Schröttle’s Krimskrams…

There you go: My Dell notebook - which I know as super stable and reliable workhorse - lets me down with a Bluescreen and tells about NMI Memory Parity Error and that the system has shut down for security reasons. I am NOT amused - there is a lot of work to be done and without the f…ing laptop it can’t be finished.
Well now - call Dell support immediately - Business Premium Service has been paid for anyway. The result is meager - some experiments via phone and trying out diagnostics accompanied by friendly words - the symptom remains the same.
OK thinks me - maybe it is becaus my harddrive is almost completely full - a mere 2 GB isn’t good for much more than the pagefile… and maybe there is some truth in the bluescreen message after all - so let’s give the notebook some new ram and a larger harddisk to start with - fiddling around with data compression and searching which files to delete has been getting on my nerves for some time anyway…
A new 250 GB harddisk is quickly found and the 1GB RAM don’t cost an arm and a leg. After installing the new RAM, the bluescreen is still there. So I may as well use them both - with the little advantage that the machine runs a little faster now…
What remains to be done is changing the harddisk: How do you install a new harddisk in your notebook - replacing the old one - if you have never done it before and if you don’t have the tools that are supposedly required for the job either??
Searching Google for ‘Laptop Harddisk cloning’ or so finds me the right information:
Simply boot into Linux (Watch out: only boot the OS, don’t install it.. ) - there is an Ubuntu-CD from the last ct’ Special flying around somewher - and then make a 1:1 copy of the old harddisk onto the new one using the ‘dd’-tool in a terminal window. The new one (of course it’s a SATA, and with those it works like this…) needs to be put into an external HDD case and is plugged into the laptop via USB. Copying takes a little over one hour for 100 GB then the new one has a complete disk image of the old one plus plenty of unpartitioned free space… Now change the harddisks - removing the old one from the notebook and installing the new one - and my Dell boots up like it had never had something other than this 250 GB disk…
I quit the experiment of enlarging the system partition quickly. It was much easier to just use the empty space for a new partition/drive and this is where all my user data will go from now on… that’s it - finished.
Oh yes, and the Bluescreen? That was still there after changing the harddisk - thanks god (Bill?) Windows XP comes with some decent maintenance tools. After some hours of chasing the error, I tried booting into ‘last known good’ configuration (F8 boot options) and voilà - everything’s fine again. That’s how easy it can be - I was plain lucky; and happy, too