HDD on VIAO PCG-FRV25

My Sister-in-law has this Sony VAIO which is running out of disk space. I would like to upgrade the HDD. I sent a request off to Sony, asking them if there were any "gotchas" in doing this. This is what I got back....

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I'm happy to assist you with the information on Notebook hard drive. The VAIO Notebook PCG-FRV25 is shipped with 40 GB hard drive and the maximum capacity is 40 GB.

VAIO Notebooks that ship with an internal hard drive are not designed to be removable by the end user and our service centers do not offer a hard drive upgrade program. Although third-party vendors or servicers may state the availability of internal hard drive models that are compatible with our systems, SONY does not support, or provide any assistance for these drives or their installation.

You may wish to consider an external hard drive. Although SONY does not offer an external hard drive, external hard drives can be found from various third-party hardware vendors using the following connections:

1. PC Card (PCMCIA)
2. USB
3. Parallel Port
4. i.LINK (IEEE-1394)

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Soooooo...I'm asking in a different environment...Has anyone tried this or similar upgrade???

I'm a retired Software support Engineer from DEC (via Compaq,HP I guess this dates me, big time), but spent the first 25 years as a field Service Eng. so tech stuff does not scare me....much....

Woody

 

I don't see why you shouldn't be able to upgrade the hard drive.

esupport.sony[dot]com/perl/model-documents.pl?mdl=PCGFRV25 - look down for "PCG-FRV Series Hard Disk Drive Replacement Instructions"

replace [dot] with a dot/period

also make sure the replacement drive is PATA(IDE) and not SATA, a popular hard drive is the Samsung HM160HC

 

url is: http://www.docs.sony.com/release/T99860133_Rev_C_NO_PHONE.pdf

 

What I was looking for was any one who has done this. I have upgraded the memory to 1GB pc2100 SODIM, and replaced the Hitachi 40 GB drive with a 160GB drive. Old drive with new memory works fine, New disk seems to be very slow. I was looking for any kind of BIOS things that need to be changed, but there are not many things you can change.

 

I have the same issues with FRV35 as I replaced it OEM Hitachi 40GB Hard Drive. To begin with, the new 160GB Hitachi Hard Drive did only work if I did a 1:1 clone, without proportional or custom resizing of partitions. Otherwise if I did not do a 1:1 clone and I changed partitian sizes, I got an error massage "Operating System Not Found"

After successful 1:1 clone and a huge amount of unallocated space on the 160GB the computer got so slow it took probably 8-10x as long as normal to boot.

I'm returning the Hard Drive now and plan to get a 80GB