DIY hard drive replacement is a great way to get comfortable working on the innards of your home PC.
Here's how it's done:
Ceiling Speaker Bracket
1. turn off the power to the PC
2. remove all plugs and cords from the back of the PC. Notice that the cables can only be placed in their own like kind receptacles so confusing them on re-installation is a non issue.
3. place the PC on a work towel or something soft to protect the opposite side of the PC.
4. remove the side panel where there is a handle or set of screws that look like they were placed for easy removal. (all PC's are different) Be careful not to move or bump other components inside the PC case.
5. Find the HD or hard drive. It should be a metal box that has two cables coming out the back. One cable is the power and goes to the power supply the other is likely a SATA or IDE cable that connects to the motherboard. Remove the cables and remove the drive from the case. Read the HD to make sure you have a hard drive and not another PC component. Look for a storage capacity like 320GB, 500GB, 1TB etc.
6. Installing the new hard drive should be done in reverse order. For simplicity sake buy a hard drive that is the same physical size as your old one so that it can fit in the same location within the case. There are other options such as a SSD or solid state drive and these are great but their size may be different than the drive removed. If you chose a different type of drive or size of drive you may need to purchase a mounting bracket to fit the old slot on your case.
7. With a brand new HD you will not have an operating system on the drive. Using a product install disc such as Windows 7 will walk you through the process. After installing the drive; plug all your components and cables back in and turn on the power.
8. You will be taken to a boot options screen where you are warned "no operating system present", or something to that effect. Go into the BIOS by restarting the PC again and change the boot order so that the computer will boot from the optical drive first.
9. Install the Operating system disc into the DVD or CD drive.
10. Restart the PC again.
11. Your OS (operating system) install should begin. Follow the instructions as it walks you through the process.
12. After the install is complete you should be able to reinstall your backed up data from the backup program that you use. If you did not use a backup program your data is possibly lost.
There are some companies that can extract the data from ruined hard drives -just search for them in any search engine.
Installing a hard drive is a simple and fun project to try. You will be surprised at your resourcefulness and glad you saved the money by doing it yourself.