How To Upgrade Your HD on an SZ***?

I have an SZ691N/X and want to upgrade the HD. There have various posts scattered around that deal with parts of this, but I thought it would be helpful for me and others to put this in one spot. As I see it, the issues are as follows:

1. How do you create a mirror of the hidden partition on the HD that contains the OS/drivers etc.

2. Which hard drive to you upgrade to - HITACHI 7K200 200 GB 7200RPM or what I'm thinking - WD 250GB 5400RPM

3. How do you physically swap drives.

4. Order of reinstall of Vista and drivers.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

You didn't need to create another thread because of a typo in the title.

1. You don't need to. Create restore discs instead.
2. Depends if you need a faster HDD or one with more storage.
3. Take out the old one, put in the new one.
4. (a) Reinstall Vista (b) Reinstall drivers

 

Or you could Acronis True Image, or Ghost to clone the drive if you buy an external HD case for your new hard drive. The 7k200 7200 rpm drives have 16 MB of cache opposed to 8 in the WD; so it is quite a bit faster. I guess size versus speed is correct. I would go with the 7K200 (if you look at my signature I have the smaller model of the same drive in both of my laptops). Never really liked the WD's, but others will swear by them.

 

Thank Lithos - obviously new to this.

As a follow up to your post -

1. I thought the partition was hidden and Sony had made it difficult to get at.
2. My thougts are the WD gives you both
3. I never thought of that! A tad more info would be helpful
4. Seems from some posts that the order of the driver install matters.

 

Well with True Image (30 day free trial) or ghost you can clone both partitions no problem. They let you make an identical copy of the drive.

WD is a slower at 5400 rpm 8 mb cache versus
Hitachi 7200 rpm 16 mb cach, but the speed difference might be minimal depending on what you are doing.

Yes the order for the drivers does matter. I fyou follow Lithos's advice I suspect you will be just fine if you don't mind restoring all of your data. Either method works well.

Good luck!

 

Thanks philfna

Any advice on point 3? I saw posts on walk thrus but can't find any

 

if you search, there is a nice post on how to remove the keyboard and palmrest, even the HD, exact steps will detailed pics.

 

3. Really not much more complex than I described it: you unscrew the old one out, and screw the new one in. That's it.
4. Not really in Vista, since you don't have to slipstream any SATA drivers, and most basics are automatically recognized.

 

For what it is worth - I did mine with a 200GB 7200 - clean install - no image no restore partition. The hardest part - the physical replacement of the drive. It all turned out OK and now I have a faster computer!

 

s4iscool

Any idea on the post? I've tried various combinations but so far nuttin.

Thanks all for all the help so far. Looks like I'm going to take the jump.

Either a post on success or a slightly used notebook for sale

 

google is your friend

i originally found it in a search on this forum...links to here, amazingly good info:

http://laptoplogic.com/resources/detail.php?id=43&rfp=dta

Only taking the keyboard tabs out on the top (nea the F keys) is the hardest. The rest is just unscrewing things