- After data transfer is complete, shut down the computer.
- Remove the PC Card. Disconnect the AC adapter and remove the
battery. - Disconnect the EZ-Gig cable from the new drive and carefully remove
the drive from the housing.
Place it on a soft and nonconductive surface. - Carefully remove the old hard drive from the laptop and then remove
the plastic holding parts and other components from the housing.
Place the old drive in a safe place. - Install the new drive in the old drive’s housing, mating it with any spe-
cial data and power connector and aligning it with screw holes.
Carefully slide the housing into the laptop’s bay and latch or screw it
into position. - Reattach the AC adapter and install the battery.
- Turn on the computer.
If you’ve been very good in this or a previous life, the new drive will
come to life and look and act just like the one it replaced, except that it
may be much larger and faster.At this point you can decide whether to continue to use the old drive. The
EZ-Gig kit allows you to install the old drive into the external housing and
connect it to the laptop using the same PC Card you used to make the clone.
Opening a back door to recovery.....................................................
One generally useful and quick way to configure a new drive is to use the
original recovery CD that was supplied with your laptop computer. This disk
is intended to restore the machine to exactly the way it was when it arrived
from the factory. It partitions the disk, formats it, and reinstalls the operating
system and most applications and settings; in the process it erases (or make
inaccessible) all previous data on the disk. That’s not a problem with using a
recovery CD on a new hard drive — there’s no data to lose. Read this para-
graph one more time and make absolutely certain you understand that the
recovery CD will take away access to anything that might be on the disk
before you undertake a recovery.
One other feature of many current recovery CDs is that they create a hidden
Utility partition that contains diagnostic tests, stores hibernation data, and
may include emergency files that can restore the ability of a damaged hard
drive to boot once again. The hidden partition is accessed by using the spe-
cial tools that are part of the utility itself. Isn’t technology wonderful?
Chapter 17: Installing a New Operating System or Migrating Upwards 267