Hello heinz57,
The thickness of the drive shouldn't cause you any severe problems.
It is likely that the drive will screw in to some sort of bracket and
the couple of millimeters that are shaved off the new drive won't be a
big deal. As long as the drive plugs in to the motherboard alright
then it's likely that it won't be a problem. However, the only way to
know this for sure is to open the machine up and try the new drive in
the machine. I've never had a problem with a drive being too _thin_.
Too thick is another issue.
As for how to actually install this drive, this unit is supposed to
have a removable drive according to Toshiba, which suggests that it's
fairly easily accessible. On the bottom of the unit you should see a
panel that can be opened by unscrewing one or two screws. This will
reveal the drive. It can be removed by pulling it firmly but gently.
Pull out first, then up, since it has to disconnect from the IDE
connection pins on the board first before it can be taken out of the
machine. You may wish to open the panel up and check how the drive is
attached to ascertain whether you will be able to mount the thinner
drive. Again, shouldn't be a problem, but it's better to find this
out now than to find it out after doing all the data transfer!
Before installing the new drive you may also want to upgrade the BIOS
to the latest version. This will smooth any problems with the system
recognizing the drive properly. You can get all the latest Toshiba
driver upgrades from their service and support site. The page is
here, but you have to go through a few menus to select the proper
model: http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su/su_sc_home.jsp
The hardware part of this is nothing much to worry about. The bigger
hassle is going to be the data transfer. There are a few products on
the market that automate the process for you. They allow you to plug
in an adapter in to the PCMCIA slot and dump the contents of one drive
to another. They aren't cheap but they work well. The EZ-Gig data
transfer kit shown here at Bix Computers is a good example:
http://www.bixnet.com/ezdattrankit.html Kingston Technologies also
used to have hard drive upgrade kits that came with a drive and the
PCMCIA card. This is the ideal way to do things.
I'm going to assume that you don't want to buy one of these kits
though. The next easiest way to do this is to take it to a computer
shop and pay them to do the transfer. It shouldn't be overwhelmingly
expensive and it could save you a lot of time and frustration.
If you don't want to do that either you have a few options. If you
have a network then you can dump all the data from the old drive on to
another machine, install the new drive in the laptop, install a fresh
version of your operating system on it, and copy back the data files
over the network. This will require that you reinstall all your
software and drivers, which is quite annoying. You could do much the
same thing if you have a CD burner in the machine or attached to it.
Burn the data files and then transfer them back to the new drive.
But this doesn't give you an exact replica of the old drive. The only
way to do that is to use a drive duplicator program of some kind.
Norton's Ghost is a fantastic product that does an admirable job of
this. You can find it at Symantec's web site here:
http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/ but you must
purchase it for $69.95. Basically, this program can make a clone of
one drive to another, or can make an image of a drive which is stored
somewhere else which can then be written on another drive. There are
shareware/freeware utilities that do similar things, but I have never
found anything as good as Ghost and I have used it without a hitch on
probably over a hundred computers.
The problem is, even with a copy of Ghost, you either need to have the
two drives plugged in at the same time, or you need to be able to
store the image file on another drive and then load it up on to the
new drive. This is just not possible with the laptop, since it can
only use one drive at a time. The easiest solution would be to use
drive adapters that allow you to plug laptop drives in to desktop
systems. These are available at any decent computer shop and are
probably in the $10-15 range. CablesOnline has them available for
order, and this gives you some idea of what they look like:
http://www.cablesonline.net/25hdmounkitw.html
If you purchased one of those, then installed your old drive in a
desktop with another hard drive, ran Ghost, made an image of your old
drive, then installed the new drive into the desktop, wrote the image
with Ghost, and finally installed the new drive into your laptop, this
would accomplish what you set out to do. But as you can imagine this
is a rather involved sort of process. Since it requires you
purchasing both an adapter and a copy of Ghost, I would suggest you're
better off just taking it to a local computer shop to have this done.
So, your options are these:
1. Install the new drive and start fresh. Install a new OS and all
your software again. This would give you a nice clean system to work
with, but you lose all your data.
2. Same as above, but copy the data files you want on to another
machine via a network or on to a CD. This is not a bad way of doing
things, but if you aren't comfortable reinstalling everything it's
probably not a great solution.
3. Buy a hard drive copying kit. Great solution if you're planning on
doing this again, but otherwise it's a fairly expensive way to go.
You might find a used kit on ebay though, which wouldn't be a bad
idea.
4. Get a copy of Ghost, a 2.5" Laptop 44 pin to 40 pin IDE adapter,
and plug the drive in to a desktop. Make an image of the drive and
write it to the new drive. This would work well, but it's again
probably going to be more trouble than you want.
5. Go to a computer store to have this done.
Sadly, laptops are not the easiest things to upgrade. That's the
tradeoff for portability I suppose. I think you're probably going to
do best by calling around to repair shops and getting quotes on this.
It shouldn't be more than $75 I would think. A competent technician
with the right tools could do this in about an hour.
I hope this proved helpful to you. Do let me know if you need further
clarification on any details.
Hibiscus
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