Replacing a Laptop Hard Drive. Is Drive Geometry a Potential Problem?

I told my sister I'd help her replace the broken hard drive in her 6 year old HP laptop (G60-120US). We plan to restore the Vista OS that's on the restore disk which came with the machine.

I was concerned about finding a hard drive with the same geometry as the existing drive because I know that was a potential problem some time ago. But then I became convinced that it doesn't matter because ...

1) There's no geometry info on the hard drive currently installed in the laptop (which is a 250GB WD).
2) Sellers of laptop replacement hard drives don't say anything about the geometry of the drives they sell.
and 3) I found this, below, on an HP site but nothing about geometry considerations other then the new AF sector size.
"Customers using original HP supplied recovery discs on systems that have had the 512-byte sector drives replaced with a new Advanced Format HDD may experience issues and may not be able to re-image their system. The most common issue customers will see is that they will not be able to use their current recovery media if they try to install Windows Vista or Windows 7 on AF Drives."
I found other HP info which said only that you need to replace a laptop HD with one of equal or larger capacity.

But then I was looking at hard drives from Discount18, an Amazon seller, and their web site said that once you've replaced a HD with one of their drives you have to do a full OS install, you cannot use the restore disk. I asked about that and got this response: "Recovery disk is design to restore exact HD size and brand. Does not work with different size and brand."

So ... does any know ... do I have to worry about HD geometry or not?

Thanks very much, Bob

Sorry for tAking so long, a laptop drive is any 2.5" drive, either regular or ssd will be fine.

You will need to reinstall your OS, if you have the disks, just load from there. I believe your quote is referring to using the HP recovery disks, but your disk may be different.

Honestly, your best solution is to get a copy of vista and use your serial to install a clean copy, though you will need to get your drivers from HP.

Thank you Patonb. We did the HD replacement yesterday. It was a piece of cake. I did need to be careful to get a new HD which was the same thickness as the old one. I also got one that was exactly the same capacity. We restored from disks which my sister had created shortly after obtaining the laptop and using a utility which came with the laptop. That restored everything back to the original state. (So Vista had a lot of updating to do as the laptop was 6 years old.)

Thanks, Bob

Patonb said:

Sorry for tAking so long, a laptop drive is any 2.5" drive, either regular or ssd will be fine.

You will need to reinstall your OS, if you have the disks, just load from there. I believe your quote is referring to using the HP recovery disks, but your disk may be different.

Honestly, your best solution is to get a copy of vista and use your serial to install a clean copy, though you will need to get your drivers from HP.

Click to expand...

Quick tip, make a backup of it now and all them updates will be there next time.