Help with upgrading notebook drive

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Rajuk
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Joined: Jun 5 2002

Hiya help needed guys.

I have a compaq presario 1200 laptop with recovery cds for win 98.

Now no laughing it only has 3gb of Harddisk!!

it currently setup as two partions by the compaq software, with D drive where all the back up stuff is kept.

Id like to upgrade to 20gb.

would this be ok with the motherboard?

how easy is it to change the laptop drive?
qustion of pull it out put new one in?

If this is plausable, how do i transfer the data across?

what the best way?

i was thinking of three options

putting in the new hardrive unformated and letting the compaq recovery disc do it job, partion and set up win 98.

from here i could then overwrite the hardrive with a ghost programme such as the free ghosting software in pc plus magazine?

Buying an external 2.5 case and formatting the new 20gbhardrive and transferring all the data across to it.
then swapping the drives.

Im not sure whether this would work, but compaq recovery disc makes two partions a C: and a D:. The disc allows you to make a backup of your hardrive onto other partion D: . how about i make a backup and let it be stored on the d drive.

copy these files over to another computer.

then install the new harddrive let the recovery discs do it thing and then staright way make a back up of my new c: drive to the D: drive.

Then replace this D: drive with the back up from the previous attaempt when i had the 3gb drive. would this work?

gordo
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Joined: Dec 19 2001

this may not help, but anyway.

I have a presario 800 and was concerned about replacing the hard drive after unsuccessfully trying another cd drive and it not working.

but today i tried another Hdd and it was fine. I actually tried a 11gb & a 30gb (my laptop has a 9gb) and they both worked fine.

As far as the recovery option goes, the recovery disk should be fine, but you might find it retains the current disk sizes (not sure). Partition magic or acronis partition expert (http://www.acronis.com) though will let you resize the partitions.

The thing to watch with copying the files across is that hidden/system files may not be copied as they may be in use.

Another option is to copy all the files across then run an upgrade on the new drive.

hth

gordo