I have a fairly new HP Pavilion ze5300 -- which has given me a lot of
trouble.

I have an uneasy feeling that the hard disc may be going bad. I have a good
hard drive from another laptop that I could use, but my question is, if I
start with a newly formatted hard drive and use the recovery disc that came
with my laptop, with it install everything, including Windows XP, on the new
one?

Ray Jenkins <rayj.balt@deletethisverizon.net> wrote:
: I have a fairly new HP Pavilion ze5300 -- which has given me a lot of
: trouble.

: I have an uneasy feeling that the hard disc may be going bad. I have a good
: hard drive from another laptop that I could use, but my question is, if I
: start with a newly formatted hard drive and use the recovery disc that came
: with my laptop, with it install everything, including Windows XP, on the new
: one?

Doing a restore from the restor CD's should restore the laptop to the
state it was in when you opened the box and first turned it on. If
the laptop came with some canned software installed, that too should
be already installed after the restore.

Andrew
--
----> Portland, Oregon, USA <----
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This question is difficult to answer specifically and exactly, since
even a single model of laptop can be supplied with more than one version
of "recovery CD". But, in general, it's most likely that the recovery
CD that you got with the laptop will recover the laptop to the exact
state it was in when it was "brand new" -- including the OS, drivers and
applications sofware as they existed at that time.

Since it's a different hard drive, you lose nothing by trying, as you
won't be "erasing" the original hard drive.

However, I'm far less certain than you are that your hard drive is the
problem.


Ray Jenkins wrote:

Amen to Barry's last comment. I've seen a lot of hard drive 'failures' that
were actually due to viruses or to disk corruption due to bad/incomplete
installation of software. Or sometimes, people set their laptop to go
"standby" when they close the lid, but then the system shuts down totally
when the battery charge gets low. The effect is just like pulling the plug,
and having that happen a number of times over a period of weeks can cause
files to get corrputed.

Frequently, re-formatting the hard drive and then using the recovery disk
makes buying a new hard drive unnecessary.


"Barry Watzman" <WatzmanNOSPAM@neo.rr.com> wrote in message
news:3FE79D45.7040409@neo.rr.com...

Thanks Barry -- I think I would try recovering on the present hard drive
before trying to recover to a new one. I was just asking in case it does
turn out to be a bad hard drive. This laptop has been nothing but trouble.
Only one I've ever had that gave so much trouble.


"Barry Watzman" <WatzmanNOSPAM@neo.rr.com> wrote in message
news:3FE79D45.7040409@neo.rr.com...