Replacing an HD in a laptop

[TnT]

My sister has an old Toshiba laptop (either a 166 or 233 Mhz) and she may be buying a new one in the future. If she does I'm thinking about taking the laptop and replacing the HD, because it has a bunch of bad sectors, and installing Linux, but I'm not sure if I can even do this. Is it plausable to find an older HD and replace the one in the laptop? How hard is it to replace a laptop's HD?

[Guru]

Re: Replacing an HD in a laptop

Originally posted by TnT
My sister has an old Toshiba laptop (either a 166 or 233 Mhz) and she may be buying a new one in the future. If she does I'm thinking about taking the laptop and replacing the HD, because it has a bunch of bad sectors, and installing Linux, but I'm not sure if I can even do this. Is it plausable to find an older HD and replace the one in the laptop? How hard is it to replace a laptop's HD?

It's quite simple infact if the laptop recognises the new HD (read don't get a 20gb+ model) and does not have the bios on the hd!

[PAugustin]

It's pretty easy, you just have to locate the HDD of the laptop. Unscreew it, and replace it with another one (2"5). As it's an old computer you might have a problem with the bios. It might only recognise 8Gb HDD. I suggest you take an IBM and use their installation software (Disk manager) that will enable you to have a 20+Gig HDD installed in the computer. By the way, this software works with any IBM HDD and is much better than Fdisk and has much more features...

Anyway, in your case I think a 10Gig HDD should be enough...

[The PIT]

Don't toshes use windoze to configure the bios ???

[Dilitante1]

No Pit, they dont, but there are drivers built on to activate the CD at boot you'll need to transfer to the new drive.....so dont dump the old drive just yet.
-pickle

[TnT]

cool, thanks guys, this was just something on my mind, but I've never really worked with the internal hardware of a laptop.