Replacing Hard Drive
 

I'm replacing my 4.5g HD in my laptop with a 40g one.

But I don't know how. I mean, I know how to take the old one out and put the new one in. But after that... I'm lost. I have copy of XP Pro but I don't undertsand anything after that...

HELP ME. Explain with small non-nerd words.

If you have to ask these questions it's probably best that you get someone to do it for you.

I would have to concur with Blistex...sounds like you might be in over your head on that one (no offense of course).

I dunno - I think you guys are being a little harsh.

Once you have put the new drive in, you should be able to boot from the XP Pro CD - and it should format the disk for you as part of the setup process. or am I just thinking too simplistically?

Yeah, that's exactly what I did.

Yeah, no kidding.

He said he can physically replace the drive in the machine. Geez, that's the hardest part! Once you slap the CD and begin the install, you're home free. Take it slow, read everything twice and you should be fine.

good luck.

Thanks y'all.

It just doens't make sense how I can get the CD drawer open with no way to boot my computer. Hence getting the XP disk in before I turn my comp. on.


On and... to all that said this was over my head. I wanna see you try to fix a two-stroke engine from a 50's Vespa.

once you have the new drive installed turn on your computer and put in the windows xp cd. when the screen says something like "boot from cd" press any key and you should go into the windows xp setup. fallow the instructions. NTFS > FAT32 btw

if you dont get the "boot from cd" go into your laptops bios and change the boot process to boot from the cd first. good luck!

Even if you don't manage to get the CD in the machine in time, it won't hurt anything. An error message will probably pop up, but the drive should still operate.

If you're that worried about it you could always put the CD in before you switch drives. I'm pretty sure that's okay.

Anyone can learn anything as long as they take the time. At least that's my opinion.

Do you want to keep your data ?
Do you have a desktop ?

You could also purchase a couple of laptop->ide converters, throw'em in your desktop, then ghost one to the other. The advantage of having a shop doing it is that they should have all the hardware. Just a thought, in case you were up to it. gl.

You could just ghost the images to cd-r's. Much more convenient.

What he said ;)

indeed, saves a lot of time.

Your computer will still power up, meaning your CD drive will get power to eject its tray. If you don't get your cd in fast enough it'll just say something like 'No Operation System Found"... just stick your CD in the drive and reboot. Make sure you have BIOS set to try to boot of the CD drive.

You could attach both disks to the IDE controller and use Ghost to copy the olde disc to the new one, then use partition magic to expand the partition.

...or you could take out the old disc, install the new one (like you did), turn on the computer (giving the cd-rom power, allowing it to work), insert the windows XP cd-rom, and take it from there.

but whatever you do, always remember that it's a friggin' machine, and it's not going to kill you if you do something wrong; 99,9999999% of the time you can simply try again.

Well, I'm getting the new drive on Tuesday. If I don't show up for a while... you know what happen.