Re: Replacing Notebook Hard Drive
- From: Shyster <Shyster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 21:06:03 -0700
(reply, take 2)
Anna/Malke:
Thanks for both of your posts; you seem both experienced with, and confident
in, this procedure, which gives me a great deal of comfort. I think that,
with all due respect to Malke, I will follow Anna's procedure. I believe I
recall seeing your step-by-step for Acronis on another thread, Anna, but I
would be very grateful if you were willing to repost it here.
I'm going to attempt the "surgery" this week-end, so I'll post a
recovery/post-mortem update on Sunday.
BTW, since I've got the experts' attention here, anyone got any ideas about
an old Sony VAIO (I think it was the first one they released, back in 2003)
that has recently developed a problem with finding the HD on startup? It
started about three weeks ago as an occasional problem, but has now
degenerated to the point where I usually have to restart three to five times
before it will find the HD and boot.
I'm not particularly worried about this one since I'm going to be replacing
it soon anyway. I was planning on using it as a learner once I replaced it,
including physical learning, which means it will almost undoubtedly end up
being trashed in any event, so I'm willing to have a go at taking it apart if
anyone can give me a sufficiently good reason to do so. Otherwise, once the
internal drive craps out for good, I'll probably just plug in a USB HD and
set that up as the boot drive.
Regards,
Shyster
"Anna" wrote:
.
"Shyster" <Shyster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3BA2B107-8D9C-48BC-80BB-EC9208991591@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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.
Shyster:
The information & suggestions you received from Malke are fine and the steps
he outlined are surely worth considering. My approach, although along the
same lines as suggested by Malke, would be somewhat different although not
dramatically so, and for what it's worth here's what I would do in your
situation...
First of all, we're assuming that when you refer to "an apparently failing
hard drive", you're indicating that while the drive may have
electronic/mechanical problems of one sort or another that "apparently"
result in a "failing hard drive", the data on that disk, i.e., the operating
system, the programs & applications, the user-created data are all
non-corrupted, i.e., as the situation now stands, the system is bootable &
functional in *all*(respects. If this is *not* so, read no further...
1. Purchase a USB external HDD enclosure that's designed to house a 2 1/2"
notebook HDD. Ensure that the enclosure comes with an auxiliary power
adapter (many of these 2 1/2" enclosures do not come so equipped and this
can cause a problem in the operation of the USB device). Installing the HDD
in that USB enclosure is a relatively simple operation.
2. Install the new HDD in the enclosure and use a disk cloning program such
as the Acronis one that Malke recommends to "clone" the contents of the
installed laptop HDD to the external one. (There is no need to
partition/format the new disk before undertaking the disk cloning
operation).
3. Remove the cloned HDD & install it in your wife's laptop after removing
the original HDD from the laptop. The new drive should be bootable and
functional. Again, assuming to begin with that we're dealing with a
non-corrupted OS & data residing on the "old" HDD.
You (your wife) can, of course, use the USB enclosure for subsequent routine
backup operations using the disk cloning program. Naturally you'll have to
purchase another 2 1/2'" HDD to be the recipient of the cloned contents of
the installed laptop HDD.
I've previously posted step-by-step instructions for using the Acronis True
Image program. If you're interested, I'll post them again. In either case -
whether you follow Malke's course of action or mine, you could use them.
Anna
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