Hard drive failed

Hi, my hard drive failed. My question is, when I buy a new one, can I just use the system recovery disc to put all the stuff on it that came with my computer? Or do I have to buy the operating system all over again and stuff?

 

You should be able to use the system recovery disk to restore it to factory settings on the new drive. I have done this with eMachines recovery disks (They use Norton Ghost) and with HP products (didn't come with recovery disks, but had the image on a partition on the drive - you had to make your own from that).

I know with Ghost images you don't even have to worry about partition sizes -it detects the new size and auto increases the partition to utilize the new space. If for some reason the recovery disks you have don't adjust the partition size there are some utilities on this site that can help.

Make sure you have the jumper settings on the new drive the same as the old one.

Good Luck

 

...I have no idea what that means. But thanks for your help!

Also, my friend said he would give me one of his old hard drives that he wiped with one of those complete distruction programs or whatever. Is that okay too?

 

That should be fine too. What the recovery disks do is essentially overwrite whatever data is on the drive, and replace it with the factory "image" the computer came with.

Partition size relates to how much hard drive space a particular partition uses - most computers have only one partition that uses the entire drive space. It is possible to put more then one partition on a single drive - here is a basic description of Partitioning from Wickipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(computers)

But you most likely will not have to worry about it - most restore disks will "see" the new drive is bigger and auto-adjust the partition size to use all the space.

Lets say your old drive was a 20GB, and you install a new 60GB drive. Once you do the restore, check the properties of the disk (open "My Computer" and right-click on the drive icon) and Windows should indicate it is a 60GB drive (or something close to that - like 57.2GB for example).

If it still shows the old drive size or some other low amount - then you need to worry about increasing the partition size manually - in which case I suggest you do a bit of research on the various ways of doing this - and as I said before if needed there are utilities on this site that will assist in doing this. I'm not familier enough with any of them to suggest one in particular. A good pay utility is 'Partition Magic'.

Hope this helps!