On Monday, December 25, 2017 at 1:21:52 PM UTC-5, Ron Hardin wrote:
I have an Inspiron 1200 that's been my main
computer since new, that's showing signs of
crashes and BSOD's.

What kind of HD does it have? Conflicting
acronyms that I don't know the meanings of.

Possibility 1 get a new HD of the right type

Possibility 2 get an enclosure for the old HD and
access it via USB from another computer.

those possibilities seeming to cover whatever the
eventual cause of failure is.
--


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.

Ron,

Best fix for a hard drive with a bad sector is to clone it to another drive.. For this, you need hardware to which both drives are attached, e.g. the drive inside the Inspiron 1200 and a drive connected to the 1200 via USB. Next, you need free cloning software such as Clonezilla or Partition Wizard, both of which can be set up to boot from a CD-ROM drive or bootable flash stick. The "surface to surface" copy is, in effect, a verbatim clone of the hard drive, including the operating system.