Upgrading HDD in m15x

seeing how AW now supports 64bit OSes in terms of drivers, i'm planning on upgrading my OS to 64bit Ultimate. And seeing how this will require re-installing my OS and copying all my data, i figured i might as well upgrade to a larger HDD as well. now, my question is, has anyone here upgraded their HDD on their own, and if so, did any difficulties/problems arise?

 

I'd imagine it should be pretty straight-forward. It's using a standard 2.5" SATA notebook drive, so everything should work out fine. Access to the drive isn't terribly difficult, so it should be a pretty easy process.

 

Wizzo,
you could get a smartbay hdd, install the 64bit version on there.

That way you still have a fully funtional 32bit version untill your happy,
without the need to swap the internal drive over till your finished.

only im not sure if you will be able swap it for the primary drive when your finished..

mabie not quite as good as i first thought..

Pete.

 

SB drive is slower, and only i can use it - i can't give it to my non-m15x-owning friend to copy files etc.

at any rate, i think i'll partition the new drive, image my current drive onto one partition, and then install 64bit on the other partition. i can access both partitions from both OSes, right?

 

yep.. That will do it.

I use Ghost & Partition magic at work, always does the job quite well.

 

is booting from a USB drive possible?

 

Yep.. I boot linux.
I have not tried a windows os on a stick, but if you can load xp to an epc.

should be possible.

 

okay. if i have two partitions on a HDD, one with 32bit, the other with 64bit, and i'm done with copying over my data from 32 to 64, can i erase all data on the partition with the 32bit OS on it and add that HDD space to the second partition?

 

Yep you can do that.
Ive used qparted from a bootable usb linux to do exactly that.

 

or would it be smarter to keep two partitions? would there be any advantage behind this?

 

Do you mean?

1, You could duel boot if you have software that will not adapt to 64bit.
2, duel partition one for os and one for files. (I personlay wouldn't bother)

I don't trust Hdds if you are worried about lossing your data burn it off.

I have a good reason why i don't trust HDDs or the SSD varient's.
I am a Senoir Engineer within the EMEA region of the IBM/Lenovo HDD warranty replacement department.

"Drives Break Frequenty and sometimes for no aparent reason"

 

There are some things that don't work happily under x64, so it might be worth keeping a small x32 partition. For example, I've encountered some copy protection mechanisms (likely driver-based) that failed to work properly under x64.

 

ok, but i can resize the 32bit partition to the size of just the OS + 1Gb for data, right?

 

Assuming you have the right tools (I can't recall how well Disk Management handles partition shrinking), then of course.

 

Ive previously resized an 80gb drive to 30GB to make two further new partitions.

Qtparted is good.

 

I'd give the 32-bit partition more room for data--- at least maybe 9-10GB of space. I know SP2 Beta required at least 6GB of free space to work with (it doesn't use all 6GB per se, but I assume it uses that space to temporarily move files around), so you're going to need that space if you ever update your 32-bit partition.