Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Replacing / upgrade laptop hard drive

Ever experience bad hard drive, read error or "operating system not found" error when powering up your computer, or even worse your laptop. Thought of changing the hard drive yourself, or a simple capacity upgrade that you can do yourself at home (of course after your warranty expires).

Find your hard drive compartment (usually at the bottom ~ of the laptop)

Remove all screws from the hard drive cover and remove the cover itself. You'll see some sort of image below (well, a little bit different maybe). Find your way to remove the hard drive by looking at the drive itself and a little thinking and tinkering. Usually, you'll do this step before buying a replacement drive as you'l need to confirm the connection interface whether it's IDE or SATA. If the connectors look like the drive in this post, it's IDE, if it's smaller by a large margin then probably it's SATA.


Prepare your new hard drive (in this case, it's IDE)

To simplify formating / partitioning you drive, connect your drive to external usb casing connector and connect the drive to another PC or laptop.


I prepare the drive using "Disk Management" tools inside "Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage". Create your prefered volume size and partition by using "New Simple Volume Wizard".


Make sure one partition is set active to make sure it'll boot from there. After preparing all your partition, install your favourite operating system as usual.