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#1
Hard Drive replacement guidance
This is my first posting on this forum, so please bear with me. I purchased my laptop from a small pc repair shop for a low price. About four months later, my Toshiba mk3265gsx hard drive began sending error messages along the lines of disk failure and back up your data and don't turn the computer on again until you replace your hard drive (I have used it many times since I saw that - my bad) I began troubleshooting and researching and found that this particular hard drive is quite terrible and if it doesn't give out this week (or while I'm sending this post) it will soon.
My laptop came with Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit already installed. The pc repair guy has a license from Microsoft to put the OS on any laptop he refurbishes, but he cannot distribute discs. I called him up yesterday and he said I need to pay $89 after I replace the hard drive if I want to continue to use win7. The worst thing is, if I paid this guy I wouldn't have any discs to reinstall windows still.
I ordered a Western Digital 320 GB Mobile Hard Drive: 2.5 Inch, 7200 RPM, SATA II, 16 MB Cache - an obvious upgrade and I'd like to use some of your tutorials on this forum to get Win7 on this new drive. The bottom of my laptop has a product key so will I need to buy this software again?
Additionally, I tried to save an image of my system on my back up external drive but this error message popped up saying that my drive isn't formatted with NTFS. I'm not sure what that means, but can I format my hard drive with that?
My plan is now to make sure my product code is good with some freeware I saw on another thread, buy an 8GB jump drive and hopefully install Win7 on that, replace the hard drive and boot my system with the jump drive. In the meantime, I might just install Ubuntu and partition the new hard drive until I can figure this out.
Any advice? I'm not sure if I know what I'm doing here. And yes, I did back everything up.
Thank you!