Install a new hard drive to your laptop the hard way
When you decide to install a new hard drive for your laptop, the first thing you must do is to make sure that you have the appropriate tools. Here is a checklist: one screwdriver, one desktop computer, two EIDE adapters and a copy of Norton Ghost. Why Norton Ghost you may ask. This guide is made with the assumption that you want to keep all the data from your old hard drive including software installations, settings and all the files. You can do this… quite easily. So install a copy of Norton Ghost on your laptop and make yourself a Norton Ghost boot diskette. But first things first. You must get the old hard drive out of the laptop. This can be rather tricky, but please follow the next steps and you will be able to do this in a breeze and without hiccups. As an attention remark make sure you are methodical and organized, always put the bolts you extract somewhere where you won't lose them. A tea cup works just fine First turn the laptop upside down and unscrew all the bolts and remove the battery pack, if you have a Compaq laptop than you will need a special screwdriver as these laptops use the rather exotic Torx screws, you should be able to find these at any good hardware store or if you are lucky enough at some helpful friend. After this carefully remove the keyboard. Never hurry and don't panic no matter what. Try to be Zen or something like that. It works best from my experience. Next step is to carefully unscrew the bolts holding the hard drive. Be careful and patient so you don't mess anything inside the laptop. Carefully remove the hard drive from its position and gently slide it out. Remove the metallic tray from the old hard drive and put it aside for later use. Put it somewhere close to the tea cup. Methodical approaches are the best one available so make sure that you stay organized. Leave all the components as they are and make sure that kittens, children or overzealous friends don't start playing with them. The overzealous friends are the most dangerous from my experience especially when they are trying to help. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Now it is time to put those EIDE adapter cables to work. Move over to the desktop computer with both the hard drives. Now this is crucially important. Set the old hard drive's jumper to master position and the new one to slave. Remove all the IDE devices from your desktop computer. Using a single IDE cable connect the two hard drives to the desktop computer. The place will start looking very grim and chaotic by now, but don't worry, this is normal. Put the Norton Ghost diskette in the floppy drive and leave it there. Start the PC. Press the DELETE button at the very early start. You should be in the BIOS setup environment now. Run the auto detect feature. Save the settings and exit. When you reboot you should enter the command prompt. Type in here the following command and make sure that you note it down somewhere: GHOSTPE.EXE -CLONE,MODE=COPY,SRC=1, DST=2 Now along the booting sequence you will encounter several error messages. They are normal. Once you get to the A:> command prompt you shouldn't have any worry. After you type in the command you will need to confirm to further pursue the task. The process itself may take a while. After the cloning is finished, extract carefully the hard drives and reassemble the desktop computer exactly as you had it before. After this boot normally and enter the BIOS setup again to run the auto detect feature. Save the settings and exit. Your desktop computer is unaffected. The old hard drive should be carefully as you won't need it anymore. Surgery time again. Return to where you have left the laptop. Hopefully no kittens, children or nosy friends have damaged anything. Take the metal tray and use it on your new hard drive. You will find it near the tea cup if you did everything right. Now gently slide the hard drive into the notebook and screw back the bolts until it is tight in its position. Take the keyboard and fix it on the notebook. Move slow and with firm moves. Don't move on to the next step until you are definitely ready and the keyboard stays there. Turn the laptop upside down again, put in the battery pack and screw all those tiny bolts in place. By this moment you should a perfectly working laptop on your hands. Now it's the big moment. Forget Zen, forget patience, you can panic if you wish, but don't forget to push the power button. If everything was done right you should now have a perfectly working laptop. If you don't you are pretty much screwed, but hopefully everything is OK. I know that there might not look that a new hard drive was installed, but you did it. You managed to install a new hard drive. The nice part is that there is some unused space left on that hard drive and you will need to make additional partitions or enlarge the existing ones, but this is an entire different story and the next and final chapter will help you on this issue. The hard part is over, now you only have to do some software tasks.
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