A family member has a laptop running windows 7 which has started bringing up a message saying the hard disk is failing.
I will replace the hdd but was wondering the best way to do it. The laptop came with a recovery disk so will this mean I will have to mirror the hdd rather than doing a fresh install (preferable)?
Thanks
Just install Windows off a disk, use the licence stuck to the bottom of the laptop, download the drivers off the manufacturers website. This way you avoid putting all the included guff like McAfee/Office trials that you don't want.
You'd be better off doing a fresh install, since as you've already started getting warnings, you've no idea whether what is copied is actually any good until it tries to read it ...Originally Posted by karlf
I dont have a copy of windows, only the recovery disk
Might be worth re-installing it off that then. I'd prefer to do that than clone it.
I kept getting this when I had Vista on my computer. Formatted the drive and installed Windows 7 and never had the message again since, that was over a year ago now.
(I also checked the drive thoroughly using tools from manufacturers website and found no errors)
bovvered?
Depends on what the recovery disc actually has on it. Some are merely 'starting discs' that then access the recovery partition from the hard disk. If it's one of those then you will need to try and clone the hard disk first onto the new one.
If it's a full, proper, recovery disc then just pop the new hard disk in and boot up off the recovery disc. Then do all the Windows updates, get some AV software installed and you're pretty much good to go.
I'd try making a mirror of it first, worst case scenario it is full of crap then format and re-install with fresh windows.
I wasn't aware windows gave messages that your hard drive was dying.
I've had plenty of them die on me in the past on previous windows installs, never been given a warning before - is it a new feature?
Could be the BIOS rather than Windows, but yeah, Windows 7 does have that warning. If the SMART status reports an error then Windows picks up on it and flags
up the warning
I had a smart warning in an HP last week, it had picked up failings in the cache controller on the drive.
Still was working well enough to pull and image and fire onto another drive though so we were lucky, if not then it would have to have been rebuilt.
Smart does work... sometimes lol
Thanks for the replies. Can I assume that as there is no recovery partition, then the disk is a proper recovery disk?
What version of Windows 7 is it and what laptop? I may be able to get you a proper windows 7 disk.
Fairly high chance, best bet is to stick it in the drive and see whats on it.
You will want to do a full windows update and visit manufacturers sites for latest drivers anyway once done as it is likely way out of date anyway.
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