All the videos on the Dell recovery disk for Win 8 seemed to have you making a backup USB or assumed the hard drive was already working. I could find nothing on steps to recover w/ a new blank HD.
So we just put the new HD in and booted the Recovery disk, and voilla, it knew what I needed, and within a few hours, 96 W8 updates were installed, and a lot of personal settings were back via the Windows Store account.
Today we will bring it up to Win 8.1 Update 1, load back all backed up documents, pics, music, apps, etc. Then make a USB backup of all this, which I assume will be able to boot itself in future if another HD crashes.
?
I sure want to thank all here. This has been so frustrating with so many sources we spoke w/ around town giving different opinions on what we were facing.
