What Happens When you Replace Hard-drive?

As you guys can see, I am not a computer savvy tech...but recently my Sam sung HDD crapped out in my HP (only 1 year old). I backed up most important things on DVDs, but my PC is running slow. I visited newegg.com and I am thinking about purchasing a new HDD to replace my faulty one. My questions are:
1.) Should I purchase the same brand/type/capacity?
2.) Should I use my emergency bootable disks first on old HDD?
3.) What should I expect with a new HDD?
4.) If I put a different brand HDD in my PC, will it crash?

Can anyone direct me to helpful links?

Thanks

1. Alomst any drive will do. Sounds like you had bad luck with the current make/model so I think I'd pass on that one.

2. Not sure what you mean.

3. That it will be blank... and that you'll have to format it and re-install eveything.


4. Nope. Just need to make sure you get the same type of drive IDE or SATA.

Question #1: Did your HP come with a systems restore disk? If so, you can use that to reinstall your operating system to your new hard drive.

Question #2:

Quote:

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but my PC is running slow

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Have you ran a diagnostic check on the drive? Usually when a hard drive fails it will not run at all. Here's a link to Samsung's diagnostic tool;
http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...s/ES_Tool.html

Ditto to locating source of slowdown before spending money.
If it is a software issue,
A new HDD will not correct the issue.

Your bad drive may be covered by warranty. Check it out.

chances are HP has the restore partition on the old hdd so you would have to make the restore cds or if those were made and lost then you'd have to clone the drive and do a factory restore using the new drive.

HP and Compaq Desktop PCs - Obtaining a Recovery CD or DVD set
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...reg_R1002_USEN

Buy a new hard drive, replace the old one, and rebuild a clean windows. That's all.