Laptop Hard Drive Upgrade How To

Tried to do a search to find this ... so forgive me if this question has been asked prior ... if such is the case, please just point me to the post ...

I have a Dell e1705 ... 80GB SATA hard drive.

I want to upgrade to say 500GB ... lots of options out there ... so purchasing a hard drive is not going to be a problem ...

My issue is that I do not want to reinstall EVERYTHING ... I would simply like to "copy" my 80GB drive to the new 500GB one ... simple right

How would I do this?

Edit:

I have Windows XP ...

Thanks ...

 

Not sure of the specific programs.. but basically you make an image of your existing hard drive, then restore it to the new hard drive, ensuring that during that restore it takes into account the new drive space.. I think Paragon makes an imaging product, just look up hard disk imaging.

 

I found this thread thread that seems to have all of the info I need ... wish me luck ... if anyone else has anything else to add however, more tips is always appreciated ... thanks.

 

Your E1705 supports SATA 150 and SATA 300 9.5mm thick 2.5" drives.
The E1705 harddrive upgrade is really straight forward
1) buy a compatible drive: (Hitachi 5K500.B, WD5000BEVT, Samsung HM500JI)
2) turn your laptop off
3) Flip your laptop over
4) Unscrew the one screw on the left side of your laptop (when flipped over)
and your harddrive will come out
5) Install the harddrive caddy (two screws) onto the new harddrive
6) Install the new harddrive in the slot, and put the one screw back in.
7) turn the laptop right side up
8) reinstall windows on the drive. Approximately 466Gb will be seen

You either have the option of reinstalling windows XP from scratch, or you can use a cloning utility such as Acronis Trueimage to image your current windows setup onto the new harddrive. A free trial can be found for download on Acronis' website

K-TRON

 

Sweet! I wasn't sure if the e1705 could handle SATA 300 ... I was fine with 150 ... it is just modern drives are 300 and it would have been nice to get the extra speed ... looks like I will!

Yes, I will be cloning ... I don't want to have to reinstall everything ...

Thanks for all of the replies!

 

No 2.5" mechanical drive can max out the SATA 150 interface, so there isnt going to be a 2 x performance gain as signified by the misleading SATA 150 and SATA 300 drives
The 150 and 300 respectively stand for the maximum transfer rate for the interface. 150 = 150mb/sec
In 2005 or so, with the advent of perpendicular recording, some desktop drives broke the 100mb/sec transfer speed, so shortly after, the SATA 300 interface was released.

I have a SATA 300 drive in my E1505, and my friend Alex has a 7K320 (SATA 300) drive in his XPS1710 - which is the same as the E1705

K-TRON

 

The thread referenced above gives the following directions:

I was chatting with Acronis this morning and they stated for the trial version, when you create a recovery CD, the clone option is not available.

Can anyone confirm/deny this?

Would there be an alternative way that folks could suggest?

Thanks ...

 

I have the full version of Acronis so cannot comment about the trial version. But if you happen to be cloning to a Western Digital drive you can find the full version of Acronis on WD's site for free.

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp

Per the WD Manual for this product:
* Acronis True Image WD Edition allows selecting only Western digital HDD as a restore location and for Cloning operation.
* Acronis True Image WD Edition is available for installing and launching only when a Western Digital HDD is connected.

P.S. I think there is also something similar on the Seagate site if you have Seagate HDs.

 

Dang!

You so rock!

I ordered a WD 500GB Scorpio Blue today from Newegg (typical Newegg ... it has already shipped!).

I assume it does not matter what the original source disk brand is?

Otherwise ... I'm set!

 

A couple of weeks ago I also purchased the same HD from our local Fry's for the same purpose as you. I personally think it is a great drive, quiet, no vibration, and just slightly warmer than the WD 250GB Scorpio Blue that was originally in my notebook.

I kept my original drive intact just in case something went wrong with the W7 install so I could just pop it back in and be good to go.

So says the manual (which you can download from the site also).

 

I currently have an 80GB drive which is pretty much plugged up (8 GB left) ... so this will give some much needed space! It should also give this 2 year old laptop some extra life. For what I do ... I don't need anything more ... other than space ...

Thanks again!

 

FYI ... I tried installing WD's version for Acronis in preparation for my new hard drive. It will not even install unless there is a WD drive attached.

Silly me, I forgot I have a WD MyBook that I could have used. Tonight I will plug that guy in and see what happens.

FYI

 

SATA 150 and SATA 300 are fully compatible with one another. Here is the info from dell on how exactly to do it for your own laptop: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins9400/en/sm/hddrive.htm#wp1123687

I don't think you should clone your hard drive, but just back up whatever data you want to save and have a fresh installation of windows.

 

In a perfect world, yes, I probably should reinstall the OS ... but due to ease ... I am going to clone.

Thanks for the Dell link. I had actually found the link ... it is good that you added it here for future e1705 users ... thanks.

 

I've been backing up the HDD's of my laptops using a homebrew desktop of mine, all machines use SATA HDD's. AFAIK, both 3.5" and 2.5" SATA HDD's have the identical plug/jack hardware, so a laptop's SATA HDD can be installed on my desktop using the existing hardware, no adapters of any kind are needed, just plug it in. Just don't try to boot any other machine with your laptop's HDD, I suspect unpleasant things will happen.
The desktop has a huge advantage in the cloning/backup process when so connected: it's fast. My 250 GB 2.5" SATA HDD from my Lenovo 3000 gets backed up or cloned in about 2 hours. I use a 2003 version of Norton Ghost (which is a bootable CDROM), boot my desktop from that, and use the Ghost menu to copy one disk to another (or to a file on a desktop HDD). I suppose you could use Acronis to do something similar with the same hardware setup I'm using.

 

I used Ubuntu's Live CD to do a block-for-block copy. Must be very careful to get source and destinate right otherwise end up copying the blank HDD to the data HDD.

Then used EAS Partition Manager to expand the primary partition. Quick and easy.

 

Just an update to WD Acronis ...

I plugged in my MyBook and I was able to install WD Acronis on my laptop hard drive (Toshiba 80GB) and a full backup of my Toshiba hard drive to my WD external (1TB).

I unplugged the WD and tried to start WD Acronis and it wouldn't.

So, in order to install it and run it, you must have a WD drive attached.

FYI

 

Figures. I saw that one coming.

 

My ssd maxes that out (sata 150). Hate using XP with ide emualation as that bottlenecks it too.

 

Just as I would have expected.

Typically to clone your drive you would put the new drive in an external USB enclosure (I would format it NTFS quick). Run the WD Acronis software to clone then when finished put your new drive into your laptop. Done, 60 minutes max.

 

am going through same transition.today i replaced my vaio fz's 200 gb toshiba 4200 rpm drive with western digital scorpio blue 500 gb drive and its running cool and better.only issue being i am now frantically searching to make my toshiba external to work as booted drive.i want to remove few details from it.
how do i do this

i am running windows 7 rtm now that old drive is having windows 7 rc.

i tried acronis.it wont run only even when i am executing it with this scorpio drive as boot drive.what can be reason?

is it because of my windows 7 install.wd support page says its not compatible with windows 7.

how can we do this?

 

I'm sorry but I am not quite following what you want to do.

Assuming you have booted with your new Scorpio drive which contains Windows 7 and you have your old Toshiba drive in an external enclosure, can't you just go to to My Computer, access the Toshiba drive and copy off the files you require?

I don't understand where Acronis comes into the equation, sorry.

 

What do you mean "booted drive"? Do you want to boot from that drive? But why do you want to do that if you just replaced that with a new WD5000BEVT? Can you make your intentions better known?

 

You would need to reformat your older drive with the mark as boot disk option checked and then modify your BOIS such that it tries to boot from USB first, and it should boot from it.

Another idea would be that your Toshiba is already a boot disk with an OS on it aleady, so simply uninstall everything you don't want, defrag it to clean it up, put it in an enclosure, connect it via USB, modify your BOIS and you should be good to go.

 

WHAT!
You mean those expensive VAIO uses CheapSkate low performance Toshiba harddisk? Whats worse 4200RPM, my grandma spins faster.
OMG a classic example of flushing money down the drain.
Note to self: Never even think of buying Toshibas and Sonies.

 

thanks to all.

i have upek fingerprint reader.i have saved all my login details in that protection suite.this data i cant get off from usb disk drive.at least i dont know how and where those files will be saved.

and i have not flushed my money on toshiba ! . i got a western digital drive.i am going to use USB boot from bios. thanks for idea.will keep you all posted.

 

It seems that you could just set up your fingerprint reader again, but:

How about putting the Toshiba drive back into your notebook and boot from it just as if you never changed it. If you can locate the folder/files/info you need copy them to a USB flash Drive or burn to a CD. Reinstall the WD drive and then try to integrate your files into the reader program.

I would start a new thread directly relating to the re-setup of your fingerprint reader after a disk change and new Windows 7 install. You may get more informed responses from people who have had those problems. Just a thought...

 

yeah, you are right.i shall do it.

 

You are getting a little off topic ...

Just as a FYI ... I performed the transplant yesterday ...

The instructions I found in Post 7 of this tread worked flawlessly ...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5375464&postcount=7

WD Acronis cloned my 80GB Toshiba and setup my new WD Blue 500GB in just under an hour.

I was able to resize the partitions with ease. For better or for worse I kept all of the original Dell partitions for the Media Direct and recovery stuff ... not that I use it though ... but if it ain't broken ... why fix it ...

I did have Acronis create a bootable CD for me first. I then cloned using that CD.

Swapped the drives ... it was like it was there the whole time.

With Perfectdisk, I did a defrag ... it moved my pagefile and hibernate files to their optimum spots ...

Done.

The drive "felt" warmer on my lap ... but looking at the sensor readings, it was actually about 2 degrees cooler.

Very quiet ... I don't hear a thing ... even when it was in the enclosure during the clone, I did not hear it.

Thanks all for your help!