I need to replace a Hard Drive - how do I reinstall Wndows 7 OS

[computrix]

I have called Western Digital twice and they will not sell or send me a cable that works so where would I get this.  This has become such a nightmare and time consuming I am thinking of scrapping this whole project and sending the drive back, I am so disappointed. Also how do I know that the new cable will even work, the old drive had a cable with a single row of 4 pins but the new drive has a double row of 4 pins as you can see from that picture I posted earlier. 

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Yes, I would say it is a nightmare when HP put non-standard stuff in your PC!

The data cable I am referring to, will not have any pins. 

It will look like this...the one end will go to the motherboard, and the other end will go to the matching data slot connector on the hard drive.  That is the most common data cable.  I had no idea what those pins were for on a sata drive until now!

Now you need to know just two things...

1. Approximately how long does the cable have to be?

2. Would a straight connector on both ends be better, or one straight connector (goes to the motherboard) and one angled connector (goes to the hard drive)?

My PC's have one straight one, and one angled one because the hard drive is close to the case, and a straight connector wouldn't be able to bend enough to connect to the hard drive with the case closed.

[computrix]

This is the cable on my current PC,   But as I showed you in the picture the new drive does NOT have that connection and will not fit it , this is so frustrating , I sent a picture showing new and old connectors can you not see the difference it is so stark

[Paul_Tikkanen]

The new hard drive does have the data connector as shown in the cable picture I posted above.

It goes right next to the power cable connection.

[computrix]

OK I think I am making progress, I went down to my local Geek Squad and took both drives with me, luckily I got someone who actually builds computers.  He told me that the 2nd cable was not needed and is not necessary. One only needs the flat one.  I wish Western Digital techs would have told me that.  Anyway I installed the drive and started the computer and hit F11 and put in 1st recovery disk and it seems to be loading files

Thanks for all your help and sorry for the confusion and frustration

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

That is what I was trying to tell you...

[computrix]

OK it managed to process the 1st recovery disk and then brought up a screen and I said to restore it to factory settings and got a message that this hard drive is smaller than original and it cannot proceed .  The original drive was 1.5 T and this one is 1 T which is all I need, so what do I do now ? 

Please Help

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You won't be able to use the recovery disks you made.

Just make the plain W7 installation media from that link I posted the other day and use that.

Then go to your notebook's support and driver page and install the drivers and available software that came with your PC.

[computrix]

It is a desktop not a notebook , after I get it restored I then need to upgrade to Win 7 Professional as I purchased that upgrade a while back

[computrix]

I find that site very confusing not sure what or how to do this and when I need teh Microsoft site .  When I go to teh one with the ISO files it downloads a 1MB file ?  That cannot be right for a wIN OS image