p-7801u HDD replacement

After some "accidental" mishandling of my laptop, I realized that my hard drive won't boot and the likely cause is probably a head crash. The clicking sound makes it obvious. Quite sad, but completely my fault.

Seeing as how my HDD is dead beyond repair and how the data isn't worth the 1000+ dollars required to be recovered, I am aiming to buy a new HDD and a new operating system. I didn't make any recovery disks but seeing as how Windows 7 sells for 30 bucks for college students I think I will just buy a new OS.

My problem is that I am a little nervous. I've always bought computers in pre-assembled conditions and so I am wondering if anything could go wrong or if I had forgotten something. Can someone please confirm whether or not I have everything necessary (new HDD and OS) to make a full hard drive replacement for my laptop?

 

Well if you want to replace the drive with one in the same series, amazon.com has great prices on the WD series ( http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Momen...2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262104044&sr=8-2)

I dont see what you could screw up, just pull the old one and put new one in and boot from CD/DVD. Thats it.

 

make sure you have adequate tools to swap out the HDDs; i was too lazy to find a correctly-sized philips screwdriver and ended up stripping the screw head attaching the HDD to drive caddy.

Needless to say, it was a real pain in the to consequently detach HDD from the caddy - it involved pliers and a replacement caddy afterwards lol.

other than that, there is very little else that could actually go wrong.

 

Thanks for the link on the hard drive, but I actually have a Hitachi 7200rpm. Would it make a difference if I bought that seagate instead? I mean, that hard drive has a pretty nice price tag for 320 GB 7200rpm.

Yeah, I am having trouble unscrewing the screw from the caddy as well, I've been using my pocket screwdriver and it hasn't been successful... I'll probably buy one of those watch screwdrivers from Walgreens or something. Thanks for the advice.

I just remembered, if I just install the OS and the HDD, would my OS automatically install all my drivers for me or do I really have to call Gateway for the recovery disks?

 

Gateways website has driver downloads.