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Upgrading laptop harddrive
Arrath
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Well, when I got this laptop (HP pavilion dv2200 I think) I only got a basic 60gb hard drive to save money. This obviously wasn't a good idea as I am so totally crunched for space I have to limbo games in and out onto an external hard drive to play what I feel like at the moment.
Looking at NewEgg I see huge and quite cheap laptop hard drives there. How easy would it be to install one of the babies and get it going? Also, would it be possible to image over my existing drive and then just partition the remaining space? I don't really feel like having to reinstall everything, some of which I can't because disks are sitting around home, 1,800 miles away.
According to device manager my current drive is a WDC WD600BEVS-60LAT0 ATA. I'm taking that to mean it is an ATA drive which would be..an ATA-6 under the newegg filters rather than SATA?
If I need ATA-6 I'd get something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136159
Ideally I'd get a big honkin', fast transfering
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145227
Looking at NewEgg I see huge and quite cheap laptop hard drives there. How easy would it be to install one of the babies and get it going? Also, would it be possible to image over my existing drive and then just partition the remaining space? I don't really feel like having to reinstall everything, some of which I can't because disks are sitting around home, 1,800 miles away.
According to device manager my current drive is a WDC WD600BEVS-60LAT0 ATA. I'm taking that to mean it is an ATA drive which would be..an ATA-6 under the newegg filters rather than SATA?
If I need ATA-6 I'd get something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136159
Ideally I'd get a big honkin', fast transfering
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145227
Arrath on
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Indeed, after checking with Western Digital, WD600BEVS is a SATA notebook drive, while the EIDE (ATA) version is WD600BEVE.
As for the imaging, yes that's definately an option. The nice thing about SATA notebook drives is the connectors are exactly the same as desktop SATA, so you can plug one or more SATA notebook drives into a desktop PC with a SATA controller and access them easily via the disk management tools built into Windows.
The imaging should be possible but you'll either need to plug both drives into the same computer at once or use some software to pull the image onto several DVD-Rs and boot to something that will install the new image. There was some paid software program that does this called Ghost, and there must me a free alternative somewhere but I'm not sure where.