Want to replace failing hard drive with SSD on Vista 32 with Recovery partiton

ralphyde said:

Intro:
My Gateway Vista 32 laptop has recently had a failing hard drive. I even lost the ability to signon as my admin user, due to an unwriteable sector, could only get on as Guest, also sustained many crashes. I was able to save all my data (long story) including thousands of email. I have gotten a new Win 7 laptop with 500g HD, but I can no longer run my AmiPro 16 bit software which ran great on my Vista 32, and which is important to me.

In recovering my data, I removed my 130 gig hard drive and placed it in a StarTech ATA Hard Drive Docking Station, where it still runs very well connected by USB to my Win 7 laptop where it shows as drives E (recovery) and F (old C drive). Using it as a secondary partition on my Win 7 laptop allowed me to access the User admin data I hadn't been able to access before, so I was able to recover tens of thousands of my old emails. And I'm quite sure that the Recovery partition there is in good shape.

Therefore, my plan is to repair my Gateway Vista by installing a new SSD hard drive. But I have no experience in doing this, so hope for some help.

1. First I will try to make a clone of the recovery partition on a DVD or CD. How?

2. Then I will install the new SSD hard drive into the Gateway Vista 32 computer.

3. Then I will reload windows from the CD of the recovery partition. How?

4. Then I will go on line to windows update to get all the updates since 2008 when I got this computer.

5. Where do I get updated drivers? How?

So this is my general plan. But how do I do these steps? I'll need some specific instructions.

Thanks for any assistance.

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