Yet another Second Hard Drive Thread

I just bought a WD32000BEVT hard drive (320GB SATA2). I have a DV9550t CTO notebook, RV653AV, with a 160GB Hitachi Travelstar (factory). I know I have to find a second HD bracket, if anyone cares to tell me where I could find it that would be great.

Now the issue. I want this drive to be just storage. I'm travelling, so that's why I can't use an external, I don't have the USB ports or the space to carry an external enclosure. I need it internal. Please...make me feel good. Tell me that I can buy the mounting kit, put the drive in Bay 2 (it's already formatted to NTFS in an external enclosure, but I can wipe it to raw again if need be) and it'll be recognized by Windows Vista x64 next boot. I'm seeing all kinds of horror stories about these laptops needing equal size drives, or needing a reinstall and that's absolutely not an option at this point. I leave in 2 days, I can have the mouting kit shipped to location, but cannot afford the time or work to do a reinstall to the 320. So will putting the 320 into bay 2 just...work. And can anyone tell me where to find a mounting kit?

 

try calling hp

 

I figured i'd have to call HP for the part, what i need to know is will this work, or am I destined to failure.

 

you will have to buy the caddie from hp if u call them and we know everything is overpriced. look around ebay try searching dv9000 caddie or mounting kit

 

Thanks, I'll go looking around right now.

Now I just need someone to tell me if it'll work right or not.

 

just include hp dv9xxx or dv9000 series in your search. it is the same mount.

 

I ordered a caddy/screw/SATA connector set from compuvest.com. I'll let everyone know how it works.

 

My original configuration was 2x120GB drives in my dv9267ea and fitted a 250GB Deskstar in my second bay. Everything works fine. No problems with the lappie not having the same drive capacities....

 

Thanks that makes me feel alot better. Now as long as there's no problem with the fact it's SATA2, and that Vista doesn't need reimaged to handle that, I'm good.

 

You can get the bracket sometimes on eBay. I forgot where I bought 2 of them (not on ebay).

Also, for our 3 9500T's I bought several Vantec SATA/IDE to USB cables, then took 3 of them and made very portable cables by chopping the cable down to about 3 inches. I bough some 2 inch sata cables, and I then made some 3 inch USB to SATA power connectors for a 2.5 inch laptop drives (the USB connector will power the 2.5 drives).

Now each 9500T's travel bag has have three very small (less than 3") cables and a spare laptop drives for use as backup.

Throw a Tekkeon 3850 power brick and some adpaters in the bag, and you can power and charge all your devices (phones, palms, GPS's and so forth), power and charge your 9500T, and be able to change the batteries on the 9500T on the fly, and finally, with the right adapter, you can use the 9500T's power brick to charge up the Tekkeon 3850.

So, we now have a 3rd external drive, power for all our devices, and all of it can even fit in a latptop sleeve. Very cool. Very portable.

Joe

 

I got the caddy kit on Monday, installed the 320, and all is good. It instantly read the data I had stored on the drive to use up here, gave me no boot issues. Only had to go to partition management and assign it a drive letter so I could get it in My Computer. So I was one of the lucky ones, absolutely no issue and excellent running. 480GB now.