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Replace hard drive in HP Laptop without install discs
I am trying to help out a family member. Her little used laptop (now 8 years old) slowed down to a crawl.
After trying all software solutions (repair, restore etc), I ran HD Tune which showed the heard drive was failing (plus the fact at idle the drive starts spinning furiously for a few seconds every couple of minutes).
I have taken an image of the drive onto an external hard drive using Macrium. As it is an HP Pavillion (dv6404tu) and came only with the system restore on the hard drive and no op sys disk, can I install a new drive, make a bootable CD and boot from this and then transfer the image onto the new drive? And is it that simple?
Also, as a new 120gb drive for this model will run approx $125, a SSD makes more financail/performance sense, only from what I have read, am I correct in that I can't use a SSD with this older laptop?
Thanks in advance.
HP Pavillion dv6404tu with Vista 32bit