Hard Drive Failed?

[Brekka]

I own a reliable HP Pavilion dv5 Notebook that served me well for 9 years. The past four days I've been working on it unstalling/reinstalling programs, and running diagonostics. The forth day I decided to shut it down for 2 hours, until I decided to power it on. Once I powered it on, I was met with this error: 0xc000000e The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. Out of curiosity, I ran a quick primary hard drive scan - once it hit 98% another error read: Replace Hard Disk 1. Obviously I must replace the HDD, but once I do that must I start from scratch? Tried booting up windows from a USB and that didn't work as well.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Obviously.
If you replace the only storage device, you have to reinstall everything.

Depending on damage of your HDD, you might still be able to clone its contents to the new drive.
But if that doesn't work, you'll have to reinstall anyway.