How To Upgrade Your Laptop Hard Drive
These days, a lot of laptops come with pretty big hard drives, all things considered. It's not hard to find 320GB or 500GB drives in even the relatively affordable models. That wasn't always the case, though. If your laptop is a year or two old, you might find yourself running out of space.
Or perhaps, you just feel that your drive access is too slow. Your drive may be large enough, but it's an older 4500 RPM or 5400 RPM model and you want to move up to a newer 7200 RPM drive, perhaps with more cache.
The good news is, unlike many parts on modern notebooks, the hard drive is usually something you can swap out. The bad news is, it takes a little bit of work. In this article we'll show you how to copy the contents of your notebook's drive to a new one, then install it.
We'll be using a Dell XPS M1330 (Buy Now) here, along with a brand-new 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4 drive (Buy Now). But our advice will be as generic as possible, so you can easily apply it to your own system.
Stuff You'll Need
Before we get started, let's talk about the parts you'll need. Obviously you'll need your laptop and your new hard drive—typically a 2.5-inch SATA laptop hard drive (unless your laptop is really old).
To get into your laptop, you'll need some small screwdrivers. This can vary a bit depending on your laptop, but it's a good idea to have micro flathead and Phillips head screwdrivers. You may also need a Torx screwdriver (the little six-pointed star shape). These are cheap and available at any hardware store.
We'd advise against trying to use tools that don't quite fit, as tempting as that may be—it's easy to strip the screws, and you probably don't have extras lying around that are the right size and length to replace them. For most laptops, the little screwdrivers are the only tools you'll need to get inside.
If you're going to re-install your operating system from scratch, that hardware is all you'll need. We're going to copy the contents of our current drive to the new one, though, so we're going to need an extra piece of hardware and some software to do that. We'll talk about the software in a bit, but the hardware we'll need is a USB-to-SATA adaptor. We're using a Sabrent USB-DSC5 adaptor kit that sells for around $20, and can hook up either SATA or IDE laptop drives. Continued...
Copying Your Drive
If you're going to reinstall your operating system from scratch, you can skip all this. We want to show you how to preserve your data, though, so we'll walk you through it all.
First, make sure your laptop is plugged in. The drive copy can take a long time, and you don't want to run out of power in the middle of it. That would be, well, bad.
Note that we're using a Dell laptop, and nearly every Dell computer these days ships with a recovery partition and a hidden partition of diagnostic tools. If you don't have a laptop with these sort of hidden partitions, this will be a little easier. Given the popularity of Dell computers (and others with hidden recovery/diagnostic partitions) we figured we'd make things a little harder on purpose.
First, you need to hook up your new hard drive to your USB port with the SATA-to-USB adaptor. It's really rather self-explanatory. Then boot into Windows.
Now it's time to install the drive cloning software. If you're using a Seagate drive like we are, you can use Seagate's free DiscWizard application to copy your drive. MaxBlast 5 is the similar app for Maxtor drives. This is basically a free, vendor-specific version of the disk copying tools from Acronis.
We want to keep this as vendor-neutral as possible, in case your new replacement drive isn't made by Seagate/Maxtor. We generally like Acronis' products, so we'll use their Migrate Easy 7.0 tool. This is a $40 application, but it's got a free, fully-functional 15-day trial. If you're only going to clone one drive one time, that's all you really need. Miray's free HDClone software gets rave reviews as well.
You'll have to reboot your computer after installing Migrate Easy, then launch the app. Make sure your new drive is hooked up with your USB-to-SATA adaptor before booting up. Once in the software, click on the Disk Clone option to launch the cloning wizard. After it scans the drives, you'll be presented with a choice between "Automatic" and "Manual." For many drives, Automatic will work fine. Because we want to copy the hidden partition over, we're going to choose Manual.
We're prompted for the source hard disk. With the internal hard drive selected, we can see how the 150GB drive is carved up into several partitions. This is the one we want. We're then asked for the destination drive, which is obviously our "USB" 500GB drive.
We're given three options for the old drive—Create a new partition layout, Keep data, or Destroy data. We want to keep data, the default option, in case anything goes wrong and we need to replace the old drive.
Now a crucial step in our Dell drive cloning. We're asked what moving method we'd like to use, and given options between: As Is, Proportional, and Manual. Proportional is usually fine, and will attempt to grow each partition by the same relative amount.
However, with drives that have recovery partitions, this is a problem. Proportional sizing can play havoc with the recovery partition, which we really need to remain the same size.
So we'll choose As Is. This will make all the partitions on our new drive the exact same size as the old drive. This is a tremendous waste of space! We have a 500GB drive, and it will look like less than 150GB, just like the current drive. That's okay. The plan is to copy all the partitions over at the exact same size, preserving the functionality of the recovery and diagnostic sections, then manually adjust the size of the primary OS partition after we have the drive cloned.
Now we're shown the final drive structure, and you can see all that unallocated space we're wasting. Again, if your laptop has no hidden partitions, you don't have to go through all this mess. Just choose an Automatic copy and you should be good to go.
After clicking Proceed, the computer reboots and begins its byte-by-byte copy of the drive.
After the Copy
After the computer reboots, locks partitions, and clones the drives, we still have a little work to do. The cloning operation can take a very long time, especially if you're doing a byte-by-byte copy like we are (ours took several hours), so don't be alarmed if it's not exactly speedy.
Once the copy is complete, it's time to do a little surgery on the laptop. If you're going to install the OS from scratch on your new drive, this is where you rejoin our How-To in progress.
First, unplug your laptop and remove the battery (there's usually a battery latch on the bottom). Wait a minute to make sure all the power has dissipated from the system—you never want to take a screwdriver to your computer if there's any current in there at all.
How you remove and replace the hard drive in your laptop will vary wildly by manufacturer and model type. Some you'll access through the empty battery compartment. Some you may have to take the entire shell off, or remove the keyboard from the top side.
Some, like our Dell XPS M1330, have a set of screws you remove on the bottom specifically to access the hard drive, which then slides out of the side (in our case) or is revealed by lifting a cover. If you have no idea where to begin, do a search for "[notebook model] disassembled" and see what comes up. There are lots of photo guides and videos to taking apart most popular notebook models.
Once you remove your old hard drive and replace it with your new one, then screw everything back together, you're ready to go.
If you didn't have any hidden partitions and were able to use an automatic or file-by-file clone of the drive, or if you're going to install your OS from scratch on the new blank drive, you're basically done!
Fixing Partition Sizes
We did a sector-by-sector copy of our drive to preserve functionality of the hidden partitions, so we still have a little work to do. We need to resize our primary partition (the C: drive) to fill up all that unused space in our new larger drive.
In Vista, you can do this pretty easily with the built-in disk management tool. In the Start menu, type "manage" to filter search results that will include "Computer Management." Click on that. In the computer management tool, on the left side under "Storage" you'll see the "Disk Management" option. Click on that, and you'll see all your drives and volumes listed in the center pane.
From there, we just right-click the primary C: partition and select Extend. A window pops up asking us how big to make the partition, and it already defaults to the maximum available size. All we have to do is hit Next and it's done.
That's really all there is to it. Of course, depending on the type of hidden/utility/recovery partitions you may have and their location on the drives, you may not be able to use the Disk Management utility to extend the partition.
Also, this Disk Management doesn't offer this functionality in Windows XP. For that, you can use the annoying command-line utility from Microsoft called diskpart.exe. Using diskpart.exe can be confusing and obtuse, but Microsoft has instructions that may help. Finally, if none of that will work, you can rely on a third-party app like Partition Magic or Partition Master, though those tools aren't always free.
Final Thoughts
Replacing the hard drive in your laptop is actually a pretty easy process for most people. Most laptops make it fairly easy to access the hard drive, even if it's not immediately obvious. Most laptops don't have special hidden partitions that won't work properly if they're resized.
So for most users, you can do an easy file-by-file type ("Automatic") copy that is pretty fast and you don't have to worry about any sort of partition resizing or anything of that sort.
Even if you have those sorts of partitions, you can make life easy by doing a fast clone of the primary partition only, skipping all the recovery/diagnostics/whatever partitions altogether. You won't have use of them once you upgrade your hard drive, but if you're okay with that, it makes life a lot easier.
Of course, some would argue that a better alternative is to simply re-install your OS from scratch on the blank drive. This requires backing up all your data, re-installing all your applications, and copying all your data back. All of which is a pain, but it results in a nice clean installation that isn't gunked-up with stuff you don't use anymore, and besides, you back up your data regularly anyway, right?
If that's the case, you simply remove the old drive, slap in the new one, put your OS install disc in the optical drive, and start from scratch. It's simple and effective, if time-consuming.
The only time things get a little hairy is if you have a laptop with special partitions that need to remain the same size, and you want to make sure they still function when you get over to the new drive. This requires making a very slow byte-by-byte copy first, which leaves a lot of unformatted space on the drive, then adjusting the size of your main partition later to use that empty space.
If you update the hard drive on your laptop, or have done it in the past, head to the comments for this article and share your experiences and tips.
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