You have two alternatives here:Send the laptop to a professional repair facility and pay for its labor and
expertise. This is a fairly expensive proposition, requiring about two
hours of labor plus the retail cost of a new drive. See Chapter 4 for more
about repair shops.
Work around an inadequate hard drive by using an external storage
device that connects. The external upgrade may be a bit more cumber-
some than changing out an internal drive, but a lot less expensive and
easier accomplished. Use the external drive for storage of data and new
applications; keep the operating system on the original drive so the
machine can be booted from that device.If your internal drive has completely given up the ghost, you will have to
either replace it or find some other way to boot the laptop.If you’re lucky, you may be able to burn, on a CD-R, a bootable version of the
operating system and make a change to your BIOS setup so that the laptop
looks for the boot information from the CD. It’s a relatively obscure solution,
but if it works for you let me be the first to congratulate you on saving a few
hundred dollars.Installing a hard drive into a holding case ......................................
You may be able to purchase the plastic holding case and other hardware for
a hard drive from the maker or seller of your laptop. However, so many differ-
ent models of laptops are on the market you’ll unlikely find a one-size-fits-all
drive holder at your local retail store or from any online site.That’s the bad news. The good news is that it is relatively easy to recycle the
holder from the hard drive that was originally supplied with your laptop. The
dance is the same, although the steps may vary from manufacturer to manu-
facturer and from model to model. (As a friend once described a change in
government, “It’s the same monkeys in different dresses.”)- Turn off the laptop, unplug the AC adapter, and remove the battery.
Do all three steps to assure that there is no power in the system that
could generate a spark and damage components. - Prepare your work area: You want a clean, well-lighted and stable
surface. - Turn the laptop over so that its bottom is facing up.
You can protect the fragile LCD by cushioning your work surface with a
mat or piece of soft packing material. You can use almost anything as
long as it is not metallic or packing an electric charge.130 Part III: Laying Hands on the Major Parts