Replacing a HD on a notebook?

How hard is it to do this? I have a HP Pavillion notebook with a 10GB drive.. I also have an empeg with one 12GB drive and one 20GB drive that is nearly full. I am thinking of buying a 30GB to swap with the 20GB in the empeg. I think a total capacity of 42GB would satiate me for quite sometime as my rate of ripping has slowed down. So.... after removing the 20GB from the empeg, I would like to upgrade my HP notebook, but have NO idea on how to do that, or if it is possible.. Certainly HP won't help....

Anyone have any experience or insite on this?

Brad

32GB Mk. II in a WRX
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

I don't know the guts of the HP laptops, but you should be able to simply pop off a panel (or unscrew, whatever) and pull the old drive out.. it may be in a tray of some kind.. stick the new drive into the laptop, and format/reinstall the OS.. it's not too difficult, if you can handle doing empeg upgrades.. :)

12gig red mk2 -- 080000125

Is there anyway to ghost my old harddrive? There is only one slot obviously... maybe pull both out and adapt them to fit in my pc? (this is where my "little" knowledge can become dangerous to myself)

32GB Mk. II in a WRX
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

Is there anyway to ghost my old harddrive? There is only one slot obviously...

I've seen third-party "packages" in software stores that handle this for you. The come with the necessary hardware to hook up both drives to your laptop and ghost one drive to the other. I forget the name of the product, and I don't remember quite how it works (PCMCIA adapter?).

___________
Tony Fabris

If anyone reading this thread knows how to remove a drive from a Thinkpad 560 please let me know. The laptop is a P120 and works fast enough for traveling (i only need to do light internet stuff). It's pretty slim for an old laptop and I fear the hard drive is not upgradeable.

-Rob
-----
12GB MK2 Blue 090000736 (6166 in the queue)

Laptop harddirve to PC adapter
I've seen them around for cheaper but this one seems to be of good quality.
I've used these before and they work. Probably your best bet. Then you can even ghost your empeg hard drives and burn the images to cd.
Not the way I want to backup my empeg but it's an option.

Hi, I'm a service engineer, work for Portable Computer Services, we're authorised Toshiba, Compaq, IBM, HP, service agents.
however our HP division is new, so I've mostly had expericence with the Omnibook series, which have thier HDDs located inside the case, to get to it, you need to remove screws from the bottom of the casing, remove the LED button cover on the top of the casing, which will reveal screws for the LCD, and top casing, and keyboard, remove keyboard screws the hdd then should be located under the keyboard, it has a lift out strap.
However this depends entirely on what model you have in the pavilion series as they do change where the HDD is located on different models.
Tell me the model and I can find out for you....
p.s. check the bottom, there maybe a simple HDD shape cover, unscrew it and the HDD maybe right there, pull the strap and this'll lift the cradle, from its connector..., unscrew the hdd from the connector...

cheers
Jaidev

Hmmmmmm, thats an old series, anyway this particular series has over 30 models, but all most all of them have the harddrive inside the machine, no removeable covers on the bottom. Here are the steps...

You must reuse the silver bracket from the old hard drive!
1) Remove battery pack.
2) Remove screws from bottom half of notebook.
3) Remove the top half of the notebook.
pry the LCD hinge cover from the side, this will reveal keyboard screws, remove them, remove keyboard.
4) Remove the 1 screw that holds the drive in place.
5) Gently pry the hard drive away from the notebook's connector.
6) Remove the two screws that attach the silver bracket to the hard drive.
7) Attach the silver bracket to the new hard drive.
8) Insert the new hard drive into the notebook's connector (with the green circuit board
side up).
9) Re-attach the 1 screw that holds the drive in place.
10) Replace the top half of the notebook computer.
11) Replace the screws that were removed from STEP #2.

cheers,
Jaidev

I must be lucky, because there is an access door on the bottom. I have the HP Pavillion N3390.

Would sticking a drive that is formated for empeg cause any problems? Or would it simply ask me for the installation disks...? Preferably, I would like to be able to copy my old HP drive and save all of my information.... I've got tons of stuff on there.... :(

If I were to buy that notebook drive adapter and stick the 20GB drive into my PC, could I connect to the PC with an ethernet cable and do a disk copy? Should I just send the dang thing into HP and have them do it? (and take a 2nd mortgage on my house?)

32GB Mk. II in a WRX
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

Yeah, Norton Ghost can copy disk over Ethernet using NetBios. You'll have to boot to dos and load the network protocol stack but it can work.
Good luck finding dos ethernet drivers for your laptop though.

It won't damage anything if you put the EMPEG formatted drive in the notebook, however you will need to repartition and format, since it wont be bootable on the notebook, OR
the best way to do it, (the way we do it at work) is we have
those notebook drive adapters, 2 of them, connect both drives to a desktop pc, and use norton ghost to ghost one to the other, doesn't matter if the new one is larger/smaller, norton ghost can adjust that, just as long as your not using Win95A and the data size doesn't exceed destination disk size,
you should be ok :), do a disk - disk ghost,
you can also do it over ethernet, if you have a full retail copy of norton ghost you can make a ethernet boot disk which has a large database of supported ethernet chips/adapters, you maybe able to get away with generic ones on your notebook.

Here's a gadget that should allow you to do the deed.

http://www.aimnet.com/~avasales/PTI25.html

After getting the drive reformatted and ghosted, you should be able to swap the drives. The bonus is that the old drive can be put into the enclosure continue to be used.

Glenn

Jaidev, thanks! I will probably attempt soon.

-Rob R
--------
12GB MK2 Blue 090000736 (6166 in the queue)
10GB "Backup" MK2a Blue 030102953

Rob,

If you have any problems, or can't figure it out, let me know. I have done several IBM HD installs.

-Steve

//== MK2 20 GB Single Drive, Green Face Plate Currently installed in Toyota Solara ==\\

I upgraded my hard drive on my laptop last week by backing up my hard drive to CD. The software I used is called NERO, which you can download from http://www.ahead.de.

The only downside is it takes quite a few CD-Roms to do the backup. In my case it took 13 discs, but I have a 16x burner, so it didn't take too long. After you perform the backup, just remove the old drive and install the new. Next, insert the first disc of the backup and make sure your laptop is set to boot from CD. It will then format while restoring the data to your new drive.

In order to do this you will need a burner that can attach to your laptop. I've got a firewire-based yamaha.

Nifty. I use Nero, and never knew it had that feature. Cool.

___________
Tony Fabris