I recently had my hard drive crap out on my Sony Vaio desktop. I was looking at salvaging the computer and just purchasing a new hard drive off of newegg. I've never replaced a hard drive before so I'm curious; if i buy a new hard drive and slot my system restore cd's into the cdrom drive, will BIOS and windows install on the new drive? i really hope i don't have to buy new XP discs. Thanks.

If your system restore disks are set up along the lines of the mess of a Gateway that I had to deal with as an undergrad, you should be able to format the drive and install all of the OS off of the disks, assuming the disks work right (as with almost everything else on that Gateway, the System Restore disks were bad also).

 

If it doesn't work though, here's a tip; find a college student to talk to. Most colleges have deals with Microsoft where students can buy CD's of the OS for reasonable prices (At Indiana, it was $5. After the Gateway crapped 95% of the way out, I waited a month for XP to be released and just bought a new disk, that actually fixed most of my problems with that PC)

Replacing a hard drive is one of the easier things to do to your computer.

 

Just crack open the case, pull out the old drive and put the new one in, plug in all the cables. If you have 1 hard drive, make sure your jumper is set to Master.

 

Take your system restore CD's and take the one that mentions anything about Windows or operating systems. Put this CD into your cd rom, and reboot your computer.

 

A dialogue should come up saying "Press any key to boot to this cd...." or something to that extent. Press any key.

 

Then a lot of stuff will happen and it's pretty straightforward on how to install it. You'll see your C drive and you'll have options to format it, I usually just do an NTFS Quick Format, and you're in business.

 

If you don't see that boot to cd dialogue, you gotta get into your BIOS and change the boot device order so that the CD ROM is the highest on the list. Usually to get into that when you boot your computer you'll see something like "Press F2 to enter setup". It could be F2, it could be Delete, or Esc, but whatever it is, press it and you'll get to a blue screen, which is the BIOS. Just navigate around and you'll find the boot device order thingy. Any questions just PM me or something, I work with this stuff every day so I can help you out.

Thanks guys, I'll probably be buying a new drive in the next couple of weeks.