side of the laptop with the removal of a few screews. In order to remove the hard drive you have to unscreew all the the screews in the back of the laptop and then flip it over and unsnap the top side of the unit. Luckily for me the Hard drive was in the front right side and I could pop it out quick enough and put it into an external docking bay so I could manually back it up. There was over 79 gigs of data to back up and this made the task alot easier. Once backed up I put the drive back in and ran the recovery partition which has the dell datasafe software on it. I am first trying the save my data option to the recovery process but as a backup I also backed up the drive manually. We will see if this works if not a complete restore might be needed. -TechGuy74

Curtis KLU LT7033 Factory Reset

So we got this new 7" tablet made by Curtis (is the Curtis Mathis of old?) and my son decided to secure it with a password so nobody could get into it. He was successful, cause nobody and I mean nobody not even him can get into it. My job as dad the Hero was to figure out how to fix the dilemma. Being quite the certifiable computer geek I thought "Well, Factory Reset, Right?". However it was quite tedious to find any official website on this product and any clear instruction on how to "factory reset" this device. I had resolved that the only option was to return the device to the store. Before doing so I managed to at least make things worse. I managed somehow to hit the wrong keystrokes to "fix" this tablet so it was not just locked out with no password to be found, but I managed to make it so when you turned it on this awesome little green droid robot would come for a second then fall over with a red triangle with and exclamation point coming out of his body. The device would lock up and stay like that till I hit the reset button on the back and then it would boot up again with the same error. I broke the news to the boy that his new toy was rendered useless he blamed his self of course and in doing so broke this Dad's heart. After much dismay and a lot of heartache this story does have a happy ending. I finally figured out the correct key sequence necessary to get the devise to reset to factory. Apparently you have to power it on and when the Klu splash screen comes you press and hold down power and Volume up at the same time and then the "bios" like screen comes up with the factory reset option as well as a few other options. We did the factory reset since we really only had the item for about a day when this issue occurred. Hopefully if you find this blog and don't have to go through the headaches we did. - TechGuy74