Replacing hard drive

[adalgisa]

Recently the hard drive on my 3 yr. old Compaq has been making grinding sounds. I'd like to replace it in case it's failing. The drive is a Seagate 80gb ATA. Can I buy another Seagate 80gb ATA and clone the drive? I don't have OS disks because Compaq didn't ship that way...they partitioned the drive and put a "restore" disk on the partition.

Will cloning and replacing the drive work? How do I go about this?

I've installed hard drives before but only when I had OS disks -

[flanzig1]

There should be an option in the Compaq BIOS/computer management you get into at first part of boot by tapping the F2 or F8 key(I believe) to make a copy of the OS that is on the restore partition.

[glc]

You can do an exact drive clone with Acronis True Image.

[adalgisa]

Can I use Seagate Discwizard instead of True Image? It is Acronis software, and claims to migrate everything to the new drive.
Do I need to format the new disk before starting, or would that be a waste of time?
or is this an rtfm moment...

[glc]

Yes, you can use Disc Wizard as long as one of the drives is a Seagate. No need to format.