Naeaes

If you can't afford to brick the mobo, don't learn using it. Basically the old BIOS is first erased and the new is written onto the ROM so a corrupt bit or random crash anywhere during the process will brick your shit. So maybe have it done at a shop? The place where I used to work would do a BIOS upgrade + CPU install for 15€ Well worth being able to blame them for a error. Then again, I believe that motherboard supports Asus EZ-Flash2 which is pretty foolproof. Skim though the manual? Maybe youtube?

Since the old drive is failing, cloning is the last thing you want to do. You do not want to clone the sectors with diminished readability. Instead, install the OS fresh on the new drive and copy the data over. I'd used something like ROBOCOPY for that large a batch of data. "whine whine whine I don't want to reinstall my stuff." -OP next. ;D

You'd need bios ver 0301 https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/B85PLUS/HelpDesk_CPU/

We'd have to know more to be able to really help you. Can the motherbaord provide the power for an i7? Does the BIOS support those CPUs? Has Dell outright locked out CPUs outside their OEM lists of CPUs? But in general, a 3770(K) does need more cooling than the i3. 125W TDP worth IIRC. If it's supported, you only have to enter the BIOS and save the settings. You'll know it's not supported from you not being able to enter BIOS to begin with. And Win10 will be just fine. Within the same CPU architecture, it doesn't care and automatically scales up to the newly available cores and threads. edit: boy, was I off! 3770K is 77W TDP, 3220 is 55W TDP. Still, ramping up the cooling will not hurt.

You know what a filesystem is? Like Fat32 or NTFS or ext3 and so on? It's basically about what strings of ones and zeroes means what and every FS is unique. Well, FreeNAS uses a FS called ZFS because it's fast and secure and best for this purpose. So unless your drives are already ZFS (which they're not, nothing uses it outside niches like FreeNAS) freeNAS won't understand the data. Like you can't read or write a language you can't undestand. Samaan tyyliin et itsekään voi lukea tai kirjoittaa kieltä, jota et ymmärrä. The process of changing filesystems is what removes the old data. I honestly a hundred percent recommend freeNAS. It's just the best. But if you insist, use some other system that uses the filesystem you have on those drives. But again, you'll be making sacrifices you don't want to make in terms of speed, reliability and security. If I were you, I'd dump the data on the 1TB onto some other drive or like Dropbox or something, format that one for FreeNAS and get the put the data back. Forget about those 320GB ones for daily use. You can't rely on them. Or do whatever. Backup your shit in any case.

Yes. To be exact, I want to avoid having to power up each machine to begin with. We just want to unload the pallet, install SSDs, apply serial numbers and ship them out.

Oh, the machines have AMI BIOS with support for UEFI

Is it possible to set the BIOS date and time by flashing the ROM? As I understand it, flashing the CMOS resets the hardware clock to some specific date and time such as 1.1.1970 or doesn't touch it at all leaving in the time it was at but whichever the case is, it can't set the date and time right. It'd need more than just flashing the ROM. But am I wrong? For context, my employer could have the supplier flash in a custom BIOS for us with our specific settings entered by default. This is a huge deal for us because we're talking of hundreds of machines that we wouldn't have to configure ourselves at all saving a lot of time for hundreds of times over years to come. But one of the things we need is for the hardware clock to be within +/- 5 minutes from UTC. Flashing the BIOS is included in the price of the unit but other setup work isn't so if they need to do extra steps to set the time it'd affect the price leaving us potentially better off just doing it ourselves as a first-boot process. Then again, we'd have to program, test, validate, have approved and implement such a process wasting time once. So if I ask them to set the time to UTC, will I get fired?

That's not quite correct. For PATA (aka IDE) we used the pins and jumpers to set the drive to act as a master or slave which was a must for the parallel interface, as you said. But SATA (Serial ATA) interface doesn't have masters and slaves. The pins on SATA drives are for other, non-standard and manufacturer-specific, uses. Some utilize them to limit the power draw, some use it to cap the capacity, some are for throttling down the transfer speeds and so on and so forth, but again, not for a master/slave selection.

Sure. Why wouldn't it?

I've worked with recovering files a bunch of times and tried many a software for it. One fast and easy free software is Piriform Recuva but it's very basic, and can't handle much corruption. I'm never surprised when it comes up with nothing at all. Anytime I need a high chance of recovery, I use PhotoRec. It's user interface is text-based and it doesn't recover all metadata (for instance filenames and folder structure are lost). But it's also free and especially for photos, it just works. Photorec comes bundled with another software that's more for trying and fixing the filesystem. Don't do that before you have your data. If you can afford it, I've found EaseUs to be the very best tool, interface is easy enough, retains metadata if possible, catches most files but it's paid. There is a free version but it's demo and has some limitation like you can only view and not recover or something, I don't remember. Then there's Disk Digger. Not much to say about it other than that with it you can take a byte-by-byte image of the failed drive and search for the files in the image. You know, the customer doesn't always grasp that the recovery can take days and wants their laptop back right away. Disk Digger is also paid. Tl;Dr: For you I'd recommend not formatting the card and not writing onto it at all whatever happens. Try recovery using Recuva first and if it fails, try PhotoRec.

The built-in 'Reset this PC' -function doesn't do much in terms of attempting to fix underlying issues. If you have a corrupted driver installed now, it'll be corrupted after the reset and so on. If that's what you've been using to reinstall, forget it and run the installer off of a separate USB stick. Obviously skip trying to fix issues or retain data/settings in there too. Obviously get your backups first. Also, Win 10 is dumping data on partitions other than the C: and whatnot you can see. So to avoid issues, remember to remove all the tiny partitions your old instance has created (and stored data on). Delete all of them and let the installer re-create fresh ones, don't just spam Next.

Something like that could be exactly what I need but I really have to be able to get the data in bulk. I'm dealing with about a thousand locations now and a few thousand more in a few weeks. So having to fill in text fields one by one is a no-go. That API looks interesting thou... To be exact, I only need the location data for doing some crude math on what location is closest to what other locations so it doesn't matter what standard the data is in, so long as it's uniform for all my locations. I'll be using excel or python for the math anyway so the website doesn't really have to have any functions for that.

I gather you misunderstood my point. That is, I believe that it used to be in the menu that other guy mentioned and I pointed out it's not there any more. That is all I said.

No, you're showing a different menu in the screencap. It used to be in the menu you get by right-clicking the start menu icon.