New Hard Drive for Sony Vaio? (VGN FE-21B)

Hi

Having dropped my Vaio and broken the HDD i contacted Sony and they quoted £144 just to take a look at the **** thing. Ive therefore decided to just buy a new bigger HDD (previously only 80GB) and order the recovery discs from sony and get a local repair shop to install it for me.

As it says above the laptop is a VGN FE21B and on the sony website says it:
support.vaio.sony.co.uk/specifications/specifications.asp?site=voe_en_GB_cons&c=0&s=VGN-FE&m=2279

Im unsure what HDD will do the job and Sony support said they would not recommend me one. Will either of these 2 fit properly and work? Is there a limit on what size HDD i can fit?
www.ballicom.co.uk/new-products/toshiba/tos-250gb-5400rpm-8mb-sata300-25--95mm.p395528.html
www.ebuyer.com/product/131277/show_product_specifications?spectype=extended

As you can see its much cheaper to avoid acting through sony this time and hopefully ill be able to upgrade my HD to 250GB for less that Sony charge for even taking a look.

Any help or HD recommendations much appreciate.

PS. how easy would it be to replace the HDD and reboot the PC myself?

 

Replacing the harddrive is very simple. Your system uses standard thickness (9.5mm thick) SATA harddrives.
Both of the drives you linked to are compatible with your system.

To install the new harddrive, simply shut down your laptop and locate the harddrive. Usually the harddrive is located under a plastic panel on the bottom of your laptop, or the harddrive is removabe (slides out from the side of the system)
Once the harddrive is removed, you have to remove the harddrive from the plastic or metal caddy.
Than install that caddy onto the new harddrive, and install the harddrive into your laptop.
Than you can power on and check to see that the harddrive is recognized by the Bios of your computer.
In the Bios you will have to change the boot order, so that the optical drive is set to boot first, and than the harddrive as the secondary boot device.

If you are installing vista, it is as easy as 1-2-3. Just put the vista disc in your optical drive and go through the steps of installation.
If you are installing XP on your system, things get a bit more challenging.
You would need to either slipstream the SATA driver into your XP installation disc, or you will need to make a bootable floppy with the SATA drivers installed on them.
Than you would need a bootable floppy drive to load the files from a bootable floppy disc (to create a bootable floppy, make an MS-DOS startup discette).
When XP starts installing you will have to press F6 for the operating system to load the files from the floppy drive.
Later you will be prompted to select your file from the floppy drive.
I believe you just press "S" or "enter" to select the file,
than that will load the file from the floppy drive, and your harddrive will be recognized.

Than when the operating system is installed, use your Sony driver discs to install your system drivers. Than you can install your programs and files.

Good Luck,
Wasnt that easy, you got the answer for free
NBR FTW

K-TRON

 

HI SPS89.

I also have the same type of vaio laptop and do want to upgrade.
How easy is it access and replace the hard drive?
I have not tried yet but would like to know how you did it.

Cheers,

PS: If there is anyone out there who knows how to do it, pls let me know.

Regards