Put original hard drive back in laptop?

tomdoo1

Honorable
Nov 24, 2012
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10,510
Hello,,i recently took my hard drive from my laptop to use as external.I decided not to use it that way,so can i put it back internally,and will it work as it did previously?At the mment there is no internal hd installed.
Thanks in advance.
 

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Did you format it when you removed it? If not, you should be able to just reattach, boot up and update Windows.

If you formatted, then reformat it, re-attach it and use your Windows install disk to re-install, also download all the latest drivers for the laptop from the manufacturer site. If you don't have a Windows install disk, was it a Windows 7 install before?
 

tomdoo1

Honorable
Nov 24, 2012
4
0
10,510


HI and thanks for your quick reply.
The drive was put into a caddy by the guy at the shop.However he did say that everything from my laptop was still on the drive.When i used it briefly as external on another laptop,everything was recognised by windows.It is running Windows 7,but somehow i dont seem to have the original disc.
Thanks again.
 

ELMO_2006

Honorable
Aug 29, 2012
368
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10,810
You may not have the original disks as the drive itself may have a pre-configured recovery partition whereby if your OS is pooched, upon bootup hit F12 (or some other key) and the system does the rest.
 

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Then you should be able to just put it back in and start up the laptop. You will have a number of Windows updates that you have missed.

As long as the SRP (system reserved partition) has not been changed you should not need a system repair disk, but once the machine is running you should make one just in case you need it in the future.

Many laptops no longer come with a Windows installation disk but that is not a big deal, as you can legally download a trial version of the same Windows install and do a re-installation on an OEM machine using the key on the machine tag followed by a phone activation. I've done it for many folks, although you won't need to do that stuff.
 

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