Question on restoring an inspiron 1720 with a new hard drive

well, my 1720 is about 2 weeks away from being shipped having been in production for about a week now. Its being built with the 160 gb 5400 rpm hard drive, but im debating changing it out with a 250gb drive when it arrives. I dont want to cancel and reorder and go back through the production que again. I realize dell doesnt give you an actual vista disk, but do they give you a system restore dvd which puts vista and all programs back on to factory specs? Or is the system restore located on the original hardrive on a seperate partition?

I was hoping it was just a matter of swapping out the drive and putting in a system restore dvd. If thats not the case, or if theres something else i need to do, i would appreciate the info.

Thanks

 

Dell does give you a Vista disk....

 

First, the "restore disk" is a vista disk.

Second, i do not know if you are aware but that laptop can hold 2 hard drives.

 

No, i wasnt aware i could add a second hard drive. Is there any additional parts i need to buy to install it, or is it a simple bolt in.

 

you will need two parts in order to put the hard drive into your computer, you will need a carrier, and an interposer. i know this is a month old post but if you have not found any information on it ill help you out.

because i too just got my inspiron 1720 and wanted a 2nd hdd as well but all i could find were old posts with old part numbers that dells website does not recognize anymore. one of the parts is the same but the carrier is not. here are the part numbers you will need.

carrier: FP444
interposer: XK231

Iam positive that these are the correct parts according to other inspiron owners posts that interposer has worked for them and the carrier that they used was a different part number (C7586) but according to dells website the one that i posted is now the correct one.

i dont think that you can get these parts any were else but dell and they are refurbished parts but supposed to be "like new"

you will also need 7 screws and i have heard various price ranges from people on different forums including this one that the screws cost anywere from $1 to $10 PER SCREW!!!!!!

i have not got my parts yet but according to DHL's website they will be here tomarrow.

by the way adding this 2nd hard drive to your system or replacing the "old" one will void your warranty (not sure if you have a dell tech replace it for you what happens) but in any case since it has space for 2 hard disks i would just put in the 2nd hard disk and then if your warranty expires then replace the other one. and if you need warranty work just take out the 2nd drive so that way its there wont be an issue.

hope this helps you if you havnt already found what your looking for.