replacement laptop HDD?

MNuTz · 27 Mar 2007 at 11:00

Hi all,

Im looking around for a replacement HDD for my mums laptop but i cant find any info on it. Laptop is a Toshiba Satellite Pro A10.

Can i just buy any HDD and fit it or will it have to go back to Toshiba to have one of theirs?

Need to know asap so i can get this sorted!

thanks

EDIT: Current HDD is a Toshiba MK3021GAS HDD2181 B
DC+5v 0.7A
30GB

Does the power rating make a difference? my friends got one that is rated at +5V 0.55A that is going spare!

also, are they all the same size?

madman045 · 27 Mar 2007 at 11:38

Usually i would say, another 2.5" ide hard disk will do the job, but i would say be careful as some have been known not to recognise larger drives

I would borrow your friends and try it

They are the same size, usually you have to unscrew it from the caddy tray its in and put the new one in its place, then boot the machine from your OS cd and install it

You will need to get the drivers for it unless you have them on cd.

semi-pro waster · 27 Mar 2007 at 13:30

The old rule used to be that you could install a drive 3x the original size without problems normally although it was never particularly hard and fast - I went from a 10gb to a 40gb without any issues. However as mentioned there can occasionally be problems, either the same size or maybe double ought to be fairly safe - if not you can usually get some sort of boot-strap loader from the hard drive manufacturer to 'fool' the bios into accepting a larger hard drive but hopefully the manual will tell you what the largest hard drive is that it will accept.

MNuTz · 28 Mar 2007 at 00:26

tried a 100gb second hand drive that does work, however, when i push the power button the power light flashes twice and then stays on. Doesnt boot up at all. Manual says it means that the output voltage is abnormal!

take the HDD out and it works fine!

Any ideas how to get round this?

semi-pro waster · 28 Mar 2007 at 08:25

I'd never heard of that before so it appears Toshibas are much fussier about the voltages on their hard drives, I think you will just have to find a drive that works on 0.7V as I can't imagine you will get a step-down transformer to do the necessary.

rpstewart · 28 Mar 2007 at 09:43

The difference in the specs is in current draw not voltage so I'm not sure why it would be reporting a voltage issue.

Have you tried it on the battery rather than AC?

MNuTz · 28 Mar 2007 at 20:29

rpstewart said:
The difference in the specs is in current draw not voltage so I'm not sure why it would be reporting a voltage issue.

Have you tried it on the battery rather than AC?

its the same on both mate

EDIT: i has put the HDD in slightly over to one side. it boots up fine now.

however, knoppix isnt seeing the drive and im yet to try and find my XP disk to install it. Tried the rescue disk but for it to come up with the following msg.

Starting Windows 98 (although im sure its XP).....

Microsoft RAMDrive version 3.06 virtual disk C:
Disk size: 2,048k
Sector Size: 512 bytes
Allocation unit: 2 sectors
Directory entries: 64

TOSHIBA Enhanced-IDE CD/DVD-ROM Device Driver (ATAPI) Vsn 2.24
(other info not important)

MSCDEX Version 2.25
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. 1986-1995. All Rights reserved.
Drive X: = Driver TOSCD001 unit 0

CDR101: Not ready reading drive X
Abort, Retry, Fail?Bad or missing XCOPY32.MOD
ERROR ! XCOPY TO RAMDRIVE FAILED !

So im back at square one really except i now know that the HDD isnt the problem!!