Qestion about toshiba portege laptop

[michael2305]

Hello, i would be grateful if you could answer a question for me. I have the above laptop, which has an 80 gb hard drive. Is it possible to upgrade the hard drive? and how would you go about doing this?

Thank you very much.

[peterb]

Yes, entirely possible.

You need to fined out how to remove the existing drive - I'm not familiar with that laptop, but many either have a flap on the bottom, either removed with a catch or a screw.

Once the drive is removed, see if it is a parallel interface or a SATA interface - the drive itself might say if you aren't familiar with the connectors.

Buy a larger drive with the same physical size (it will be a 2.5" drive - probably standard thickness) and install it.

That is the easy bit.

If you are willing to start again with the operating system, just re-install from the system CD if you have one. You then need to get your data back from the old drive. You can do that by getting a 2.5" USB caddy with the correct ide orv SATA interface, and connect that to the laptops USB port and copy the data across.

Alternatively you can clone the old hard drive to the new drive. You can do that by connecting the NEW drive to the USB port (using the caddy method) and then using a software tool to clone the disk (make a bit by bit copy) of the old drive to the new one. Then install the new drive into the laptop. You will have some free space on the disk(because it is bigger than the old one) which you can then use as a new partition (a new drive letter) using your operating system's partitioning tool. (Usually something like fdisk).

You cannot simply copy from within the OS as that only copies files in the file system, but not the other data on the disk that the computer needs.

It is actually much simpler to do than describe - it is only complicarted by the fact that a laptop usually only has one internal drive bay, so cloning the disk is not so straightforward.

There are several ways of cloning the disk from a software point of view. Acronis and Norton ghost aare two - I haven't used either.

Caspar XP is one that works from within Windows - and I have used that. However I would now use a Linux live CD, but that takes a little more confidence and a (very) basic understanding of linux. It is a free solution though.

Whatever software you use - you must make sure that you correctly identify the source and target disks (easier in Windows). Otherwise you will clone your new (blank) disk over the old one.

[michael2305]

thanks very much for your info