How difficult is it to add a laptop hard drive?

[DuffmanOhYeah]

Well, under slightly different than usual circumstances anyway.

Ok, so I want to think about building a car-pc. I found someone who would sell a laptop shell (sans memory and all drives; HD, CD or floppy) for like 20. I have some memory from a recent lappy upgrade, and all Id have to do is buy a HD.

So, the question is, can I install a new HD without having any of the other drives? Obviously it would be impossible to load an OS on to the system directly with no cd drive from which to get it from. So I guess can I format it and install an OS in another laptop and then move the drive over to the new machine? Im thinking Win ME for the OS. Its not a very powerful machine, so I think XP is out of the question, but I also dont want the long boot times of 98.

I would later add a dvd via USB so I can play movies, but that would be later. I really want to keep this as low cost as possible.

 

[Cheetah8799]

If you use Windows ME, you can hook the laptop drive up to another laptop, or a PC w/ IDE adapter, then do the install 1/2 way through, to the point where it reboots. Then turn it off, pull the drive, and put in in the partial machine it will run in. It should continue the WinME install and be good to go.

Keep in mind that prior to starting the install, copy the WinME CD to the drive so you have access to it from the partial laptop. Otherwise you won't be able to get any data from it to continue the install.

 

[piasabird]

Laptops are proprietary. They build laptops to not be user friendly. You are likely to break something taking it apart.

 

[InlineFive]

Depends on what kind of laptop you have. Most laptops can access HDDs through a door on the side and it's really easy to change. Provided that you have an adapter if need be for the motherboard (like my C600),

-Por