T61 New Hard Drive

I have a few questions regarding putting a new hard drive into my T61 7662-CTO machine. It's running on a Core 2 Duo T7300 with 2x1gb RAM.

I dropped my laptop from my bed, around two feet yesterday and the machine instantly seized up and said that the hard drive could not be found. After pulling it out and putting it back in a few times, it finally recognized it long enough for me to pull my more important files from it. Now all it can do is boot up and run the Pc doctor/thinkvantage programs; not even safe mode.

Anyways I'm reading the Hardware manual and it shows that that hard drive specifications max out at 250 gb which I am assuming is the options I could have chosen when I purchased this three years ago. So my question is if larger hard drives may work. I just ordered a 500 gb WD hard drive and I'm hoping I didn't purchase an incompatible drive. Both are 5400 rpm and 2.5 in SATA.

If the 500 gb drive is compatible, do you guys have any partitioning ideas or practices you favor? I'm planning on running Windows 7 and maybe be open for some XP on a second partition. I was thinking 150, 150, and 200gb partitions.

Thanks in advance!

 

I put a 320GB in my T61 without any problems, so yes I believe that 250GB at the time was the max hard drive for it.

Partitioning comes down to how much space you really need. If you are only going to use XP every once in a while then it should be smaller than the Windows 7 partition. (Unless you put large files on the XP partition)

 

Any 2.5" 9.5mm drive will be compatible. Get a 7200 rpm hdd.