CF-73 hard drive replacement

Hi everyone. First time caller, long time listener....

Have a client who handed me his CF-73 because the hard drive has failed. He was getting various read and other errors for several weeks until it got to the point where it wouldn't boot at all. I thought Spinrite might be an easy fix, but either the drive is too far gone or there is some kind of BIOS settings that prevent the type of access that Spinrite needs.

Anyway, we're proceeding with a hard drive replacement. I've done tons of hard drive replacements, laptop and desktop. But this one has me stumped.

Can I open the caddy, put a new drive in then put the caddy back together without destroying it? Or, do you need a new caddy every time?

The client told me he saw several hard drives for sale online for $300+ and wanted me to go ahead and order one. But, is there really anything special about the drives other than the caddy?

I've already picked up a couple of 2.5' drives from my local supplier (one IDE and one SATA).

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

(PS, I did search around the net and here specifically but couldn't figure it out without posting a new thread)

 

It should be easy enough to look at the caddy to see what it would take to dissassemble it.

 

Yes... They are easy to swap. Get yourself the Hitachi 100GB, 7200 rpm HTS series, ATA-6 connection hard drive. (sata won't work I don't think) The caddy comes apart easily. Unscrew the cover and pull apart the gel wrapping making sure you reinstall it EXACTLY the way it came apart.

A hard drive swap is about the easiest thing you can do to a Toughbook. And your client will LOVE the increased speed of the 7200 rpm drive!

Good luck and please post back to let us know how it all went!

 

Cf-73 uses ata not sata, its just like replacing ordinary notebook the only dif. is that it has a caddy with foam as a shock absorber for sudden impact as like all panasonic toughbook. You may notice it is dif. from other notebook That you hve encounter. They all uses the same harddrive though as long as it is 2.5 , ata. You can do that easily as you are handy enough, I guess!

 

I'm not sure, but many Toughbooks use a 3.3V HDD. I've seen postings about cutting pins off of the drive to enable 5V drives to run, but I'm definately not an authority.

 

I could be wrong, but the only ones I remember being 3.3V are some of the ultralight series (T2,W2...) and those are dual voltage, not 3.3 alone.

 

Thanks for your help everyone! Got it fixed. I was a little intimidated by the caddy before I posted here. Once I had the confidence to tear it apart it was actually easier than "normal" laptops where you have to screw the drive to the adapter.

This model did take the IDE version not SATA as was already pointed out.

One thing I found that was strange. The product key sticker on the bottom was for Windows 2000 Professional. The customer gave his Panasonic labeled restore CD and it installed XP and various Panasonic drivers and utilities.

 

I had posted this in another thread, has anybody found a ATA-6 7200rpm
like Hitachi 2.5 that is over 100gig?

Thanks