Daughters laptop had a virus and she tried to use recovery discs to re set it. Then all she got was a black screen and a flashing cursor but can’t type. I then tried using discs to restore and all went fine until windows restarted then black screen came back. I’ve googled it and the problem could be a knackered hard drive. If I buy a new drive will the restore discs put windows back on? and how hard is it to swap a laptop hard drive. Machine is only two years old so seems a shame to bin it.
Cheers, Graham.

How hard depends a bit on the make/model. You should find some Youtube videos to help. Laptop harddrives are standard, I just bought a 750gb one for about £70 and switching it into my computer (Mac Mini was easy)

Shouldn’t be hard to replace the drive if you know which end of the screwdriver you hold, and which goes against the screw. 🙂 All you normally have to do is open a cover, gently remove the drive. It may be fitted in a caddy, if so then just make a mental note of the orientation of the connector on the drive so that everything slides back in nicely.

To rule out some other possible causes: does the laptop beep on boot, and if so, how many times ?

It goes straight to black screen and flashing cursor and only beeps when you press a key. Pressing f2 repeatedly as you fire it up brings up set up page. I did this to get it to boot from dvd drive to restore with original discs.

Download an ISO of Seatools on another PC and burn to CD/DVD, boot from the disc on the problem PC and run a full test, this will tell you conclusively if the hard drive is good or bad.