Laptop Hard Drive Upgrade

Laptop Hard Drive: Need to replace or upgrade? Well, you've come to the right place. Laptops take 2.5'' Mobile Hard Drives.

Which Hard Drive For My Laptop?

The fact is that there is a laptop hard drive almost for every laptop. But not all hard drives fit all laptops. Most places that sell hard drives keep extensive databases on which drives fit which laptops. In order to buy the right laptop hard drive you need to provide them with the laptop brand and model, and they'll look it up in their vendor database for suitable hard drives.

Laptop hard drives are not proprietary to the computers. Any brand drive will work in any laptop if it fits correctly ... with one exception - IBM laptops require IBM hard drives.

Beware of BIOS Limitations:
Some laptops have BIOS limitations built-in by manufacturers. For instance, if your laptop was originally built with a hard drive smaller or equal to 8GB then your laptop may have BIOS limitations meaning that it will only recognize 8GB out of your new larger capacity hard drive.

Resolution: You can remove these BIOS limitations. Go to your laptop manufacturer's web site and download and install the latest BIOS upgrade available for your laptop model.

Check this page for manufacturers' upgrade web sites.

First Things First

You need to back up all files on your existing hard drive to the new drive. Remember, your Windows operating system is on your old drive. You need to do a complete backup first. Copy all your files to a portable drive like the one at the bottom of this page.

Insure you can Boot your new drive. Create a bootable diskette before you install your new hard drive.
To create one, go to Control Panel, select Add/Remove Programs, and select the "Startup Disk" tab. You'll need this diskette to boot your new empty drive, and to format it.

Laptop Computer Sale Hard Drive Blowup

Here's a basic laptop layout from the underside. You can see the location of the hard drive and other access areas.

How To Install Your Laptop Hard Drive

Turn off your laptop and unplug from your power supply.

All you need is a small Phillips screwdriver to install a hard drive. Turn your laptop upside down. Remove the screws that secure the drive, take off the cover and take the drive out of its compartment. Replace with your new drive, insert the cover, and replace the screws.

The Details

Now, different laptops use different options to secure a hard drive in the compartment. Sometimes, it'll be two screws; sometimes one screw only or one screw and a sliding lock.

Look at the bottom of this laptop: the laptop hard drive compartment is located to the top right corner of the laptop, there are two screws to be removed.

The location of the hard drive differs from laptop to laptop. The bottom of your laptop may not look like the one on this picture. Another compartment that also uses screws to secure its inside under a cover would be your memory compartment. But this one will usually have a square or very close to a square shape. So, go for the rectangular shaped cover to replace your laptop hard drive as shown in the photo above.

In some laptop models, hard drives are attached to a small tray with 4 screws. If that's the case, you will need to remove the 4 screws that secure the tray, remove the tray from the old hard drive and attach it to the new hard drive with the same 4 screws. Once the new drive is in the rack, slide the rack back into the compartment, replace the cover and secure it with the screws. Done.

Now turn the power on ... What happens next depends on whether you cloned the old drive to the new one or not:

If you chose to clone hard drive than your new drive has Windows already loaded and your laptop should automatically detect it and boot as it use to boot from your old drive.

If you didn't than since you new drive is empty not much will happen. If you have a Windows XP disk than insert it into the CD ROM drive and boot off that. Otherwise insert your Windows bootable diskette into the floppy drive to boot. The bootable diskette will recognize your new laptop hard drive and it'll give you the option to format your new hard drive. Then, you'll insert your Windows CD to proceed with the Windows installation program.