Thread: Replacing Hard drive in laptop

I was able to successfully replace the HD in my Toshiba Satellite.
I did a mirror onto my WD external Hardisk, made a bootable Win 10 disk, removed and replaced the HD with a new one, then did a mirror of the external HD section.
I recovered all but my contacts AFAIR. I was even able to recover favourites etc.

I bought the same size and model HD as was in it to simplify matters.

The old girl now goes at comparatively the speed of light and hasn't had a glitch since, including updating to 1805 recently.
My original problem was that it would not update to 1705 and would not fix using all of the Win 10 utilities.
Regards Philip A

Originally Posted by PhilipA

I was able to successfully replace the HD in my Toshiba Satellite.
I did a mirror onto my WD external Hardisk, made a bootable Win 10 disk, removed and replaced the HD with a new one, then did a mirror of the external HD section.
I recovered all but my contacts AFAIR. I was even able to recover favourites etc.

....

was the old drive playing up?
if not, this method is easy peasy and very quick to do.
When son bashed the daylights out of his WD laptop drive, I opened it up and found the head stuck. as the drive is now dead, moving it wasn't going to break it any more than it being dead anyhow.
I got lucky, and it spun up for one last time. I cloned it(I have a HDD docking station for ease of doing such stuff) to the new SSD, and his lappie booted up as tho nothing had happened!
Didn't need drivers for the SSD as I thought may be an issue, just made sure that the SSD was recognised in the BIOS before bootup was attempted.

Mirroring/cloning of a failing drive usually doesn't work, and the OP is better off with a fresh installation. Just the fresh install will give a speed improvement.

Oh! and one more point to note for Ean.
Sometimes a full hard drive can do similar things to a failing hard drive.
Sons SSD had to be restricted to 250Gb(cost!) compared to the 750Gb drive I had fitted to it. He's a gamer and gamers need storage. Every other week he's got some weird java/mod(or whatever .. I'm not smart enough to know what it all is) file that takes up 1.something Gb for his games.
Every week it's the same whinging .. his laptop is playing up. cant' do this, cant' do that.
Problem is usually Windows updates being automatic. So they need (eg.) 1Gb and he only had a few hundred Mb space remaining on the SSD.
So first thing to do on the old lappie is check the properties on the old HDD, and specifically how much space reamining. Rightclick the C drive and choose Properties in the small window.

Oh! .. sorry I keep remembering other things to check for too.
Most original install HDDs on most laptops have a separate (usually D: drive) partition on the actual HDD. Sometimes they're set to hidden(from the user) so that they don't tamper with them.
You can find this out by the size of the HDD.
eg. if a 500Gb brand XXX hard drive, then it will have something like 480Gb of actual usable space in total. if the C drive(in the properties) says only 450Gb or much less than that again, then there's a good likely hood that you almost certainly have a D: backup drive.

If you can't see a D: drive and want to be sure it's there or not, another give away is if it has a DVD/CD/optical drive of any other kind. What letter has it been assigned? if E: then most likely you have a D: drive.
Why this is important, is that it's an image of the original install of the operating system.
That is, no need to install, you just do a backup/reinstall from that D: drive.

Also important, is it Windows Home or Pro version(makes a bit of a difference).

So the info I can find on the HDD
Toshiba 500GB
SATA 3Gbps
8MB
2.5 inch

the program is Windows 7 Home Premium. Looking in the properties it tells me I have 352GB free of 450GB ( C ) drive
CD drive seems to be the ( D )

The thing is just so slow , like 10 minutes just to open a page , but I get a warning showing up saying that the system needs to be backed up as the hard drive is failing or something like that.

Cheers Ean

So run the Microsoft utilities and then back up to an external disk or whatever.
Get Win10 and make a bootable DVD.
Replace the HDD.
Boot into Win 10 then restore from your external media.

Regards Philip A

Havent you fixed this yet?
I bet if it was a prawn boat it would've been fixed by now!

If your drive is working I would try and clone it using a clone utility. You will need a USB adapter for the drive. I've used clonezilla before, which requires a separate USB/CD to be created, though there at others that work too.

The benefit of this over the windows utility is that you won't need to reinstall windows and all that stuff around - just swap in your new drive and it should boot up as normal.

Originally Posted by Pedro_The_Swift

Havent you fixed this yet?
I bet if it was a prawn boat it would've been fixed by now!

No not yet, got more important things at the moment like hopefully seeing my house in daylight, bloody boats have seen me leaving before sunrise and home after sunset for about 3 weeks ,but that may come to an end this Saturday.

I should be able to concentrate on it next week.

Cheers Ean

Aren't you supposed to be on hiatus somewhere ??

Sorry been a bit busy myself too, and trying to get similar stuff sorted on my daughters old (ASUS) laptop too.
What I'm doing is make Win7 install USB stick, and stuff like that.

Part of what I'm trying to do tho is to mod the overall Win7 install file(this one is Home Premium too) to remove all the clutter/garbage/flotsam/etc, that I know I'll never use.
Stuff like Windows Media Player, Games, and crap like that. Makes the overall size of the Windows install file much smaller AND makes the actual computer install leaner/faster/smaller.

eg. the actual DVD, or a USB stick media will have all the versions of Windows on them Home/Home Premium/Pro/Ultimate/Enterprise and both x86 and 64bit versions too, and you just choose the one you install given your key.
So even tho the entire 7+Gig file for the install, you really only need about 1.something Gb of it.
I got my USB stick down to just under 1Gb removing stuff out of it(and automating the install)

I got the Win7 USB booting, but beyond that, I can't get it to load onto the HDD(mine's a Samsung).
Cryptic error msg, pointing to a device driver required, but all device drivers are on the Windows install folders! .. so it beats me what's going wrong .. until just a while ago.

For the past 10+ years I've been working with 64bit Windows, and I think this old lappie is 32bit .. hence why it it gave this arcane error that made no sense.
That is, I made a 64bit only Win7Service pack 1 and cumulative updates installation USB, where I think it needed a 32bit version .. but it still gave errors on the HDD that again made no sense.

So I made a new 32 bit version of the USB install stick, and then the HDD errors are even more insane.
It now says the HDD is 'write protected', and I format the drive using the built in tools(DISKPART) in the windows install, so the newly formatted drives/partitions are still all write protected!
DISKPART says they're not write protected .. so I reckon the HDD may have some errors/bit corruption or something.

So for Ean: I'd recommend to go to the Toshiba website for that model laptop!
if it's a 'Satellite 1300' or whatever, google that exact model and look for links to the Toshiba website.
Don't go to 'Drivers.com' or DriverUpdates.com .. etc. Go directly to the Toshiba support site and look for info on whether it's 32bit or 64bit at the least.
AND download some of the drivers on their site, and store them somewhere too(like on a current computer).
Important drivers will be VGA(display), Eth(ethernet), wifi/bluetooth if it has them, touchpad(not vital, but could be required) and Chipset drivers.

Note with downloads on their site(s) .. and all laptop manufacturers do this! .. they have all manner of helper/assistant software to download. All of it is just bloat.
The leaner you keep the install, the quicker it is to load and run.