Hi, My HP laptop hard drive went south. I need to know how to initialize a replacement. I have a set of Recovery Discs I made 4-5 years ago. Will they initialize, partition and format the new hard drive or do I need a WD utility and which one(s) if I do? I had trouble trying to ‘re do’ the old drive. If the discs are corrupt, what WD utilities do I need to do the job? FYI, the new HD, on order, is a WD7500BPKX. Thanks inAdvance for your help. bob03
Hello and welcome to the WD community.
Just to be on the safe side i would check with HP support to know if with he recovery disks i can do a full installation of the operating system, however normally it is not a full installation but I don’t have this information.
HP recovery discs will NOT format, partition, and/or initialize a drive. You must do that first.
First go to hp.com and download all current device drivers for your hardware and copy them to a cdrom or USB flash drive. Use only the first HP disc, the one containing the Microsoft OS, unless you want all of the “extras” HP loaded onto your PC. Then install only the necessary device drivers from the cdrom or USB flash drive.
