New Laptop Hard Drive

wotnoshoeseh

Hi,
My Dell laptop hard drive (40GB) is chocka full. I need to buy an upgraded laptop hard drive (120GB+) and have it installed in my laptop.
Does anybody have any good sources (competitivie prices, quality product and good customer service etc.) for laptop hard drives. Also have to consider delivery as I'm in NI. Would prefer 160 GB ,but will take 120. If any one has any good deals that they know off I would appreciate it if you could let me know what they are.

Also I think I'll probably use something like Norton Ghost, or Acronis TrueImage to replicate my old hard drive onto the new one (installed in hard drive caddy) before installation. Does anyone have any experience of this? If so are there any things I need to look out for (compatibility issues etc. etc.).

Thanks for all your help.

mjr600

Save the hassle, just buy an external drive and tidy the original.

Little_John

Buy a 120GB and save about half the cost of the 160GB.

I would buy the drive and install it from scract dont take it to a company and pay them windows install is juat a follow the instructions thing anyway. Installing windows from scratch oposed to copying the drive is the best methodit will get shut of the build up of junk on the drive and your PC will run a lot quicker as a result.

Put your old drive in to a caddy and copy your documents, favorites and email over after you have installed windows and what ever.

Using a drive copy software is easy the hardest part is to find the correct method of booting with the USB drivers to make the USB drive show in the software, it differs between PC's some work with USB 2 drivers others will only use USB 1.1 drivers and 40G on USB 1.1 will take an age.

Laptop drives which ones to buy? its a tough one, Ive used loads of different makes and some have been good others better but eventhe better ones I have had failures on so I won't recomend any jsut go for one witht he performance and price you like they are all as bad as each other.

wotnoshoeseh

Thanks littlejohn, but I can't re-install Windows as when I bought this from Dell I didn't have the Windows disk included. If I need to do a system restore/re-install Windows I simply do it from the hard disk. That's why I was going to replicate the original drive onto the new one. Incidentally USB connections are USB2.0

Cheers

Little_John

hmmm

The old dell charge £5 to supply a windows disk they did a bit back. what a scam that was. and I know loads that have fallen foul of it.

You can borrow a disk from someone else as long as it is the correct version home or profesional it will install and you use the windows key on the bottom of your laptop.

wotnoshoeseh

OK Littlejohn. I'll try the disk copy first though, and if that doesn't work I'll wipe the disk and re-install windows from CD.
Thanks for your help.

Donnie

Seems quite straightforward to change a HDD. Just refurbished an old laptop. Put a new £30 Western Digital 60GB drive in and doubled the RAM(£10).Takes a few minutes.
Reinstalled Windows and voila! 2 hours all in.

wotnoshoeseh

I've got the new hard drive now and put it into a USB caddy. Just plugged it in, and while Windows recognises (as in new hardware in the tool bar) it I can't see the drive in Windows explorer. Can anyone help?
Do I need to format the drive? If so, how do I do this?

thirascule

hit the start button, go to run and paste in this "compmgmt.msc", without the quotes. In the lefthand pane choose disc management. It will show up in there and will enable you to create your partitions. You will need a Primary partition for windows and an extended for any other logical drives you want.

wotnoshoeseh

thirascule,
Thanks for this. Note I'm using an external hard drive and it's this one that it won't recognise.

wotnoshoeseh

The disk is showing up but there is a "no entry" icon on it and it says "not initialized". Also the memory is showing up as "unallocated".
Was able to right click on this drive and "initialize" it. However Windows Explorer still doesn't show up the hard drive as drive E. Also memory is still unallocated?