Upgrading & Fixing Laptops DUMmIES

storage and retrieval. For the record, the MBR is always located at cylinder 0, head 0, and sector 1. Then the disk can be ident ...

High-level formatting ......................................................................... The third step is high-level for ...

If you upgrade your laptop from an earlier version of Windows to run Windows XP, you’ll be given the opportunity to convert the ...

I talk first about the hardware side of a hard drive replacement, and explain installation of an operating system and transfer o ...

A small amount of hassle It is usually possible to remove a hard drive installed in a bay and disassem- ble the plastic componen ...

You have two alternatives here: Send the laptop to a professional repair facility and pay for its labor and expertise. This is ...

Ground yourself before touching the old drive and its enclosure and the new replacement drive. Slide the hard drive out of its ...

identified to the system by the placement of a jumper across a specific set of pins. A jumperis a small speck of plastic with a ...

To have the drive operate as a master drive, no jumpers should be installed across any of the four pins. That’s simple enough an ...

BIOS about the type of drive, its size, and other specifications. Today, nearly all BIOS setups are capable of auto detecting ID ...

storage. These drives can be huge, from today’s new small end of 20–40GB to monsters of 200 or 300GB in capacity. The only probl ...

You can also build your own external USB drive, recycling a standard full- sized drive from a desktop computer. Inexpensive exte ...

they are specifically designed for use with laptops (very few desktop PCs even have a PC Card slot) and they use the same tiny, ...

PC Card drives .................................................................................... In 2005, Toshiba broke new g ...

Chapter 8 Floppy Drives: Relics and Memories In This Chapter
Counting the bits on a floppy disk
Spinning a tale of floppy mech ...

was a floppy disk — a fragile circle of magnetized iron oxide on a plastic car- rier within a bendable envelope. But back at the ...

Save a few ounces of weight. Save a few dollars of cost. Open up 10 or 12 cubic inches of space that can be used for other pu ...

wedge near the hole but have many more spaces at the outside of the circle. (There’s also something called a cluster,which is a ...

Mylar disk; this is a very different design from that of a hard drive, where the heads float on a cushion of air a few microns a ...

Avoiding the Top Ten Stupid Floppy Disk Tricks ..................................... Floppy disks are far from indestructible; i ...