QUESTION ABOUT REPLACING NETBOOK HARD DRIVE

[vickister]

i have just bought a 500gb sata hard from 2.5" 5400 online and i was looking to replace my exsiting one in my medion akoya mini e1210 and i have a few questsions to ask as it arrives on monday,

How easy is it to change the one in the netbook

I currently have xp home on my netbook provided with medion that is on a 80gb partitioned hard drive 66gb windows and 7gb recovery, the recovery process is provided by symatec norton ghost,

how ever when i boot up it gives you the f3 to enter recovery menu whic this allows you to update bios and restore hard drive back to factory settings which is fine for me

Now heres the question can i copy all this over to the 500gb and still have the recovery f3 option working at boot up that will load the recovery menu and then be able to install a fresh copy of windows in my 500gb.

and then in future i just press f3 to do fresh install or if anythign goes wrong

does any one know if this is possible

and if i got this working if i dual boot xp home and ubuntu will the recovery still work

i havent opend the recovery disks i got but would perfer not to

any guides advice appreciated

 

[J.B]

Very easy to change a hard drive in a laptop.

Moving the partitions over is not so easy. The way I would do it is plug both drives in to a PC and use something like Acronis TrueImage to make a mirror copy of the original drives recovery partition. This is the biggest problem with recovery partitions, if your HDD goes you are up the creek and somewhat paddle less.

If they have given you recovery disks use them! It's the easiest way!

 

[IAmATeaf]

Without the correct cables plugging in a laptop hard drive into a PC might prove difficult.

The way that I've done it is to create a network boot diskette appropriate for the NIC in the laptop, boot up off this, mount a share on a PC/server that has enough free disk space and then ghost the entire physical drive over onto the network share.

Then install the new drive, boot up of the same diskette and ghost the image back down to the new drive.

The above is more complex but you can download network boot diskettes off the web, just find out what type/make of NIC the laptop has beforehand.