Sony Vaio Install New HD and OS

various11

Honorable
Jan 26, 2013
4
0
10,510
Hi. I recently was given a 1 year old Sony Vaio laptop from a friend who had it replaced because of a corrupted HD(damn rich ppl lol). The laptop boots and logs in but soon after gets a critical error from corrupted HD sectors. It uses a WD Blue 500gb HD and I have aquired a new(ish) WD Blue 250GB HD to replace it with. I do not have the original Sony Vaio recovery media for this laptop. I want to get it running again and have tried installing a fresh copy of windows xp pro corp on the new hd but when i try to boot the systems it black-screens on me just after win xp boot screen. I am about to try a fresh install of windows 7 on the new HD and see if that will boot. Then I will try linux mint 14. What are my options, should I just buy new recovery media from sony or is there an easier way? Thanks in advance guys, I will reply when i get home with the details on what version vaio it is. Thanks a lot.

Josh