Hard Drive has many bad sectors, how to replace?

[green elephant]

I had thought of checking out another person's computer with Hard Disk Sentinel to make sure the drive was healthy and all, to find out it was at like 20% health and has over 80 bad sectors. I plan on buying another one on eBay. what is the best, easiest way to switch hard drives? The OS and everything is on this main drive. I can reinstall the OS, but then there is drivers and syncing all the files back in and regaining all the programs. There is about 220GBs in total used on the drive (its a 500gb). I have a 500gb external hard drive I can use to back all the pictures and documents on, but can I somehow make it easier than this and just copy everything (programs, documents, pics, OS) onto the external and copy it over to the new hard drive and then plug it up to the desktop? I also have a SATA/IDE to USB adapter I could use with my laptop which would most likely me needed in the 2nd method.

 

[gregrocker]

I'd look at the HD bay and cabling inside to see how it's set up but you should be able to use most any 3.5" SATA HD. Keep in mind that the best upgrade you can give a PC these days is an SSD.

Files should already be backed up against failure. If you have no data loss yet then you can save a Win7 backup image to external to apply it to new drive to see how you like it. I recommend using Macrium - Image your system, making the boot disk to use on both ends.

Otherwise follow these same steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7. Everything is covered there, compiling what works best in tens of thousands of installs we've helped with here.