HardDrive 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..

 

[setishock]

Once you have the drives installed power up the laptop and open the optical drive tray. Pop in the disc and close it.
Reboot.
The system will see nothing on the hard drive but something in the disc drive and attempt to boot it.
Follow the prompts and you should have the OS installed in under an hour. Go to the laptop makers website under support and download the drivers you need from there.
The bios settings are on a chip on the mother board not on the hard drive.
And yeah WD drives for laptop and desktop systems seems to hold up better for longer periods of time.