Guides for Installing a New Hard Drive for Sony Vaio FW290

Hi,

I thought that there must be a guide on how to open up a Sony FW and install a HDD, but I couldn't find one. Anyone knows whether there is a guide around? What I need is:

1) Guide to open up a WD 500GB 5400rpm portable hard drive (WDME5000TN) to take out the HDD.
2) Guide to install the HDD into a Sony Vaio FW, including open up the laptop and things to be careful of.

Thanks for any helps or links. Thanks.

 

i'm working on a whole guide to installing XP on a FW, and i'll include changing the HD. i'm going to try and have it posted this weekend. changing the HD is easy, i actually changed a HD on a 290 2 days ago, i have a 190 and swapped my HD when i got it, really easy.

 

Thanks Essential. Yup, I heard it is easy, so want to try it myself Please let me know when you upload it and I truly appreciate it. Thanks in advanced.

 

This is great news. Mind sharing the procedure for replacing the hard drive? I just ordered one from Sony Style with the intention of replacing the standard SATA HDD with a SSD once the prices come down a bit more (still around 700 bucks for the 256GB on newegg)

 

I did it to my fujitsu lifebook before. It was quite easy but it took patience and guts.

 

this won't take guts, just takes the right sized screw driver. i took pictures when i changed mine with the intention of posting it, hopefully have time tonight to work on the guide, if not i will have time tomorrow after the 1pm football games.

 

Did you use the recovery disc on the new drive or did you clone your old one? (If cloned, what program did you use?) Just wondering what would the best approach. I'm swapping out the drive as soon as my laptop arrives...

Thanks

 

The process for changing the drive and RAM is very simple. Using a small screwdriver, you just open the hatch associated with each component. For the drive, once you unscrew the three screws holding it in, you have to get the two back screws all the way out. My magnetic screwdriver tip did it for me. Slide the drive forward where the single screw was and lift the rear up. It was very simple. Nothing like the complete dismantle I had to do on my Macbook Pro.

As to the cloning, I used an external PC since I could not get the software I had to recognize the Sony USB chipset.

I have a full size PC that has 4 eSATA ports. I put the new drive in the eSATA housing:
http://www.addonics.com/products/enclosures/25snap.asp

And the Sony drive connected to this: http://www.apricorn.com/product_deta...e=family&id=39 via USB. Booted from the CD that came with this device and cloned the entire disk including the recovery partition.

I tried just putting the new drive in the housing and booting from the CD, but the Sony BIOS would not see my USB connected drive and does not have an eSATA port.

I did not try ghost directly on the laptop with a USB housing. That might work too. Enjoy your new laptop.

Cheers,

 

My Vaio didn't come with any recovery discs. I installed XP clean so it didn't matter, I bought an OEM XP on newegg and slipstreamed SATA drivers, so the HDD that came with the laptop is just in the box my new HDD came in.

Also, i'll have the guide up this weekend. Buffalo got blasted with snow as did a lot of the east coast, and my free time was taken up by snow blowing most of the weekend.

 

Thanks for the info. It seems like apricorn is a popular product for hard drive upgrade. I just bought a cheap external 2.5" SATA case for the old drive.

On desktops in the past, I've used HD Clone to clone the drive when I had to replace hard drives but the free version is capped at 300MB/min.

I ordered 160GB 5400RPM drive and I'm replacing it with 320GB 7200RPM drive since Sony was charging little too much for the upgrade (and swapping 4GB with 2GB). Unfortunately I don't have eSATA so I'm going to have to open up the case of my desktop and use the SATA ports.

So I think my plan of action is set:

1) Take out the hard drive from the notebook
2) Attach the new hard drive and the one that I took out to my desktop SATA ports.
3) Use cloning software to copy the data to the new drive. (Either HDClone, EASEUS Disk Copy)
4) Install the new drive (go through setup, make recovery discs, take care remaining free space on the hard drive)
5) Once everything is good with the new drive, I will wipe out the data on the old drive and put the drive in an external case.

 

Sounds like a good plan. I used SATA to eSATA cable/bracket to feed the internal SATA ports to the rear case slots. I also, uninstalled a ton of bloatware once the setup was complete. Since I bought this for games and Blu-ray movies only, (I use the Macbook Pro for work) I did not need all that other junk that came pre-installed. It took awhile but was still better than dealing with the fresh install driver issues.

What RAM did you buy? I bought this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104036 It is very fast and jumped the Vista RAM rating to 5.9

Merry Christmas and enjoy your new FW!

 

I bought G.SKILL one from newegg. Althought it was $10 cheaper ($40) when I ordered it.

I'm with you on not wanting to go through fresh install. My wife has Sony VAIO as well and I had to spend an hour or two cleaning up when we got hers. It was pain trying to get rid of AOL and it's terrible that Sony puts a full copy of 'locked' movie (spiderman in this case) on the hard drive.

My FW should be arriving today...

Merry Christmas to you as well.

 

guys who makes the HDD for vaio? Hitachi? Seagate? Western Digital?

 

If you search FW owner forum, it seems like people are getting Hitachi HDD in theirs...

 

my original 160GB was a Hitachi.

 

I don't think removing and installing the HD with FW is that difficult. You just need to remove one screwdriver from the chassis and remove the other 3 from HD bracket.

 

I just received my laptop today. The 160GB 5400RPM drive in this one is Toshiba. 4 screws to remove the plastic and metal casing from the body. Then 4 more screws to take hard drive off from casing. Very easy to remove.

 

Mine was a Toshiba as well. It's in a drawer waiting for the day I sell this unit (and put it back in) and get the next best thing!

 

The original RAM and HDD I had on the FW140D were a 2GB Samsung PC2-6400, a 1GB Nanya PC2-6400 stick, and a Toshiba 250GB 5400 RPM HDD respectively.

 

I posted my guide with pictures on how to replace the HDD. Enjoy.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4320502

 

Great guide for HDD replacement. Great job on the XP guide as well, however, this seems just as annoying as the clean Vista install. I personally, just removed all the annoying bloatware and kept my original Vista load. It would be nice if Sony offered a 64bit version of the bloatware-free system. Making you choose the 32bit Business version to get a clean install with drivers is lame!

Thanks for the guides and Merry Christmas.