Need some advice on methods for replacing still functional laptop hard drive (getting imminent hard drive failure msg)

[Bagger]

I'm not yet sure what operating system is on this laptop, it should be NT or 2000, with a small chance of it being '95. Obviously I can't just slap the new hard drive into the laptop and connect it as a slave drive in order to do a disk-to-disk copy. I most likely don't have a base load image, otherwise I could just back up the data to a server, load the new image, and restore the backed up data (don't really wanna do it that way anyways). Some ideas I was throwing around in my head:

- Find a user in the location who had the same laptop (should be 2 or 3 of them) that they could spare for an hour or two, slap the new drive in that laptop, and try to use something like laplink to copy the image over.

- Buy a couple of 2.5" to 3.5" IDE connector adapters and slap both hard drives in a desktop machine in order to do the disk copy

- Buy an external USB CD-RW drive and make an image of the entire drive with Drive Image (wouldn't work with the version of 95 they use, or NT)

- Buy an external hard drive enclosure (would most likely be USB, therefore same limitations as far as the OS is concerned)


Any suggestions much appreciated 🙂

 

[techfuzz]

Depending on the type of laptop, you can buy an adapter to put your additional hard drive in the bay like where a removable CD-ROM or floppy drive currently occupies. Then just using the disk imaging software that comes with the new drive or Ghost.

techfuzz

 

[Bagger]

I'm kinda looking for an immediate solution, like something I can pick up on the way there in an hour or so 🙂

 

[DurocShark]

Ghost baby! Do it over the network or a crossover cable. 😉

 

[thraxes]

- Buy a couple of 2.5" to 3.5" IDE connector adapters and slap both hard drives in a desktop machine in order to do the disk copy

I'm quite partial to this idea.

 

[Bagger]

So I go through all this brain-crunching only to have my support guy tell me that he has an external drive bay that I can plug into the pcmcia port to do the copy. Better late than never I suppose.