Installing new hard drive m11x r1

Hello I am about to install a new momentus xt hard drive into my m11x r1. I read a lot about clean installs on windows 7 and the command center onto your new hard drive but I also read about how the order you download these things in is important. I also do not know much about drivers but I do know where to find them for my laptop. Once the new hard drive is installed do i need to reinstall all of the drivers for my comp? Sorry i am kind of new to all of this. Could someone please that has successfully done before post what i should do in steps in order from beginning to end. +1 to people that help

 

Do you want to do a clean install? You could just clone your drive.

 

Hi,

I just ordered one also. I am going to try cloning the drive. The seagate page has software for cloning the drive and it has a step by step instruction video. I haven't tried it yet, so I'm not sure how it will go.

I am expecting my new drive tomorrow.

If you are interested, here's a link to the video on the seagate page. (just to make sure, I haven't tried this yet, so it's just a suggestion)

Laptop

Here's a link the DiscWizard software.

DiscWizard | Seagate

More information: As wsnors pointed out in another thread this Seagate software only seems to work if you already have a seagate drive installed in your system. I don't know if anyone has had a different experience, but the software wouldn't even load for me.

 

Remember "Warning Will Robinson", if you do a clean install you will lose your alienrespawn or Dell data safe on the recovery section. If you want to have the recovery clone the drive. Just thought I'd mention it. As some people forget about that until after.

 

I was going to try to do the clone thing but i read that was harder to do with computers made by dell because of their bios. I don't know a whole lot about computers so i dont know if i am up to that challenge.

 

I have read the same thing.

I'm going to try cloning my drive either tomorrow or Saturday. I have to go to a dinner for my work; if I get home early enough I am going to give it a try. I'll post back with my experience.

Good luck!

 

Okay it would be great if you would post back after doing it. If it works out for you i would like to know how you did it and how easy it was for you. +1 for letting me know =)

 

The easiest way to do this is buy the aftermarket HDD prior to receiving your system. Upon arrival, boot up the system, do the initial OS setup, launch AlienRespawn and create the recovery media.

Swap in the new HDD/SSD, boot up with the recovery media and follow the prompts to restore your factory image.

Poof, all done - aftermarket drive is in and you can setup your system and go from there.

That recovery media is very handy. Make sure you create it and stash it away for a rainy troublesome day.

For those who purchase after and want to swap it in, yea - clone/image will work. Nice since you wont have to reinstall all your apps.

 

I did my SSD in this m11x just the way the (All Knowing) Batboy posted for ya, worked great. Thats why you realy want to keep the system as factory, and not lose the recovery. Good luck both and let us know how it go's

 

Hi Jeremy7791,

I did the clone last night. Hope this is helpful for you in deciding what to do.

Sorry for the long post.

Well, I got the drive cloned and I am up and running with the Momentus XT. Everything seems to be good at this point, a few hours of usage. I’ve only had one glitch where my mouse stopped working, but unplugging it and plugging it back in fixed that.

This is the first time I have done something like this, so bear with me. The overall process went well.

Here’s what I did to clone the drive. If anyone reading has some suggestions about how I could have done this better, please let me know. I'm learning this as I go along, but that's part of the fun!

First you will need a way to connect the new drive to the m11x. I used an old external USB hard drive that I had. I took it apart, (broke it in the process) and used the UBS connector on the top of the drive to connect the Momentus to the m11x. The Momentus was not recognized by Windows when I plugged it in. After plugging and unplugging the drive into different USB ports it finally showed up as drive Y with a big question mark on it. I did some reading and to get Windows to recognize the drive I did the following.
From Start menu

1. right click computer and choose manage
2. on the left side of the window that opens up double click disk management

Here I could see the Momentus, but Windows was telling me the space was not usable.

3. Right click on the unallocated space (black bar) and choose “new simple volume”
4. Click ok, and then here you get to make a couple of choices.
a. size of the drive. I made it the largest size, one partition, which is the default choice.
b. choose the file system, default is NTSF, which by my understanding is the standard system
c. you can give the drive a name and assign it a drive letter. I choose D which the default drive letter choice.

After that Windows will take about a minute or two to set up the drive. From this point Windows recognized the drive.

I then used the program EASEUS to clone the drive. It has been recommended by other users on the forum so I went with that. I originally planned to use the Seagate software on their website, but that does not work unless you already have a Seagate drive installed on your system. In fact, the software will not even open. Slickie88 recommended Acronis (I believe), but the newer 2011 free version does not support cloning. I could not locate the 2010 version, so I went with EASEUS. Here’s the link to EASEUS Todo Backup Home 2.0.2. It’s a free program.

Free Download EASEUS Todo Backup Freeware and Trial version. Complete Backup and Restore Software for Windows & Linux.

Install this program on the drive you want to clone. After you have the program installed, fire it up and

1. choose disk clone.
2. choose the drive you want to clone, your current drive in the m11x
3. choose the destination drive, the Momentus XT

4. Here the program instructions say: “you may click ‘sector to sector’” but they do not say what that will do. “You may click” is terribly ambiguous. Thank you for allowing me to click; I think I will. Well, what that simple click did was cause my cloning session to fail. After looking around on the EASEUS website I found that “sector to sector” needs to make use of extra space during the cloning process and therefore requires three hard drives. About 15 minutes into the “sector to sector” clone, it failed. After the first aborted attempt, I had to reformat the Momentus again using the process above and start the cloning over.

This time I did not select “sector by sector” and everything went fine from there. The whole cloning process took about 3 hours or so, not exactly sure as I just watched a bunch of Seinfeld episodes while it was cloning.
When it finished cloning the drive, I turned the m11x off. EASEUS stresses turning everything off immediately if you want to use your new clone as a bootable drive, so once the cloning was done, I powered down and took out the m11x’s original hard drive. A word of warning here: have a nice space to do this; do not do it on your lap. I lost one of the screws that holds the hard drive into its metal casing! That was pure stupidity on my part, but I just wanted to get the new drive fired up and see if everything was working well. The little screw is somewhere in the midst of my carpet. I’m going to look again today.

Taking out the hard drive is not difficult. When you take off the back plate, the drive is easy to access. Once you get the hard drive out, there is a small adaptor which allows the drive to connect to the m11x. Take this off the top of the old drive and put it on the Momentus. Place the momentus back in and put the screws back, replace the back plate and you’re ready to power up.

After the starting up the first time, I updated the firmware on the Momentus.

The update can be found here: Momentus XT Firmware Update

Be sure to check that the update is compatible with your drive, the numbers are listed on the website and there is even a downloadable tool to check for you. After the firmware update, the Free Fall protection asked me to restart in order to protect the new drive. So far everything seems to be going well and the drive is function properly. I didn’t have to worry about the Windows activation and all my programs seem to be in working order.

I think I am going to go to Steam and reward myself with a nice new game for all the hard work, maybe Singularity. Ah, but first I need to find that darn screw.

Alienowl

 

I'm trying to install a new drive as well. I tried using the seagate cloning software, but it seems that my computer goes to sleep in the process. It has stopped twice now. The last time, I hit the power button and it seemed to resume, but the screen stayed off so I couldn't see progress. It then seemed to finish (flashing light on usb enclosure stopped blinking) and I hit enter and the computer shut down.

Now I boot to windows and check the drive properties.

Should I expect to see byte to byte exact sizes?

C: has 50,498,367,488 bytes but the clone has 50,357,796,864 bytes. Something won't be right with this I think. I hate to keep deleting the partitions on the brand new drive.

What do you guys think?

edit: Wait a minute. just booting into windows would have written some data to C: right? So they won't match exactly i guess. Maybe I should just install it and see. I just hate to find crashes or something happening later