Two questions about dual HDDs in dv9000t

Greetings - my dv9000t hasn't arrived yet - but I have a coupla questions about the dual drives. It has the 160-Gb option which I assume is two 80-Gb drives. Is one of the drives empty or has H-P split the Vista install across the two drives? My plan is to order an 80-Gb SATA drive from NewEgg and image the new OS drive onto the replacement drive - keeping the original Vista HDD as a clean backup. Second question - has anyone tried a Ghost 8 boot disk - will Ghost recognize the SATA drives and allow you to image them? TIA

 

You'll be most likely getting 1x160GB drive. For the other bay you'll have to buy some stuff for it before you can install the 2nd drive. Have a read through this...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=106014

 

If you ordered the 160gb option, it'll come in 1 hd. The other drive has no hd in it so you'll have to buy an additional 2.5 hd to place it in. You'll be asked to make a set of recovery disks - there's a hidden partition on the disk for recovery so you 160gb is split into 12-140 gb and 2-40gb.

 

Oooh - Thanks - I get a Doh - I checked my order on H-P and it does not say 2 X 80-Gb. So, I just ordered the infamous part # 434106-001. And, who knows what part I will receive, if any. For some odd reason I (foolishly) thought the 160-Gb was 2 80-Gb drives. Thanks for your responses...

 

I would use Acronis Disk Director 10 and Acronis True Image 10
I have the 160gig option and it came as a single Hitachi drive.

You don't need to save your backup on a hard drive. You can burn it to DVD's.

 

Thanks to all who have replied. H-P Parts says they have shipped the adaptor kit. Using dir's from another post and the Vista DVD in the box, I loaded Vista Premium yesterday on the Toshiba drive. Very smooth load and it runs much faster - although I did have to call M$ to activate it. Only downside appears to be the webcam - but I think I just need an app that actually uses the webcam. It continues to be a very nice system - although the WSXGA+ display isn't as bright as I thought it would be. Thanks again...

 

I found a guy who sells the Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 ATA Device (160 GB, 5400 RPM, SATA), identical to the one that came in my notebook for about $135 + like $8 shipping. I think they come in Mac notebooks. I didn't know if that was a great deal or not, as I'd rather wait for a larger 7200rpm drive. Someone told me it could be better to have two identical drives in the notebook.

 

hmmm what would be the benefit of having two identical drives? the only reason would be if u had two really fast drives then the speeds will be good, as opposed to one drive being alot slower than the other (when transferring between them and such). another reason could be if you want to use RAID perhaps but i dont see the reason here.

 

Actually, I just found it quite a bit cheaper on Newegg for $114.99 + free shipping.
Did they just have a price drop, or what?

The tin bracket with sold gold screws cost me $52, shipped from HP.

http://hitachigst.pgpartner.com/rd.php/pg=~~2/r=280/m=22888859/q=n/mt=~6~124.95~114.99~121.31~1~~/k=b81215b89e1ee657984c38daa506a135