Hello guys and thank you for taking the time to help me out. I have a HP laptop with Windows Vista on it and now everytime I turn on the laptop, ( I droped it about three foot from my lap) It tells me to back up my file because the hard drive is going to fail. I went out and bought a new Harddrive today, 2.5 SATA 250GB Western Digital, I want to install it but my OS is on the hard drive in a partion somewhere. This is my problem, I have no idea how to get my OS so that I can reinstall it after I change my harddrive out. Can I burn it to a DVD? Any help would be great, thank you all very much.
moved to correct forum. should be able to make recovery dvd disks from inside windows. hp has a program to do that either on the desktop or in all programs. will need about 3 dvd disks.
You need to use a program like "macrium reflect" (freeware), it will make an exact image of your c: drive. You can then "restore" this image onto your new drive. It's best to save this "image" on an external drive, since it will probably be too big for a dvd.
As said above the best way is to use a cloning software and clone the HDD. That way you pop the new one in and away you go like nothing happened. There is some nice software on a boot CD that you can dowload. I believe that name of that CD is Hirens.
