hello
 yesterday my pc froze, i had to disconnect the psu cable, when i tried to restart, i got the "unable to find os" message.
 so  i went to the sony help/tech' support & followed the instrutions, they told me to go to bios ( via f2 ) check the hd is recognised & if it is to re set the bios to default.
 well i did all this, the pc still shows unable to find os & to top it off the hd is now shown as "none" in bios.
 sony say the hd is faulty & to purchase a new one, as the pc is 7 years old, i can buy a hd from ebay, but i need some advice as i'm getting confused on the repair procedure.
 ok, 1) the replacement hard drive will have nothing on it, so i assume i need a fresh windows os, correct?
2) the hd will need to be partitioned so i'm told, so i need to carry out this operation first?
3) there are some guys on ebay selling "recovery discs " they say these discs can recover the  data from my faulty hard drive, does that sound true?
4) the replacement hd will have none of the original files from sony/windows, so will it even work on the pc if it boots up?
5) the firmware on the replacement drive is not the same as the original, is this gonna be ab issue?
6) how on earth is it possible in 2015 to have the entire os on ones pc completely removed, gone, vanished, without a trace, in 2 minutes
Thanks for any help in advance.

os windows 7 home premium
sony vaio vplc13s1e
8gb ram
hdd seagate barracuda st3100528asYou will have to reinstall the system, and its best to do this with a system recovery media set that you should be able to get from Sony.

The PARTITIONING WOULD be automatic.

Unles the recovery disc on ebay is for your specific system, I wouldn't use an alternate as for if its the real deal, they have hardware detection required to install. So for example if its the wrong disc media for the hardware that is in your system it will boot off the disc and then refuse to install as an antipiracy feature.

Gone without a trace in 2 minutes = drive was damaged in less than a second probably, or was failing and finally failed for good. Drives die. The system is 7 years old and if it was heavily used then there are many run hours on the system. I have seen drives die in less than 7 years so I feel you got possibly a good amount of use out of it before it DIED. Some drives live forever, others die.yeah, i guess 7 yrs ain't too bad, i'm saving the recovery disc OPTION to LAST, as that will 100% wipe all my data.  i made a set when i 1st got the pc.
i've been reading on the sony site, others have done the clean install, with success, so i'm gonna try that & then try to recover some of the data/files from my old hard drive.