Replacing Laptop Hard Drive

[mbaldw]

Hi Folks,

One of my colleagues recently asked me to take a look at her laptop as it suddenly started taking ages to boot into Windows and frequently either shut itself down or came up with a BSOD.   I scanned the memory and that seems fine and so I attempted a factory restore, which came up with an error telling me the disk wasn't formatted correctly.  XP's System Restore failed because the laptop BSOD during it.   With her permission, I decided to boot from the Windows CD in order to format the drive and install the O/S from scratch.   It allowed me to boot from the disc, but when I tried to format the drive it got about 20% of the way through before coming up with an error message saying the disk was corrupt and it couldn't finish.

I swapped the hard disk with an old one from a knackered PackardBell laptop and was able to format and install the O/S (confirming that it does indeed seem to be the hard disk at fault).   My question is whether all laptop hard drives (i.e. those advertised as 2.5" such as this Seagate one) the same in terms of size and shape?   I know laptops have SATA and ATA like desktops, but I don't want to buy one online only to find it doesn't fit the computer.   My experience with the PB's hard drive suggests they are uniform in this regard, but I would appreciate some clarification on this.

Cheers,
Marc.

[Buffalo2102]

Nearly all 2.5" drives are the same size - as are most 3.5" drives.  There are one or two extra slim drives about but they should all have the same standard PATA or SATA interface (pins).  You shouldn't come across any that won't fit into your laptop, unless it is some unique model.

If in doubt, check the measurements of your old drive and compare it to any that you are considering buying - the sizes are readily available on the drive manufacturers website.

[query]

That was true, but the race for capacity has changed things of late.

Drive makers had pretty much standardized on 9.5 mm height drives - until Toshiba and Fujitsu released their 200-250G units with 12.5 mm height designs.  These will not fit the vast majority of notebooks made in the last few years.

The race for capacity has also created another issue - there are many notebooks that are not that old, which do not have BIOS support for drives over 120G.  Fortunately  most manufacturers are producing the large capacity drives almost exclusively in SATA format, which won't work with the older BIOS-limited systems anyway.

Be careful also when you install the drive - many makers use a proprietary sled/connector you must move from the original drive to the new one in order to successfully connect it to the system board.

The notebook drive market is becoming the wild west that the desktop drive market was in the early Pentium and Pentium 4 eras.

[Buffalo2102]

True, but there shouldn't be an issue when just replacing a hard drive for a similar capacity model, as is the case here.  It can be a lot different if you are considering upgrading.

I've just been through this with my Gateway laptop and all I did was check the specs and size of the drive I removed (a Fujitsu) and checked it against the drive I considered purchasing (a Seagate).  The sizes were the same and the drive caddy fitted perfectly.  Every other drive I considered (of similar capacity) was also the same size, with the exception of one or two newer slim profile drives.

[mbaldw]

Thanks very much for the info guys.   The new drive will be the same size as the failed one (40gb), so there shouldn't be any BIOS issues there.   The only minor hurdle I was confronted with took the form of a small rectangular block of foam glued to the inside of the hard drive enclosure just above the pin receptors.   This prevented the old PB drive going in because its case has a panel that extends to cover the IDE pins, while the original hard drive did not.   However, a couple of seconds and a pair of tweezers removed this block and allowed installation of the test drive.   I'll measure the old drive and make sure I check the dimensions with any I order.

Thanks again for the assistance.
Cheers,
Marc.