Installing a new hard drive

[Andy008]

If I install a new hard drive into a laptop, what process should I follow to get XP up and running?

Thanks.

[748rhydhir]

upgraded my laptop last year.installed new hard drive,ran xp on cdrom drive & away it went. all ok

[vehelpfulguy]

One of the problems with laptops is that they often require special "drivers" to get some of the hardware working.

The best way to re-install Windows is with a recovery CD that came with the laptop.

If you have not got that do as follows.

Go to the website for the laptop company and download any driver for your laptop and version of windows you are on.

Copy those drivers to a CD or DVD.

Put in new hard drive.

Put Windows CD in the CD drive and "boot" from the CD.

Follow the Windows install through to the end.

Install any special drivers that you need to install.

Download and install all the latest Windows fixes such as Service Pack 2 and any updates.

Re-install any programs you need.

[Hippy]

I did this just this last weekend, and did just about what veryhelpfulguy said! Ho-ho. Laptop now singing and whizzing like it never did before. The old disc was too small and slow. I got a 80 GB one from PC World for �54.99. Money well spent!

[rojash]

The quickest way is to buy a USB portable drive then do as follows:

Connect via the USB
Use a disk-imaging program such as Ghost, DriveBackup or Acronis to image your existing drive to the USB one.
Remove the USB drive from its container and swap it for the drive in your laptop.
Reboot.
You now have a larger drive in your laptop, plus an external one for backups, archives etc, and the only software you've had to install is the disk-imaging stuff.

I've done this a number of times and (excluding the time to create the image, when you can be down the pub) it takes about 12 minutes.