PC recovery discs with brand new hard drive quesiton

[mike boss]

I have a question about recovery discs.
When buying a PC from a big box store I know one of the first things you do is create
the recovery discs. If you have a complete hard drive failure and buy a new hard drive,
if you run these discs would it give you what the PC had stock ?

I have an HP PC I picked up like 7 years ago. I think the HDD is going to fail.
I'd like to pick up a 1TB (or 2TB) drive and put it in. I can get a copy of Windows,
but ideal would be running these recovery discs. I can then remove the unwanted software.

I guess the question is, do these discs only work on the drives that show the partition RECOVERY ? Or would it work on a brand new drive ?

(Hope I make sense)

[JDFan]

THe recovery disks are made for that purpose so should work fine for the new HDD -- best thing to do would be remove the old HDD and install the new one - place the recovery disk into the DVD drive and turn on the system -- It should automatically run the setup from the recovery disk in the drive and once finished will be back to the state it was in when you first purchased the system.

Doing it this way will also ensure that if something doesn't go correctly you will be able to shut down remove the new HDD and reinstall the old HDD and be back where you started. So it provides a bit of extra safety in case something doesn't work out.

Figure the recovery partition is pretty much just another copy of the recovery disk but on the HDD as a hidden partition for use if the HDD is still fine but something has happened to the install that needs fixing but the main problem with them is they are on the same physical HDD as the system so normally when something goes wrong (ie. the HDD is damaged or malfunctions) the Recovery partition is also unuseable (thus the need to create the recovery disks after purchase !)

If for some reason the recovery disk set does not work (if it didn't burn correctly etc.) post what OS it is and I'll post a link to download an install disk ( Microsoft has them available but they are sometimes a bit tricky to find links to ) 

[mike boss]

Cool,

thanks JDFan.

I think I'll look for a new HDD this week. I need to make sure I did indeed burn off the discs (as the PC is old!).
If not I can burn them this week. I'm thinking all the PC issues, speed, etc is due to this possible failing HDD.
The PC was fine before, and I had no issue using Photoshop, etc..... just as of late not so good.

Thanks

[JDFan]

Cool,

thanks JDFan.

I think I'll look for a new HDD this week. I need to make sure I did indeed burn off the discs (as the PC is old!).
If not I can burn them this week. I'm thinking all the PC issues, speed, etc is due to this possible failing HDD.
The PC was fine before, and I had no issue using Photoshop, etc..... just as of late not so good.

Thanks

Could definitely be the cause -- What size HDD is it and how full is it getting ?? -- could also be running out of space for the swap files and scratch disks as PS uses quite a bit of it when using larger files. so might also check if clearing up some space helps out if it is getting pretty full. And probably wouldn't hurt to make a backup of your personal files if you haven't recently (wouldn't want to lose the only copy of your layouts etc. !)

[mike boss]

Funny enough, a guy at work had a failure of his HDD this week.
This is what motivated me to get this done.
I backed up my music, but my pictures and other media (and Word docs like resume, etc I did not).
However I will backup everything this week and even try out Google Drive.

The PC is getting full, near capacity actually. So that could be a big part of the issue as you mentioned.

The HDD is a 500