Replacing hard drive - questions.

alroley

Last month my keyboard on my HP laptop starting working on and off - every so often the space bar, enter and most of the keys on the right side would stop working for a while. I finally brought it to a repair shop and they rang today and said it's the hard drive that's the problem and they will need to replace it.

I have very limited knowledge about this so am a little lost. They said they'll replace it with a 250GB one(as far as I know the current one is 500GB).

Is 250GB too small? Will it be slower?

Would it be possible to buy a 500GB one or above and replace it myself. How much would a pretty good one cost? Where to buy it?

I am assuming I will lose everything on my laptop when it is changed?

I work in a repair shop and that sounds more like a keyboard (or cabling) fault than the hard disk. Might want to get a second opinion.

duckysauce

alroley wrote: »

Last month my keyboard on my HP laptop starting working on and off - every so often the space bar, enter and most of the keys on the right side would stop working for a while. I finally brought it to a repair shop and they rang today and said it's the hard drive that's the problem and they will need to replace it.

I have very limited knowledge about this so am a little lost. They said they'll replace it with a 250GB one(as far as I know the current one is 500GB).

Is 250GB too small? Will it be slower?

Would it be possible to buy a 500GB one or above and replace it myself. How much would a pretty good one cost? Where to buy it?

I am assuming I will lose everything on my laptop when it is changed?

bring it somewhere else

Run diags yourself on it first and see if the hard drive fails . If it doesn't it is like the other poster said cables , keyboard etc or the motherboard. Very odd that a flakey hard drive would cause only some of the keys not to respond , all of the keys for a couple of seconds yeah but not particular ones. Back up your data before bringing it to another shop aswell.

alroley

Thanks guys - will try to bring it somewhere else tomorrow.

I am in a bit of a rush to get it fixed though so am contemplating just letting them replace the hard drive and hoping that works.

alroley

Wow so apparently the guy who rang me was talking about someone elses laptop and he rang me instead of them.

My laptop just needs a new keyboard - but have to wait until Tuesday now

You were all right about it not being the hard drive!

T-K-O

My faith in repair shops has now been restored

bluefinger

thought i'd bump this rather than start a new thread.

I've got dell inpspiron 6400 which I love dearly. I'm thinking of replacing the hard drive as the one I have is only 60gb which is smaller than some peoples phones at this stage. As i'm usually near capacity I find i'm spending way too much time deleting or tidying up files. So i've a couple of questions.


is this easy to do?
how do i go about backing up my existing files etc?
are there any recommendations as to what to buy? (i've seen some on memory c and they look quite affordable)

FSL

Yes its easy to do.

Make sure the hard drive you buy is the same connection and physical size as the existing one (SATA or IDE) if the laptop is old it might be an IDE drive.

Whenever I do this I boot from a USB stick into a Linux Distro, attach the new drive using a powered USB to SATA/IDE cable and use dd to clone the old drive to the new one.

If the new drive is larger that the old I use Gparted to expand the partition on the new drive to fill it.

Then take out the old drive and put in the new. The laptop will be exactly the same as it was before but with a lot more space.

Torqay

You'll love it even more with a solid state drive, 120 GB drives are available for 70 yoyos (e.g. this Kingston 120 GB SSD, £63 @ Amazon). You don't have to worry much about transfer rates as you controller can only do SATA 150 but it will still be a massive improvement over any HDD.

P.S. don't clone a HDD to SSD, a clean installation is recommended for proper partition alignment and certain SSD specific settings will be automatically applied with a fresh installation (Windows 7 and higher).

bluefinger

Torqay wrote: »

You'll love it even more with a solid state drive, 120 GB drives are available for 70 yoyos (e.g. this Kingston 120 GB SSD, £63 @ Amazon). You don't have to worry much about transfer rates as you controller can only do SATA 150 but it will still be a massive improvement over any HDD.

P.S. don't clone a HDD to SSD, a clean installation is recommended for proper partition alignment and certain SSD specific settings will be automatically applied with a fresh installation (Windows 7 and higher).

thanks Torqay.
would you recommend this one then?
http://www.memoryc.com/storage/solidstatedisk/128gboczvectorsataiii25inchssd100000iops.html

I would prefer to clone though as I don't have the installation discs and just want more space, performance wise i'm ok I think. would this cause me trouble or is it just not recommended

fl4pj4ck

T-K-O wrote: »

My faith in repair shops has now been restored

no, the repair shop guy just reads boards

Torqay

bluefinger wrote: »

thanks Torqay.
would you recommend this one then?
http://www.memoryc.com/storage/solidstatedisk/128gboczvectorsataiii25inchssd100000iops.html

I would prefer to clone though as I don't have the installation discs and just want more space, performance wise i'm ok I think. would this cause me trouble or is it just not recommended

Nah, way too expensive. As I said, any cheapo SSD will do with a SATA I controller.

Of course you can clone/migrate but for optimal performace I'd reinstall the OS rather than carrying the garbage of an ancient Windows installation over to a new drive, whether that's a HDD or a SSD..

Overheal

fl4pj4ck wrote: »

no, the repair shop guy just reads boards

Mistakes happen. Our repair counter on average juggles 10-30 service tags, all the paperwork is handled in homogenous-looking folders. I could easily see how a mistaken phone call might have taken place.