Upgrading laptop hard drive?

[AMDPwred]

How much of a pain is it to upgrade a hard drive on a laptop?

 

[DSTA]

Depends very much on the laptop. On most it's failrly easy in my experience. Might need a torx tool perhaps.

Edit: what brand/model do you want to upgrade?

 

[AMDPwred]

It's an old Toshiba (from other thread ). I'm not sure which model though. I think he is bring it to work Friday.

 

[DSTA]

Suppose it's for the P133 you wanted to know a price for?

Should be easy, on the Satellite Pros from that time, for example, there's an easily accesible tray. Only problem is that I don't know how far the BIOS will play along, capacity wise. Best do a web/usenet search before ordering a fat 20 Gig laptop drive.

 

[jschuk]

Except for the Portege 300CT (only because I haven't tried it but probably follows suit) all Toshiba's with a 133Mhz have a BIOS limitation of 8GB. This is only if you partition the HDD in that machine. I have successfully put a 10GB drive into a Sat Pro 440 (P133MMX) by ghosting the 440 image using a laptop that didn't have the BIOS limitation. I put a 12GB into a Sat Pro 430 and 420 too.

 

[dkozloski]

The physical thickness of the drive is important as some of the thicker drives will not fit in some machines. They are rated as 9mm thick, 17mm thick and the like. The software workarounds such as OnTrack or Maxblast take care of most BIOS limitations.

 

[VBboy]

It takes 5 minutes including opening and closing the computer cover.
Takes much longer if you need to transfer your existing data.