Upgrading 8600's HD... sorry for being redundant

my 8600 only has 30gb hd and i want to upgrade it to 60gb or up to 80gb...
is there any other seller other than dell???
and can somebody teach me how to do it... thanks....

 

I recently upgraded my 30gb 4200rpm/2mb cache to a hitachi 60gb 7200rpm/8mb cache model. It was relatively straightforward, but I'm a professional nerd, so standard disclaimers apply. I saw a significant increase in speed and responsiveness.

First, shutdown the computer completely (no sleep, hibernate, etc). You can buy the bare drive from almost anyone, but you will have to transfer the mounting hardware from the old drive. You can also buy drive sleds for the 8600 on Dell's website or on ebay. The drive bay consists of a drive sled, 5 screws to mount the drive to the sled, and a converter that changes the IDE connector from a dual row of pins to a card edge connector.

For now leave the old drive in the laptop.

The hard disk is under the headphone jack on the left side of the laptop. To remove the hard disk, there is a screw on the bottom. The drive sled slides out.

The other issue you need to deal with is your data. There are a couple of options. Dell sells a 2nd hard drive bay which goes where your cd/dvd goes. You can also mount the old drive in a USB or Firewire case. You also need to decide whether you want to copy your OS, or just reinstall the OS and applications and saving your documents. Each option has advantages and disadvantages.

I chose to copy and resize whole partitions using Partition Magic. I started by installing it on my old disk. I only copied the first two partitions (1: dell diagnostics, 2: windows xp). The third partition is a compressed copy of the original install from dell in some proprietary format (dell uses a variant of symantec ghost for this, they call is Dell PC Restore). This partition takes about 5gb of space, and I had read a number of documents on dell's site basically saying it didn't work if you touched it. Also Partition Magic wouldn't copy the partition.

There are some free alternatives to partition magic, but i didn't use them. I also tried to copy the drive using a firewire sled I had lying around, but something didn't work (my guess is that it didn't support 60gb drives, it's worked before with smaller drives, and it's kinda old).

I chose to mount the new drive in the 2nd hard drive bay which I had laying around from another project. The Dell part number is 340-8250. It's for a Latitude D series, but seems to work fine in my Inspiron 8600. I copied the partitions, resized the windows partition to be the rest of the disk, then swapped the old drive for the new drive and rebooted.

Everything seems to just work.

Good luck