A small amount of hassle
It is usually possible to remove a hard drive installed in a bay and disassem-
ble the plastic components and metal hardware to gain direct access to the
tiny hard drive within.
- Prepare your work area.
Before you touch the hard drive you are removing or the new one you
propose to install in its place, you want a clean, well-lit and stable sur-
face. Ground yourself before touching either drive.- Turn off the laptop, unplug the AC adapter, and remove the battery.
- Take the hard drive out of its bay.
- Keep track of every screw and piece you remove.
Have a pad of paper nearby and consider using a numbered, compart-
mentalized container for each part and make a corresponding entry in
your notebook. One interesting solution is to use a clean egg carton with
each of the cups numbered or lettered.- Once you have taken out the old drive, put it aside and immediately
install the new one in its place. - Install the plastic and metal pieces and plug the new assembly into
your laptop.
Painful and worthy of question
Older laptops were built with no concession to the user when it came to
replacing the hard drive; the storage device was plugged in to an internal bay,
buried beneath the top cover or hidden under the bottom plastic.
Before proceeding, it’s worthwhile to distinguish between these two situations:
Your existing hard drive is working properly, but you’ve run out of space.
Your existing hard drive has stopped working, and you can no longer
use it to boot the system.It ispossible to open up an older laptop and get at the hard drive, but the job
may involve dozens of screws and the removal of all sorts of unrelated parts:
the battery, the keyboard, the CD-ROM, and just about everything else. You
should be able to read all of the gory details in the technical manual for your
machine; if you don’t have a copy, you may be able to find it on the web site
of your machine’s maker.
If all of this doesn’t scare you off, be heartened by the fact that you will still
probably be able to use an off-the-shelf laptop hard drive. It should match up
with the connector inside the case and screw into place.
Chapter 7: Easing In to Hard Disks 129