7200 Rpm Hd?

Hey,

I've talked to a couple of you before, I'm a newcomer, I picked up my CF-28 800 from Ohlip a couple weeks ago that I'm currently working on.

I live in Canada, so I'm having a bit of trouble finding a 7200 RPM hard drive for a reasonable price, I actually haven't been able to find someone who still has a Hitachi and the Seagates are pretty slim pickings up here too.

The thing is, most US sites won't take my orders because my credit card is based in Canada, even though I do have an address that I can ship to in the States.

What's my best option?

 

I'd try Pricewatch.com; you may find a supplier there who'll sell to you, or perhaps even one based in Canada.

mnem
LookieLookie! I FOUND it!

 

I just ordered a bunch of hard drives from www.zipzoomfly.com. They were the only ones that had the correct Hitachi hard drive. I called Newegg to inquire when they might get more hard drives. After some paper shuffling his response was... "Well... I'm not sure when they will be here but the ARE on order!"

Gee... Thanks...

 

You guys should feel lucky down there with Newegg. The one place in Canada that actually has a Hitachi 7200 drive in stock is charging $180 for it.

ZipZoomFly refuses to ship to Canada, along with so many other stores in the states including Newegg.

No one would be willing to send a drive up to poor little old me would they?

 

Let me look into this for you

 

Here you go.. problem solved!

http://www.centrix-intl.com/details.asp?productid=4518

 

HOLY SMOKES!!!! A price that compares with Newegg! Thanks Gravitar! I just ordered 5 of these from zipzoomfly at $98... I thiknk I'll go ahead and order more now at this price!

 

tigerdirect.ca has some for just over 100.00

 

Inbred.... WHERE YOU BEEN???? Long time, no see!

Thanks... But they are all over the place for $100+... I wanted to stay in the $89 range. I buy alot of these so it adds up!

 

Thanks Gravitar, let's hope that Toughbook doesn't buy out all the stock before me.

Inbred, tigerdirect is all out of stock, hence the "usually ships in 7-21 days", as is almost every other Canadian hard drive retailer....... Don't you love Canada?

 

Josh... Go ahead... I just ordered a bunch from another site. (Unfortunately!) I paid $98 instead of $89... I could have gotten a "free" hard drive if I would have known about this place. I searched for hours too. I guess I should have kept my eyes open.

 

When I checked, it said they had 79 in stock. I think you're safe!

 

I musta got lucky. even a blind squirrel gets a nut every now and then!

 

Keep this place on your list Toughbook, they even say something about quantity discounts in the FAQ, sounds like a dream come true.

 

TB,
Is the Hitachi 0A25015 HD what you put in your 29? If not, which one and where is the best price?

 

There are two types of Hitachi laptop hard drives. They are the same in all respects except one.... The important one. The HTE series is what I have been having to buy the past few times... But you want the HTS series as you can program it on the fly for perfomance or battery savings. You MUST download the Hitachi Feature Tool and get the HTS series, 7200 rpm drive. It is the BEST!

 

TB,
Is this the model that I would want for 29? Model: HTS721010G9AT00

This is the one in Gravitar's post with the centex link.

 

You may wanna check out if the 29 uses a SATA drive or not...

It does use DDR, which means it has a possibility of using SATA as well...

 

Yessir.... That's the ticket! Get them while thet're hot!

 

OK TB, I got one ordered. I sure hope that you're going to do a how to for challenged 29 owners (with photos) and instructions. This one is scary for me; changing the memory chip was a piece of cake.

 

Ahhhh... The hard drive is just as easy as the 28. There is a little more tape. If you have ANY doubts... Take a few pics with a digital camera during disassembly. That will keep you on track. It will really only go back together one way. And you won't believe how much faster it will be. I know on the 28 it's like going from 800Mhz to 1.8Ghz... IMHO

 

Come on Rick; you da man! It could be titled changing the HD, CF-29, for total DA's. I'm seeing a series of books, CD sales, infomercials, TV interviews and maybe even a movie about your life. The DA's out here would really appreciate it!

 

TB,
BUMP.

 

Pappy... The tutorials take me a few hours. I don't have the time right now. I might be able to get around to it in the next few weeks...But I'm telling you... It's almost as easy as swapping out the one in the 28... Seriously... A little different but just as easy. Take a look in the service manual to see al the parts. Then when you take yours apart ou'll know exactly what you're doing...

 

It may sound juvenille but I take pictures of this stuff when I start taking it apart. I was having problems with the keyboard ribbons and the pic's showed what I was doing wrong....

 

TB,

In your HD tutorial on the 28; you made the following statement at the end:


"I am assuming that you will reformat at this point. I reformat all my PCs about every year and a half anyway so I am used to it. I keep my stuff backed up for this reason. If you want to copy your old drive over to the new drive you obviously should take care of that prior to the swap.,"

This is the part that scares me. I have no clue what this means or how to accomplish what you are talking about. The mechanical part; if not seeming easy, at least seems doable by a DS like me.

Can I make recovery discs with my CD Combo drive? How would I copy the "stuff" from my old drive to the new before I start?

If somone else would like to field my DS questions to keep me from being a PITA to Rick; please jump in and take me to school.
Thanks, Pappy

 

I'm with you on that. I don't have a clue either. My understanding is that you have to have some kind of progam that will burn a copy of your hardrive onto a CD. I've heard other people talk about using the Acronis True Image software to make a backup with. That's what I am thinking of purchasing next.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

 

I just purchased Acronis TI... still downloading. I used to use Norton Ghost back in 2000, but I've tried the current version and it is in no way the same thing. We used to just boot to a floppy, copy the PC image to another computer (usually a server machine), then when we needed it, we would boot with a floppy and copy it back. "Burning" the image to a server, or "Copying" the image back to a pc took all of about 20 minutes and was SOOO easy. Now, I am afraid I'm in the dark as much as you guys. From reading the description of TI, it appears to do what I was used to. I will let you know for sure when I get it all set up.

 

I also have a MY BOOK 320GB, external hard drive that connects through the USB.

Problem is, once I copied the "stuff" from my existing HD, how would I get it to the new HD? And, if I could accomplish that feat, would that make my computer boot up and work correctly after I put the new HD in place?

 

That is where the software comes in. It will "copy" your stuff to your external drive, then if you ever needed it, you would be able to "copy" it back from the external drive. The Acronis, as I am testing it now, has a "Clone" hard drive utility that will do an exact copy of your hard drive to another hard drive (used mostly for those that are replacing their drives, or upgrading to a larger one). This seems to fit what you are looking for.

 

Doobi, let us know how the Acronis stuff works out...

 

Pappy... I have never cloned a disk in my life... Though I have backed up and restored. The difference is that when cloning it makes and exact copy of everything. A backup just copied what you want it to and puts it where you want it to. The way I see it you have a couple of choices... Both are fairly easy to do.

1. Clone your drive per instructions that come with the software. (As I said... You'll need someone else's help here... I've never done it.)

2. Just copy the stuff you want off of the old drive over to your external hard drive by using the backup feature included in XP. Then when the drive is replaced... Restore it back to where it was.

3. Copy what you want over to the external hard drive manually. Then after you swap drives you can reinstall what you want.

The good thing about 2 & 3 are that you end up with a saved copy of your important data on your external hard drive. Sort of like a "forced" backup to save your important data.

The other good thing about 2 & 3 is that you are installing a FRESH copy of XP with no corrupted files! You literally have a brand new system!

The good thing about number 3 is that it forces you to evaluate pretty much everything you have stored on your drive. Everyone accumulates crap all over their drive. A total reformat gets rid of all the clutter. Then you reinstall only what you deem worthy.

Don't forget to export your favorites in your web browser. >File/import & export/export to your external hard drive. You can do the same thing with Outlook if you use that. It will copy over all your contacts and emails.

I only reformat... Not clone, though I would like to learn how and do it. It sure would make things easier when installing all the hard drives and OS' that I do.

 

That would make sense if you had a new hard drive to start with. Load your OS, files, etc. Then clone the drive and you'd have your startup disks. That way you'd be fairly certain that you had a clean disk without any bad or corrupted files. Kind of like those factory restore disks. I think.

 

Cloning is what I did for a year as a tech. It was my job to build the image, clone it, then push to all the workstations that were being deployed. With Norton ghost, it was fairly easy, and we could do up to 15 machines at one time. It took about 20-30 minutes, and all 15 were up and running!

To build the image, I would install the OS; install ALL updates; install all software we used; verify all drivers were working and installed correctly; sysprep the machine; then ghost away. It was a very easy process from then on. The hard part was building the image, took time.

I don't like reformatting my PC's because of the time it takes to fresh it up. I would prefer to have my own image that I like, then just re-image my machine when i need to. If I get new software, I can either add it as I go, or recreate my image file. The problem is, I can't seem to find software that did what Norton Ghost did back in 2000. Even the new Norton doesnt seem to do it. I got Acronis to work, but it took 4 hours to write the image!! I can live with that for now, but man, that's a long time. A lot longer than the 20 minutes I'm used to. I know machines are bigger now, and the Image file would be bigger than I'm used to, but that still seems too long. I'm thinking mainly of IT guys that would have to wait 4+hours to deploy a machine, that's ridiculous! Hopefully I am just missing something obvious, I HAVE been out of it for over 7 years! I will keep looking, but for now, Acronis will do what you need.

 

Oh, and the other thing, cloning DOES make an exact copy of your drive. This used to mean that if you were going to put it on a machine that had different peripherals/devices, it would not work. Acronis claims to have a way to clone to a machine using different devices! That would be a nice feature. That would mean that if you cloned your old cf-28 to say a cf-29 it should still work. Only updating the difference in drivers.

 

I've had a pretty long history with ghost.. i was using it back in the 90s, and now use a version that's just a couple years old. what do you remember from the old version of ghost that you can't do now? the one i've got is way cool. everything i remember ghost doing back then, and much more. the only thing i kinda don't love about it, is it fills a WHOLE 1.44MB disk. so you have to find one with few or no bad sectors, which i seem to have trouble finding very many of!

 

cf-29 does NOT use a sata drive.
cf-30 does and the cf-19 does.

thats the only ones i know FOR SURE that do.

 

I'm not exactly sure about this reply, maybe modly or one of the other Linux geeks can verify or dispute this information.

I use PCLinuxOS for most everything I do, it comes as a live-cd which can be re-mastered (rebuilt with what you want for software on it). One of the programs in Linux that I have NOT tried is dd. From what I understand dd, or disk dump, will dump the contents of one disk, or partition to another. I'm not sure if it will write boot sectors and that kind of thing, but a live-cd with dd added could possibly be used with a USB drive to do exactly what is being discussed here.
The live-cd's are bootable, find almost all the hardware on the host system, give you access to partitioning software, and don't put anything on the drive if you don't want it to. I guess if somebody wanted to do a little research on dd (a google for 'man dd' would give you the manual page for it) , and burn themselves a copy of a livecd (I'm almost certain there are livecd's that are built for this exact type of system maintenance, I only mentioned PCLinuxOS because it's pretty user friendly) the task could be easily accomplished for free.
Just something to think about, not trying to push Linux down anyones throat, but it's free, flexible, and not as archaic as it used to be, really almost "desktop for the masses ready".

 

As I recall, we booted with a floppy that ran ghost.exe. From there, you either imaged the machine, or re-imaged the machine. The whole process took like 20 mins.

Upon installing ghost on your main pc, you had the option to make the bootable floppies that include the location for the ghost images. It was all pretty hands off as I recall. Just haven't seen it run like that on any platform. What version of ghost do you currently have? I have NG 12.0

 

Somebody help out the old codger here. Will this HD work in my CF-29, MK2?

http://www.centrix-intl.com/details.asp?productid=4518

 

Pappy... YES! That is the EXACT drive you want. Don't forget to go to Hitachi's site and download their Feature Tool. There are two things that will come with it that are of benefit.
1. Feature Tool - Asks you for a 1.44 floppy to set up. Then you will boot to this floppy and you will be able to make a lot of selections. The only things you want to select are the speed/bettery slider. (You'll see when you open it.) You can slide it all the way to performance.
2. It will allow you to install Power Booster to the desktop. This little app allows you to do something similar to the Feature Tool. Open it up while the laptop is on and you can double click on the desktop icon. That gices you a slider that shows

Battery-------------------[]-------------------------Performance

You can move the slider anywhere you want. On batteries alone? Move the slider toward The Battery side. On A/C... Move the slider toward Performance....

Just my too scents!

 

Thanks TB. I hate to have to ask the DS, PITA questions; but my area of expertise obviously does not run to computers. Now if you need an in depth explanation on how to determine the health and nutrition of cows by examining their dropings; I'd really shine in that area.

To say that Pappy just doesn't know s---, wouldn't be entirely correct. lol

 

I've read all of the knowledgable and helpful posts about how to back up the data from my existing HD and then load it my new HD. There is one concept that I'm not sure about: I back up the info from the current HD. I take that HD out and relace it in the enclosure with the new HD, which is then fitted back into the computer.

When I hit the power switch; is my my computer going to boot up and run? If not, how do I get the info that I saved into the new HD?

If that's what you fellows have been telling me; I'm sorry, but I missed out on that part.

 

pappy,

Someone else will probably chime in with a more complete reply, but basically, the HD will not boot up right out of the box. You'll need to format and partition the drive first, using format and fdisk utilities ( I recommend you search on those in Google for full info). If you have a bootable install CD/DVD for your OS, that should work you through those steps in the setup of the hard disk format and partitioning.

If not, number of threads here have mentioned how to set up a hard drive for CF-28's without a CD drive - those will give more complete details using a bootable DOS floppy or a new HD temporarily in a USB enclosure. You could use that process if the drive you have is not CD bootable. Also Linux live CD's will boot and then walk you through the setup and install process, if that is the way you want to go.

Some of the processes you might use to back-up the old HD could make a bootable cd or floppy to start the reinstall I believe, but I haven't used them so can't comment.

 

I have a Panasonic CF-73. Would anyone be able to confirm whether the Hitachi HTS series 100GB drive would work in my computer?

thank you,

Greg

 

Any harddrive for laptop as long as it is ata/ IDE

 

Greg... A search turned up this thread from not long ago...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=205804

 

Ohlip, Toughbook:

Thanks very much for the quick replies. I had seen the other thread but just wanted to doublecheck and verify that there would be no problems. My apologies for being a little lazy. I just finished taking the drive out of my Toughbook and verifying its specs vs the Hitachi drive and I will go ahead and order one.

I was somewhat concerned as I had ordered some extra memory recently that was supposed to be compatible with the CF73 and it turned out I had an older model which required a different memory type. I wasn't sure if something similar existed for the hard drives.

Greg

 

Pappy, that was the beauty of running Ghost as I have been mentioning. Once you installed your new HD, you would boot from a floppy and the program would then ready your drive (ie partition it and format it); then copy all your data to the new drive. When it was finished (about 20 minutes) you would reboot the machine and be back up and running.

Now the longer version is using the Acronis program. If you first backup your old drive to a separate location (being another computer networked to yours); you could then install your new HD and boot from the Acronis CD and achieve the same results. This process takes about 4 hours though. Another variation is to purchase a casing for your new hard drive (runs about $50 or less) that attaches to the usb port. You could then "Clone" your old drive to the new (Now on external); remove your old drive and replace with the new; and reboot to normal.

I know it sounds difficult, and it sometimes can be, but if you can learn to identify nutrition patterns from feces, then this won't be a problem!! hehehe
After doing it a couple of times, it really is easy to remember. And most programs will walk you through the process step by step (as Norton and Acronis both do).

Good luck,

Paul

 

Doobi,
I think you may have put things in terms that sort of get through the fog in my head. A: I have a CD drive; but no floppy drive. B: I have NO recovery discs nor any original discs that probably came with the machine.

My Boss Lady (wife) has a Toshiba Portege that also did not come with any discs; but it does have a recovery disc creator utility. Do you think I could copy and load that utility on my 29, then make recovery discs of my existing OS? If that seems doable; could I then boot up from those CDs after installing the new HD?