My son's 3-year old HP flaked out yesterday while we has playing minecraft. Monitor suddenly went black with the "no signal" message briefly flashing up. I tried plugging his PC into my monitor and turned the power on, but no signal ever went to my monitor so it stayed blank. He then told me, "Oh yeah, I was seeing an "imminent hard disk failure" message pop up whenever I rebooted over the last month."
I took the PC in today to a local Microcenter and paid $42 for a full diagnostic. Assuming the hard drive is the problem, can I just purchase a new internal hard drive myself, a new copy of windows 10 on a cd, and put the cd in the computer so when it boots up it installs the new copy of windows 10? All of the software he has on the PC (steam for games, Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud) can be downloaded again and reinstalled on a new hard drive. I have a hard drive docking station which I can plug the old one into to retrieve and copy the few files he actually would want to retrieve, assuming it will even spin at all. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
So, my main question is this: is replacing the main PC internal hard drive as simple as installing a new one and having a new windows 10 install disk ready to to insert?
I took the PC in today to a local Microcenter and paid $42 for a full diagnostic. Assuming the hard drive is the problem, can I just purchase a new internal hard drive myself, a new copy of windows 10 on a cd, and put the cd in the computer so when it boots up it installs the new copy of windows 10? All of the software he has on the PC (steam for games, Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud) can be downloaded again and reinstalled on a new hard drive. I have a hard drive docking station which I can plug the old one into to retrieve and copy the few files he actually would want to retrieve, assuming it will even spin at all. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
So, my main question is this: is replacing the main PC internal hard drive as simple as installing a new one and having a new windows 10 install disk ready to to insert?