Re: Replacing Notebook Hard Drive
- From: John Hensley
- Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 09:45:44 -0400
On Wed, 16 May 2007 22:20:01 -0700, Shyster
<Shyster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Please forgive the repetitive nature of the question (I've gone through the
various other threads on the topic of replacing hard drives, but since I
haven't done a drive swap before, and I would rather not mess up my wife's
computer, I wanted to double-check with the more experienced members here).
I have an HP notebook with an apparently failing hard drive. HP sent me a
new drive (just barely under warranty) but, from what I can tell, no
instructions on how to transfer all the data (operating system, bundled
software, self-installed software, files, etc) from the old disk to the new
disk. The HP support people have been very nice, but not very helpful beyond
telling me the obvious (you have to install the operating system) and the
unhelpful (you have to manually re-install all your other programs).
In reading through the various posts on the topic, I saw several references
to creating an image of the original drive, swapping the drives out, and then
using the image to replicate the old drive on the new.
First, I want to be sure that I understand what I've read, and second, I
want to see if there are any special issues with doing this on a notebook
that has only one hard drive. Lastly, I would like to know whether this is a
fairly routine, reliable method of swapping out a defective drive, or whether
it's likely that I will have issues with the computer in the future if I do
it this way rather than the mind-numbing way of manually installing
everything all over again. Mind you, this is my wife's computer, so I will
take slow and mind-numbing over even a mild level of risk.
For your advice, I thank you in advance, and again, I apologize for bringing
the topic up once again.
The easiest way I've found to replace a laptop drive is to take the
old drive out of the laptop and connect it to desktop or other
computer with enough free space using a $10 IDE to USB cable. Then
copy the files from the laptop drive into a directory on the desktop
computer using RoboCopy from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en
Next connect the new laptop drive to the computer where you put the
files and use RoboCopy to copy the files onto the new laptop drive. If
you use 2 of the IDE to USB cables you won't even need to use the
intermediate disk space and can use RoboCopy to copy directly from the
old drive to the new.
The only problem I've ever had doing this was once the new laptop
drive showed up as drive E: but deleting the mounted devices key in
the registry and rebooting cause the new drive to be assigned C: and
everything worked great.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
John Hensley
www.resqware.com
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