The hard drive on my Acer Aspire 5315 laptop has totally failed and is destined for the garbage pile. I was running Windows Vista on it but am now unable to access the drive.
Being a newbie to Linux, I would like some guidance on the following plan -
to remove and replace the dead hard drive then to install Ubuntu, by putting disk into drive and starting up laptop. I assume that the new hard drive will be totally bare.
Am I right in thinking that is all there is to it, or have I, in my ignorance, missed something?
I successfully installed Ubuntu onto my daughter's old Dell laptop a while ago and it runs like a dream.
Thanks for your help - apologies if this is a bit too long, never used a forum before.

The best advice I can give you, is to go look for the hardware manuals for the machine on the manufactures web site. You are looking for a hardware maintenance manual. It will give you information on how to remove the HD, the new one goes in easy enough when you have the old one out.

The hard part is knowing how the machine is assembled with screws that can be very difficult to find.

You are correct, a new drive will be 'bare'. You will need to partition the drive, then format the partitions, and then install. Been a long time since I used any flavour of buntu, as I remember it, there are partitioning tools, and formatting tools on the install .iso. I would recommend you make a / partition, a swap partition, and the rest for /home. You can make it more complicated, but it will run just fine like that. Separating /home and / allows for easier installs in the future.

Post questions, if you have them.

The machine seems to be a somewhat old model, based on an intel chipset. Which is good news as intel stuff mostly works fine in linux. You should ensure that the new HDD fits to your system (you may take the old one with you if going to buy the new one).

You may also consider SSD harddisk, if you can afford it. That makes the system _a lot_ faster. In that case you should tinker a little with the configuration latter.

Ubuntu offers you some sort of automatic partitioning. It is definitely the simplest if you are not confident with your own partitioning scheme, although it may be a little more hassle if you one day want to upgrade/change/install a second system...

And one more thing -- if you have kids around you, just disassemble the old harddisk, instead of throwing it away :-)