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Fitting new hard drive to laptop

Pineman100
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Posted July 12, 2012 at 10:12AM

My daughter has asked me to fit a new, larger capacity HDD to her Dell Inspiron 1525. The existing 100GB drive (yes, that's how old it is!) is full.

Ideally I would use her Acronis True Image to clone the old drive, but I have a number of questions about this.

  1. Will the ATI clone function work if the target drive is of considerably larger capacity than the old drive? I heard somewhere that the source and target drives have to be identical.

  2. I'm not sure how to connect the new, target drive to the computer, in order to clone on to it. My daughter has a backup HDD in a caddy, but the caddy is 4.5 inches wide, so I presume it's fitted with a full-size 3.5-inch drive, rather than a smaller 2.5-inch laptop drive. Is the interface the same for both types of drive, so that I can put the new drive into her caddy? If not, can I clone to her backup drive, then fit the new drive to the laptop, then (booting from the ATI CD)clone back to the new laptop drive?

As you can tell, I've never done this before! All advice gratefully received.

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buteman

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Posted July 12, 2012 at 10:27AM

Can only tell you that removing and fitting the new hard drive is so easy that even I could do it.

The hard drive should just pull out but check that there are no screws holding it in.

Once out there should be 2 screws either side of it which have to be removed which lets you remove the support frame.

Put the support frame on the new hard drive ad both screws to either side and push it in to the laptop.

Now that was how easy it was on an Acer so would imagine most laptops would be similar.

There were two screws on the underside case which hold the new hard drive in place.

Should only take about 5 minutes to do.

You may have to wait for responses from others as I could not sign in using I/E.

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Pineman100

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Posted July 12, 2012 at 11:42AM

Thanks buteman.

I'm fairly comfortable with the business of swapping the HDD in the laptop. It's the business of cloning to the new drive, and how to achieve it that I'm hazy about (see my two questions above).

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onthelimit1

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Posted July 12, 2012 at 12:09PM

Smaller to larger is OK - the other way round can be a problem. For the sake of a tenner, I'd be tempted to use something like this

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KRONOS the First

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Posted July 12, 2012 at 12:18PM

Yes you can use the larger caddy as the power/Sata connections are the same for a 3.5 drive as a 2.5 drive. You might need to stick something under the drive to bring it up to the required level of the connections, given the difference in thickness between the two hard-drives.

One would assume that you will be using the old 2.5 hard-drive as a back up so it might be wise to invest in a caddy for it. Something like this.

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lotvic

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Posted July 12, 2012 at 12:31PM

or a permanent caddy for 2.5 sata so that the old 2.5 can be used as an extra backup harddrive. LikeThese

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lotvic

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Posted July 12, 2012 at 12:32PM

Chronus beat me to it :) I should have refreshed page before posting...

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Batch

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Posted July 12, 2012 at 12:40PM

ATI clone disk to same size or larger = dead easy, absolutely no problems.

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Pineman100

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Posted July 12, 2012 at 1:00PM

Thanks everyone. Getting a caddy for this job and for using the old drive subsequently as a backup is an excellent idea. I've ordered one.

All questions answered very satisfactorily! Thank you very much.

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