Ghosting a Laptop HDD

parkie · 18 Jun 2006 at 21:05

Was thinking of upgrading the 20GB HDD in my girlfriends Laptop to something a bit more substantial, how do I go about this? Can I do it using my PC? What power connectors will the 2.5" drive use? Will a normal IDE cable do the trick? Actually, do they use the same power connecots as a floppy drive?

hope you can help

cheers

p

smids · 18 Jun 2006 at 21:13

You'll need to get a laptop IDE to normal IDE converter - one which also has a molex power plug as laptop drives receive power and data through their IDE port. It can be done with a PC though.

Easier: Get Acronis True Image Home 9.0, make an image of the entire drive, ensure this is burned to a DVD or several DVD's, then just pop in the new drive, boot using the acronis boot CD (you can create it from within the program) and boot and restore image. Hey presto!

Dutch Guy · 19 Jun 2006 at 10:49

smids said:
Easier: Get Acronis True Image Home 9.0, make an image of the entire drive, ensure this is burned to a DVD or several DVD's, then just pop in the new drive, boot using the acronis boot CD (you can create it from within the program) and boot and restore image. Hey presto!

This is the easiest way but that would mean there has to be a DVD burner on the laptop.

smids · 19 Jun 2006 at 10:50

Not necessarily - he could LAN the two together with a crossover cable and transfer the image files.

Phemo · 19 Jun 2006 at 11:04

Another alternative is to pick up a 2.5" drive USB enclosure. You can get these for around £10 and then you have a spare portable 20GB drive in an enclosure for random backup purposes or whatever you'd want to use it for.

Provided the laptop is at least semi-recent, even a DOS version of Ghost should pick it up. I did the same thing when I changed my laptop's HD - just slapped the new drive in the enclosure then booted to DOS Ghost and copied the original drive to the new one. After swapping them around it worked absolutely fine.

smids · 19 Jun 2006 at 11:09

Good point on the enclosure thing! I wouldn't use Ghost though. Acronis do a 30day full working trial I am led to believe (I bought it as I was so impressed - Ghost failed 5 times for me before I gave up).

Phemo · 19 Jun 2006 at 11:18

Yeah Acronis True Image is definitely a better product than Ghost all-round.

parkie · 19 Jun 2006 at 12:04

Phemo said:
Another alternative is to pick up a 2.5" drive USB enclosure. You can get these for around £10 and then you have a spare portable 20GB drive in an enclosure for random backup purposes or whatever you'd want to use it for.

Provided the laptop is at least semi-recent, even a DOS version of Ghost should pick it up. I did the same thing when I changed my laptop's HD - just slapped the new drive in the enclosure then booted to DOS Ghost and copied the original drive to the new one. After swapping them around it worked absolutely fine.

that sounds like the answer to me, the extra storage would be useful as well, can you recommend one, what brand? I've used Ghost as long as i can remember and it'sa never let me down and I seem to remember they added usb support a few years back.

Can anyone recommend a good laptop HDD, I know plenty about PC drives but laptop I'm not so sure. What should I stay away from?

thanks everyone

p

Phemo · 19 Jun 2006 at 12:23

I'm not too sure on enclosure brands - I'm just using some cheap thing I got off an auction site and have never had any problems with it.

As for hard drives, I was doing some research into this a while ago as I wanted to upgrade my laptop's HD to a 7200rpm. If it's speed you want, go with a Hitachi drive. If it's capacity, my personal preference is Seagate. What sort of size are you looking at?