Laptop hard drive set up

[eric8675309]

Hello,
I'm going to venture into installing hard drives in my 2 dead laptops 2 out of 4 the hard drives died (Seagate dead, ones with western digital still running strong)
As far as the physical install of the drives I think I have that handled. I've done h/d installs in desktops(slaves) and watched a you tube video on the physical r&r of the drive in this model laptop (Dell vostro 3750)
once I get it in, how do I load the o/s with the disc?
IIRC you change the bios to boot from optical drive.. but never have had a h/d die, the desk top was to have dual boot.
Is the bios settings saved/read on the h/d or are they saved in memory on the mother board? or are the bios files lost with the h/d

other than that I just need the order of operations to get into the bios on boot up to make sure it's set to boot from optical drive and if I need to load a driver for that drive.

basicly a newb on starting fresh
Any help will be a big thanks..

 

[carnageX]

BIOS is a chip on the motherboard. Settings are saved to that chip. It remains saved as long as the coin battery remains plugged in / is good.

Just set boot order to boot from disc first, then boot off of the CD/DVD when the HDD is installed and follow the steps to install Windows.

 

[yaba-]

can a laptop be used without an operating system - until one can be acquired - there seem to be a lot of laptops for sale without hard drives ?

 

[carnageX]

Define "used". You can boot off of a LiveCD environment and "use" it.

Most likely people just don't want to sell the HDD along with the laptop in case they had personal information stored on it that they don't want to give to a potential thief that's savvy with recovering data.

 

[yaba-]

I guess I mean - just functional - I guess you cannot store information - I think that's what a hdd is for - but if you have a flash drive with info on it - you can work with it ? & while your here -- I am deleting perfectly good material that I worked hard to get because I do not have any space to store it --- is there anywhere I can put it so it doesn't just go to waste ? --- I hate to throw away good stuff -

 

[carnageX]

Well you can buy an additional hard drive (either internal or external), or depending on how much data you have, you could sign up for an online storage account on somewhere such as DropBox.

 

[Yevrag35]

I'd rather buy any laptop without the hard drive. Most likely they reduced the price to reflect that, AND I would've already ended up buying a newer/better hard drive to replace it anyway.

can a laptop be used without an operating system - until one can be acquired

"A laptop is not usable unless you have some sort of user interface to utilize the components" would be my answer to that. Which, like carnage said, there are free and pay-for alternative user interfaces (operating systems/recovery environments/etc.) that you can use, sure. Those would require to be loaded onto, like you said, either a flash drive and/or CD.

 

[Joe C]

I put linux puppy on a flash drive and ran it like that before.
Ultimate boot CD has Parted Magic in it....which a linux distro, and it will run on memory alone, no disk so it does run better and it does have internet software and drivers for most pc's if you just need to surf and basics
Ultimate Boot CD - Overview