My nephew has a Compaq Presario laptop which quit working a couple months after the warranty expired. It turns out the the hard drive is totally dead. Unfortunately he never created a recovery disk. I haven’t worked with Vista as of yet and am not sure exactly how the licensing works. What I am trying to find out is how to reinstall Vista on the new hard drive. The computer has the green and white sticker with the license key on it. Can I just use another OEM disk to install it and use the key that came with the computer?
Even if I had a recovery disk, would the install have worked since the HD was totally dead? I would think so, but just read somewhere that you needed the disk and the recovery partition.
Thanks in advance.
