How to clone laptop HD?? Upgrading HD?

[gredodenda]

I have IBM T60 with 5400rpm HD. I'm thinking about getting a 7200rpm HD. I hear that 7200rpm for laptop makes a huge difference but can it be cloned? I don't want to reinstall everything including Vista OS...

Is there a such way to clone it?

thanks

 

[MichaelD]

You heard correctly; a 7200rpm drive will make a substantial difference in the response/snappiness of your laptop. The HD is by far the slowest component in any computer. It won't be "night and day" but it will be noticeable.

The main difficulty in cloning a laptop drive is getting two drives hooked up at the same time. Easy to do in a PC, very difficult in a laptop.

There's a couple of different ways to clone your old HD to your new one.

One way:

You will need imaging software such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. You'll also need an external hard drive to store your image. You image your current HD and store it on the external drive. You install the new HD and take the image from the external HD and put it on your shiny new drive.


Another way:

A disk cloning machine, which I'm sure you don't have. But a local PC repair place or Best Buy/Fry's/other big tech store might have. Bring them both drives and have them copy one to the other.

Hope this helps a little.

 

[Old Hippie]

Apricorn 2.5 SATA Upgrade Kit. It's $35.14 when you add it to your cart. You can use the enclosure for external storage when the swap is finished.

 

[corkyg]

Cloning a laptop drive is no different than any other drive. I do it regularly using Acronis TrueImage 10.

I set up an external drive 160 GB. Connect it to the laptop and boot with the Acronis bootable CDR. I then clone the internal drive to the external drive. Both are the same size. When it is done, I remove the laptop internal drive and put in the replacement. Drive RPM is not a factor at all. I use all 160 GB drives (5400 RPM).

I then clone from the external to the internal using the same procedure. When it is done, I then have TWO main drives for the laptop - each identical to the other. That is system backup to the nth degree.

It is also possible to clone directly to external cases that can accommodate 2.5-in drives. Best results are via eSATA, then Firewire, then USB 2.

BTW - I just did all of this with a new Thinkpad T60. Super little machine!