Replacing the Hard Drive on a Vista Machine

I dropped my HP tx2-1950dx Touchsmart laptop the other day. Since then, the hard drive has been making clicking sounds. After doing a disk check, it seems that the area from 11% to 14% on the hard disk is in bad shape.

I ordered a replacement disk from HP and it arrived the next day.

The first thing that needs to be done is to create a recovery disk that can be used to boot the system from the CD. In Vista, type Recovery in the start box and select Create Recovery Disks. This uses the recovery partition on the hard drive to create disks that will restore the system to its original factory state. Please note, this should have been done BEFORE the drive was damaged!!!

I have also created a current backup of the drive using the Windows Recovery option. I hope that I can use these disks to restore the disk instead of using the original state disks.

I also used DriveImageXML to create a compressed backup of the disk, but I will need to figure out a way to run the software before the main partition is installed.

I will follow the instructions on http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial144.html
, once I have my recovery disks created.

After running the recovery disk, it seems that I will need to reinstall the factory state and then restore the later recovery that was created in Vista.

There is no way to load an image of the disk, except for the original factory state. The HP recovery disk does not allow access to the Repair Computer utility that is normally accessed after pressing F8 during boot. The only way to load another image is to buy a piece of hardware that will add the new drive to the computer through USB. I have ordered such a device.

I borrowed the hardware from a friend, but it didn't work on Vista. I bought the hardware for Vista. It still didn't work. Some of the partitions could be restored but not the boot partition. After several attempts, I surmised that the boot partition was corrupt, since I made it after the crash.

I ran the "restore to factory state" disks and reinstalled additional software and updates. All is well now.