BleepingComputer.com: Harddrive crashed unexpectedly. Will reinstalling Vista destroy partitions and thus cause data loss?

Hi everyone! New here and this is quite a nice site. My problem stems from my impatience. Have a HP Pavillion a6700f with Vista Home Premium x64 bit. The harddrive crashed which was totally unexpected. No warning whatsoever. I have talked to HP support, which was the most pleasant experience, ahem. They said I have tried all I could do and agreed to send me a new harddrive at no cost along with recovery discs (which I already have). Because I simply do not wish to wait until Thursday to get the drive, I was wondering what would happen if I took my external HD with two partitions and installed it internally, would Vista destroy both partitions during installation and create one new partition? The reason I ask is I have many family movies and pictures on one of them and do not want to lose them, of course. The other partition is about 220gb and has nothing installed. Bottom line, will Vista format the entire drive and remove the partitons resulting in data loss? Or should I just wait until Thursday?

Thanks,
Rodney

Personally, I would wait until you get the replacement drive. If you are worried about data loss, don't take the chance of have something unexpected happen.
Another thing, whenever I had a warranty replacement from HP/Dell etc, it normally comes with 24-48 business hours of calling it in. They may be giving you the worst case scenario, unless you are in the middle of nowhere.

Well, as far as "middle of nowhere", I am in Kansas = ) Ya, I think I will wait but just for the record, does Vista recognize partitions during install and give the option of which partition to install it? Just in case I get bored and want to gamble.

BTW, thanks for the quick response!