Can recovery disk(s) be restored on brand new HDD?

Hi guys,

If I buy a new, larger hard drive for a dv6500t to replace the original stock drive, can I apply the HP recovery disks and install windows again on the new drive? Or, do the recovery disks only work with the drive they were created from?

thanks

 

They will work on any Hard Drive that you put in there. The only thing you have to do is increase the partition of the system drive, because most likely the Recovery Disks will format it to the specified disk size your laptop came with. If you don't have Vista Ultimate (which comes with a utility to manage your partitions and sizes) there are other applications such as Acronis Disk Director Suite, or Partition Magic 8.0 that will allow you to manage and change partition sizes.

Since you are installing a new HDD, why not follow the guides found in this forum to do a clean install and gain that performance HP sucks out of the machine like a leech with all that bloatware and crap they install.

 

That was actually my next question; will the clean install guide work the same on a new drive

Thanks!

BTW, so you're saying that the recovery disks will format let's say... 80GB out of 200GB if the original drive was only 80GB? And also you are saying that I would need to get a partitioning utility to 'open up' the full capacity of the new drive?

Are there any free, reliable utilities to do this?

 

That is what I'm thinking, it might detect the full space and partition accordingly, but I doubt it. It is probably preset with a certain partition size so it won't even partition for the full 80GB, because the recovery partition was there as well and took up about 11GB. If you go and download Acronis Disk Director Suite, it offers a trial period which will allow you to resize your HDD.