laptop hard drive questions R&R

[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..

 

[voyagerfan99]

BIOS information is saved in the BIOS chip on the motherboard of the computer. That's how you can turn on a computer without a hard drive installed and enter the BIOS.

You can install the hard drive and then just insert the CD of what you want to install. Enter the BIOS and set the CD drive as the primary boot device.