Help ! Looking for HDD for Dell Inspiron 1300

[HTSS_TR]

I got a Fujitsu HDD MHV2060AH 60GB from Dell Inspiron 9300, I believe it is IDE/ATA-100.

What I need to do now is reformat that drive with another laptop. Then wait for the enclosure to arrive in 3-4 days to clone the old drive to the Fujitsu drive using WD-Acronis I copied earlier today.

 

[buickman50401]

Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
I got a Fujitsu HDD MHV2060AH 60GB from Dell Inspiron 9300, I believe it is IDE/ATA-100.

What I need to do now is reformat that drive with another laptop. Then wait for the enclosure to arrive in 3-4 days to clone the old drive to the Fujitsu drive using WD-Acronis I copied earlier today.

Are you planning on using this used drive in the laptop or did you order a new one for it?

If you already ordered a new one, you can start the cloning process as soon as the enclosure arrives. Clone the old drive via Acronis to the salvaged drive that you put in the enclosure. Then wait for the new drive to arrive, install it, boot from the CD clone off of the salvaged drive.

I wouldn't recommend using that salvaged drive in your laptop since you don't know the history of it/how much life span it has left.

While drive failures can occur in both desktops and laptops, its been my experience that do to environmental factors and use(abuse) that laptop drives fail at a higher rate hence the recommendation to not use the salvaged drive in the laptop.

Edit:
As a "bonus" if you will, putting a new drive in the laptop and keeping the salvaged drive in the enclosure will give you the option of running some kind of back-up software on a regular basis. As a quick and easy solution, I use MS SyncToy on my XP, Vista, and Win7 machines. All of my important data files are duplicated across 2 laptops and 1 desktop. I run the sync on a weekly basis between the 3.

Synctoy doesn't run in the background. Its as simple as start the program, select drives/folders to sync and click the button.

 

[Bottom_Feeder]

Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
Reading new posts makes my head spin, I'm a little more confusing now than before. I think it is an easy job to replace hard drive, but it seems to be more complicates than expected.

Don't worry about it. The process is still fairly straightforward.

Buy a WD drive. Buy a PATA USB enclosure. Install said hard drive in said enclosure, and plug it into the laptop. Don't do anything with the new drive if Windows asks you.

Download and install WD's flavor of Acronis. Run the software. Clone the drive from old to new. Turn everything off. Remove the drives from both and install the new one in your laptop. Boot it up and enjoy your old OS on a newer, larger and hopefully faster hard drive. Easy.

 

[Bottom_Feeder]

Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
I got a Fujitsu HDD MHV2060AH 60GB from Dell Inspiron 9300, I believe it is IDE/ATA-100.

What I need to do now is reformat that drive with another laptop. Then wait for the enclosure to arrive in 3-4 days to clone the old drive to the Fujitsu drive using WD-Acronis I copied earlier today.

Keep in mind, the Acronis software from WD probably will not work unless it detects at least one WD drive in your system.

Also, you don't need another laptop to do anything with the 'new' drive. Cloning it will create a new partition and dump your data to it. You don't need to partition, format, or anything like that first.

 

[buickman50401]

Originally Posted By: Bottom_Feeder
Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
I got a Fujitsu HDD MHV2060AH 60GB from Dell Inspiron 9300, I believe it is IDE/ATA-100.

What I need to do now is reformat that drive with another laptop. Then wait for the enclosure to arrive in 3-4 days to clone the old drive to the Fujitsu drive using WD-Acronis I copied earlier today.

Keep in mind, the Acronis software from WD probably will not work unless it detects at least one WD drive in your system.

Also, you don't need another laptop to do anything with the 'new' drive. Cloning it will create a new partition and dump your data to it. You don't need to partition, format, or anything like that first.


If he's running XP though he might want to do any additional partitioning he'd like to do before the clones the drive using something like Gparted. I don't remember the limitations of XP's disk management snap-in but I know its not as flexible as Win 7.

 

[HTSS_TR]

Just received the IDE drive enclosure today. Connect the Fujitsu HDD MHV2060AH 60GB to it and reformat that drive with instructions from eHow. The size is 60GB so that it may be done in about 20-30 minutes. Then I'll do the cloning with WD-Acronis, I think the failing HDD is WD.

I may not need to buy new drive, the Fujitsu drive is running near silent, while the failing WD drive is making awful sound once in a while.

I was buying a new WD in either capacity 80GB or 120GB, when I click on check out to buy it the price went up $10 for both, it [censored] me off big time.

I cross my fingers, if the Fujitsu drive is working then it will be perfect, if it fails in a near future then I still have the WD drive to re-install to clone to a new drive.

There is something really stands out with this experience. I paid $5.xx shipped for the HDD enclosure, there is a small circuit board with a small chip and something else on the board, plus 2 small screws, a screw driver, a USB cable and a protective cover for the metal case. All this for $5 shipped, how did they ever make any money out of this sale ?

 

[HTSS_TR]

I think I did it.

I'm using the cloned Fujitsu 60GB drive as I'm typing now. I have the old/failing drive in the enclosure and save it if this Fujitsu drive gives me trouble in the future.

The old drive max capacity is 40GB and usable is only 34GB and I have 9GB free space, this Fujitsu drive max capacity is 60GB and usable is 51GB and free space is a whopping 26GB.

Thank you all for helping me in tackle this problem, I don't think I can successfully do it myself without your helps

.

 

[Bottom_Feeder]

See? Easy!

 

[HTSS_TR]

Yes. It's easy but only after reading all the posts and carefully analyze all comments in details, specially your helpful posts. If I didn't start this thread asking for help, I would buy a SATA drive and may not be able to clone the contents of the old drive into it correctly, and then it will not be able to install into the laptop.

My point is there is no dumb/stupid question, specially anything involves electronics/computer. To someone with knowledge/experience like you it may be trivial, but to someone else like me it is so complicate. That why I ask some questions again and again to be sure that I should the HDD swap correctly. And there are people like you who is willing to put up with trivia questions and explain in plain English step by step on how to do it. For that I appreciate your time and others who posted here.