Hard drive help? Acer/Dell laptop

[Shadowolf~Forever]

So, my hard drive failed a few months back on my dell laptop. Rather than replace the hard drive and having to buy windows again, I was given a refurbished laptop to hold me over until I could eventually get a better computer.



So the dell sat around forgotten for a while.


Now that I'm working a bit more, I figured I could replace the harddrive and see if I could install windows from a disk my mom had from her computer....it didn't work(it goes to a black screen after it says loading windows and stays there).


Anywho, I remembered that I had a drive from my old acer packed away and I dug it out this morning and put it in.

It still loads up as an acer in the dell computer.

is there a way to change it/reformat it or something to dell without losing the files(pictures, music, games) that are on it?

[Lanackse-Kanvae]

Shadowolf~Forever

{.....}

is there a way to change it/reformat it or something to dell without losing the files(pictures, music, games) that are on it?

When you format a drive, it will essentially remove EVERYTHING on it including all of your files.

What do you mean by "change it"?

[Miserable pile of secrets]

so you were able to pull a hard drive configured with acer hardware and put it into a dell hardware? should've bluescreen'd on boot unless they shared similar equipment.

what do you mean by "loads up"? the windows splash/desktop wallpaper? the computer properties information?

if the computer is in working order you could always backup your files through: internet cloud service (google drive, dropbox, etc) flash drive, burning them to a recordable/rewritable dvd. if not place it in a usb enclosure and connect it to another computer.

then reformat it and preferably create a fresh clean installation of windows (driver hunting may be an issue unless you have the cds it came with)