How to replace a laptop hard disk drive when you want to do it yourself
Are you good with Hellraiser puzzle boxes?
What is a laptop?
Your laptop typically consists of many high precision components. First of all, you have a systemboard, which is also known as mainboard or motherboard. On that main board you have your CPU. Also on the motherboard you have some memory that is referred to as RAM. On all but ultralight or ultraportable laptops you also have an optical drive such as a CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, or DVD-RW. Finally you have the keyboard and an integrated display.
Opening a laptop is very much like solving a puzzle where one needs to take apart a box that is held together by unknown forces. Fortunately, for HDD and RAM replacement, the procedure is typically simple. To access the rest of the system you will need to literally solve a puzzle and unlatch hidden latches, unscrew screws in the correct order, and so forth, hopefully with the aid of a service manual.
User serviceable parts
On a typical laptop, you will have easy access to replacing the hard disk drive, which is also known as HDD or harddrive. The second commonly accessible part is laptop RAM memory. Keyboard can also be replaced on most laptops, but it’s easier to do so on some and ridiculously difficult on a few models.
One of my older laptops is a P3 700mhz Toshiba Satellite 4630. Replacing a keyboard on that laptop can be done in less than 1 minute and it simply requires popping off a piece of plastic, unscrewing one screw, and that’s pretty much it. This is easily one of the easiest laptops that I had to service.
Tools required
If you are comfortable with using standard tools, such as #1 Philips or #0 Philips, you may well attempt to replace your laptop hard disk drive or your laptop RAM yourself. Some older equipment requires trickier screwdrivers, such as the T6 or T7 Torx driver. By the way, most Windows Mobile smartphones need a Torx T5 driver, which can be hard to find.
A warning about laptop screws
Please be warned that these laptop screws are extremely fragile and easy to strip. Some of them are covered with a layer of nylon on the thread, which makes them extremely difficult to unscrew. Your standard so-called “Precision screwdriver” designed to fix eyeglasses or watches will simply not have enough torque.
An awesome laptop repair toolkit doesn’t need to cost an arm and a leg!
One excellent tool set for repairing laptops only costs $10 at Home Depot. I own several of these. It is absolutely amazing. One “power” tip I can give you is how to dramatically increase the torque from its “precision tools” portion. What I do is actually take the shaft of the precision tool and use it in my power drill. Assuming that I have enough grip on the screw’s head, it will never strip that screw.
I have not found a better toolkit at any price.
Another tool that I use very often is a high torque precision screwdriver from Fry’s electronics. It features P00, P0, Torx 5,6 & 8, Flat 2mm and 3m. These bits are unique to this tool, but it really saves lots of time and, more importantly, lots of screws!
Removing the laptop hard disk drive
On most laptops, the drive is held in place by one or two tiny screws. If the drive is failing, you can usually hear it very loudly. Be careful with these screws! Try multiple bits until you find one that fits the screw with least amount of movement.
This very frequently becomes a chore as some screwdrivers that are supposedly Philips #1 do not have a very accurate bit. What happens then is that the screw gets stripped and then you are in for trouble.
Once you unscrewed the panel, there may be multiple ways to remove it. While some light force may be required, it should be minimal. If the panel cannot be obviously popped off, look for sliding opportunities.
Laptop hard disk drive cage
The drive is typicaly mounted inside a tray that we refer to as a cage. More often then not, the drive will be secured with 4 tiny screws. The torque required to unscrew them will be higher than you would expect. My power drill comes in very handy for these. These screws are typically Philips #1. Be very careful because an imprecise Philips #1 will instantly strip those screws. You want the bit that has absolutely no squaring in the middle. I stripped a couple of laptop hard disk drive cage screws this way just the other day, so do heed my warning. In fact, I had to drill out those stripped screws with a 1/16″ drill bit.
ATA, IDE, PATA, and SATA laptop hard disk drives
For our purposes, the terms ATA, IDE, and PATA are interchangeable. The purists will disagree, but they are not reading this article. When you bought your older laptop, it came with an IDE or ATA laptop hard disk drive. Nowdays, if you go to a store or go online, all you’ll find is either SATA or PATA. You won’t find any new IDE or ATA laptop hard disk drives.
PATA stands for Parallel ATA and is a relatively new term due to emergence of SATA. SATA stands for Serial ATA. If your laptop came with anything other than SATA, you will need a PATA laptop hard disk drive to replace your current laptop hard disk drive.
When you remove your laptop drive cage, look at the connectors. If you see lots of pins sticking out, it’s a PATA laptop hard disk drive. If you see two sets of slide connectors, it’s a SATA laptop hard disk drive. If you see neither, you probably are looking at a PATA laptop hard disk drive and a manufacturer’s proprietary PATA adapter. When you very carefully slide off that adapter, you’ll find the PATA pins underneath. Why must you do this very gingerly? There are 40 pins that can be easily bent.
The 137GB barrier related to 48-bit LBA
You can purchase, as of this writing, PATA laptop hard disk drives in capacities up to 160GB. Anything beyond that will likely be a SATA laptop hard disk drive.
There is a specific limitation in Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows XP. You can read about it in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. If you have something older, you may want to get a new laptop.
SATA systems are less likely to be affected by this as they were typically shipped with Windows XP SP2 pre-installed, which addresses this limitation.
4200RPM, 5400RPM, and 7200RPM laptop hard disk drives
Generally, the higher this number, the faster your hard disk will perform. It may be slightly noisier, but properly functioning hard disks are nearly inaudible. It may also consume more power.
You would be very unhappy if you replaced your 7200RPM desktop hard disk with a 5400RPM one. Now consider that just about every laptop is shipped with a 5400RPM drive. Replacing that drive with a 7200RPM unit will instantly boost the laptop’s performance. A 7200RPM drive is typically not sold in an office supply store, although you will frequently find 5400RPM and external hard disk drives there.
If you are willing to wait, you can order these drives online.
Transferring data and introduction to HDD cloning
So you have your two drives. Would you rather reinstall the system and rebuild it, potentially losing data, or simply boot up with the new drive like nothing ever happened? I thought so!
HDD cloning falls under the category of data recovery because the processes are quite similar. The one exception is that it’s much easier to clone an HDD that still works, albeit slower, or if we are simply upgrading a fully functioning harddrive’s capacity or performance specifications.
When we clone a disk, we simply create an exact copy of the old disk. When we do this for data recovery purposes, we simply have to deal with an uncooperative piece of hardware and use more advanced software.
Delete Temporary Internet Files
Before you begin disk cloning, you should delete Temporary Internet Files as that will significantly speed up the process. You can do this by accessing your control panel, double-clicking Internet Options, and clicking “Delete Temporary Files” under “Browsing History”. This particular information is valid for Internet Explorer 7. For IE6, see this Microsoft Knowledge Base article. If you have multiple users on your computer, login as each of them and repeat this procedure. It will significantly reduce the cloning time.
Setup your cloning environment
Cloning a system hard disk requires doing it when the laptop is not booted into Windows. Free tools are mostly available for Linux, but there are some Windows tools as well.
The easiest way to clone a disk is to hook it up as an external drive to a system that is already running Windows or Linux. Experts will use Linux, more casual users will use Windows. In general, Linux tools are more full-featured and are typically free. For Linux, you can take advantage of a free Symantec Ghost-like tool called Clonezilla. For Windows, most tools like Symantec Ghost or Acronis TrueImage Home are not free but you can use ImageX from Windows Vista or various other forensic drive cloning tools. Here is an example of one such tool Drive Image XML by Runtime software.
If at least one of your hard drives is made by Seagate or Maxtor, you can download and run the Seagate DiscWizard, which is basically Acronis TrueImage, for free!
How to hookup a laptop drive to another system through USB, Firewire, and eSata
By far, the easiest way for you to clone your disk would be to use the Clonezilla Live CD. Simply put the new disk in a USB enclosure, boot the system from the Clonezilla CD, and clone from your internal disk (typically /dev/sda or /dev/hda) to your external disk. Then swap the disks as described above and boot.
Some enclosures are better than others. I suggest buying a 2.5″ laptop enclosure that includes a dual USB cable. One is for data, the other is for power. Avoid buying enclosures that do not include either a 5V power adapter or a dual USB cable. Firewire won’t make much difference for a casual user who just needs to clone some data. If you want the external drives to perform at the speed of an internal drive, IEEE 1394 firewire or eSata are the way to go. eSata will require some additional parts.
One gizmo I particularly enjoy using is the USB Coolmax IDE/SATA/Laptop IDE converter. It just works! It’s not even an enclosure, but it has independent power and basically will power any modern hard disk drive that other things cannot wake up. I use it extensively for data recovery purposes.
And finally, a note about Windows Vista
Even though your drive may clone flawlessly, Windows Vista may refuse to boot claiming winboot.exe is missing with error code 0xc000000e. The solution is very simple. Boot from the Windows Vista media and choose repair boot. At least Toshiba’s system recovery media allowed me to do this painlessly. I will verify it with other media.
An easy alternative is to let skilled professionals do this for you
As you can see, replacing a laptop hard disk drive is a complex process with many potential pitfalls. Those stripped screws really change the dynamics of the project from easy to being full of curses. I’ve explained it thoroughly for those of you who think you can do this. However, if you are based in San Francisco Bay Area, you have an easy alternative.
LaptopIsSlow.com is sponsored in part by HardDiskCrashed.com. They have a facility in Castro Valley, CA where you can drop off your laptop overnight and they will perform all of these procedures for you. You will simply pick it up the next day and enjoy improved performance with all your data intact. They can also enlarge your C: drive partition seamlessly to give you more space.
