Getting a new harddrive for a notebook

[slpaulson]

Can I just get pretty much ide 2.5" harddrive for a notebook and make it work? Or do I have to get one specificly for that kind of notebook? Thanks in advance.

 

[slpaulson]

Bump
Somebody has to know this around here.

 

[bacillus]

never had to do it myself but I understand that most are standard fit size with standard placed screwholes.
suggest you make a windows startup disk & test that you can access your cd drive in dos before you journey down that road as some laptops cd drives require specific dos drivers(requires modifing the floppy info) for them to function, the standard generic drivers on the startup disk being useless! if you can't access your cd drive in dos then you won't be able to install the OS!

 

[slpaulson]

I already accessed the cd.
Basicly my friend's harddrive crapped out, when I boot up it says no os found. If I do fdisk it says no mounted disks.
I'm gonna get an adapter and try the old harddrive in my pc first though.

 

[cdternie]

might be a good idea to put this in the general hardware forum, rather than here in the cpus/overclocking area. might get better feedback at any rate...=]

 

[slpaulson]

Ug I coulda sworn it was in the General .
God I'm dumb.

 

[Blundar]

s long as the notebook is 1998 or later you shouldn't have too many problems. IBM and toshiba laptops have used 100% standard 2.5 inch drives for a long time now. I just put a 20 gig in my thinkpad... not hard. You do need to watch out for form factor: there are 3.
9mm is newest and smallest, 13.5 is older and more common, 19.5mm is usd for some drives. Measure your old drive first. If you want the 4gig IBM travelstar I pulled from my thinkpad PM me and maybe we can work something out.

 

[slpaulson]

I really do not know the year yet, and I don't have much info about the notebook. Its a compaq and it has a 1gig toshiba harddrive. I'll measure it when I get time.

I'm sorry I posted this in the wrong forum, I was asking a girl to prom when I started to type this and I wasn't quite thinking about this . She said yes by the way.