Hard drive dying in my HP notebook computer...

[Steve A.]

I was wondering why this computer had froze up after rebooting itself and the hard drive sounds like it was spinning at a fraction of the normal speed. And I was just thinking about taking out the 60GB hard drive and replacing it with something bigger...

Has anyone here replaced the hard drive on a notebook? Any tips or suggestions?

This is a HP Pavilion ze4800 Mfg # 2CB4311F2C

Thanks!

Steve Ahola

P.S. It sounds like if I could put a drop of fine oil on the spindle the hard drive would spin long enough for me to copy the contents (most of it has been backed up- as a matter of fact very recently).

[Steve Conner]

Spindle bearings haven't been accessible from outside since 1980-something. Shaking the hard drive sometimes helps free it if it's stuck. (Or kicking it in the case of the big old 5 1/4" ones!) Don't just shake it any old way, the idea is to twist it around the axis of the platter such that the platters will want to stay still while you turn the casing.

Notebook hard drives are more or less interchangeable, the only thing you need to watch is if it's SATA or not.

[bob p]

laptop drives seem to be the bane of my existence. i've got a compaq that's got a really finnicky drive/bios in it where its a crapshoot if the damend BIOS recognizes the drive at bootup. the bios table always says that the drive isn't there. i don't use the PC often becuase its just not very reliable. sooner or later i'll swap back to a smaller drive that i was using before the "upgrade" and see if things get better. hopefully its just a bad drive.

drive swaps are actually pretty easy. i had to buy a set of micro-torx bits to get my laptop apart. you might even have to find tamper-resistant micro-torx bits. typically you undo some screws on the back, and flip the PC right side up and lift the keyboard to get to the drives.

once you're inside, they're just like the drives in the bigger PCs, only smaller. no, but seriously, the EIDE/ATA type drives have drive-select jumpers on them just like in a regular PC. same old deal with masters and slaves. (as you can tell, i have an old laptop)

hth

[Paleo Pete]

Well, in general I don't hear the hard drive spin much in laptops, usually it's the CD ROM that does the audible spinning.

Spontaneous reboots are usually caused by either heat or faulty power supply, and with laptops it's much more likely heat. Those things tend to run hot. So check the fan intake and make sure it's not clogged with dust. Also make sure it's running. You can get cooling pads for laptops that have airspace and fans to help cool them better. They do work, I have one and it keeps my sister's laptop cool enough you can actually sit it in your lap without the cooler and it won't burn your legs. Without the cooler, in about 10 minutes you can't keep it on your legs.

Swapping hard drives shouldn't be that difficult, if necessary. Check for various cover plates on back, one should be for RAM swaps/upgrades and most have a hard drive cover too. My Toshiba takes me about 3 minutes to swap hard drives, which makes it pretty quick and painless to get WinME (which was installed by previous owner), win98, win 3.11 (yeah it works great on a P-II 266) and Linux with a quick hard drive swap. Two screws, unplug it, plug another one in. 3 minutes and I'm booting it up.

You might also want to find out what brand drive it is, and run the manufacturer's diagnostics, usually found for free download on their websites. Most of the time if a hard drive is going bad I hear a clicking sound, rather than a spinning sound, sometimes accompanied by a whirring sound kind of like a fan with a piece of paper in it. It's not easy to describe in printed form, one of the biggest problems I've had in 6 years of helping people fix computers in an online forum..(I've been building and repairing them for around 7-8 years or so for a living)

If you have to open the thing up, you'll need some clear bench space to lay out parts, maybe check on their website and see if they have disassembly instructions, laptops are not easy to open up, I lay things out in order of removal to help in reassembling, and you'll need a couple of free hours and lots of patience. The last Dell I took apart took me 5 to 6 hours from start to finish, to glue and resolder a broken power adapter input jack.

[Don Moose]

Mr. Ahola -

I have seen a mess of laptop HDD upgrade kits (at Fry's, but there must be other resources) that come with an external hookup cable and some transfer/clone software. If your machine is more than a couple of years old, it's most likely PATA/IDE rather than SATA.

That requires getting your existing drive spinning, of course.

If you have a full-sized PC handy, you might try a 3.5"->2.5" drive cable adapter and see what you can see using your desktop (maybe the extra current available will unstick your platter ... or cook the motor)

Hope this helps!

[Steve A.]

Spindle bearings haven't been accessible from outside since 1980-something. [clip!!!]

Well, I seem to remember there being a round piece of clear tape over the spindles of not-too-ancient hard drives. While that does not directly access the bearings, putting a drop of very fine oil or maybe even kerosene on the shaft can work itself into the bearings. (I'd done that trick- with fine oil- on countless motors in my HVAC work, mainly to keep them turning until I could return with a replacement motor. Someone might protest "but the bearings are sealed!" but more often than not it would work.)

I had noticed the computer getting very sluggish yesterday- and when it finally booted up you could hear the hd laboring, with disk access about 10 times longer than usual. I figured that I would leave it off for 24 hours to allow it to cool down, then copy everything over to an external hard drive. Perhaps someone could recommend software to do that which would run on its own OS on a boot CD rather than through the WinXP operating system.

Thanks for all of the suggestions and information!

Steve Ahola

P.S. I didn't realize that they had SATA for the 2 1/2" notebook drives. PC Gamer just had an article about upgrading your notebook hard drive. The kit includes an external enclosure that connects through the USB 2.0 port for mounting your old hard drive. #1- it allows you copy the contents of your old hard drive to your new hard drive. #2- you can use your old hard for external storage. Pretty nifty idea! Now if I can just remember what I did with the system CD that came with the notebook...

[Steve Conner]

Perhaps someone could recommend software to do that which would run on its own OS on a boot CD rather than through the WinXP operating system.

Norton (or Symantec now?) Ghost is the utility I hear recommended for doing that. You have to buy it though, unless you can get one of those "Special" versions

Ghost For Linux is free, and I hear it can ghost Windows systems too, since it's just making a copy of the hard drive bit-for-bit. But it's probably not so user-friendly.

Having said that, I think Windows systems (even XP!) need a good razing to the ground and rebuilding from scratch every couple of years. You might get better performance if you just salvage your data and reinstall the OS.

[Steve A.]

Norton (or Symantec now?) Ghost is the utility I hear recommended for doing that. You have to buy it though, unless you can get one of those "Special" versions

Ghost For Linux is free, and I hear it can ghost Windows systems too, since it's just making a copy of the hard drive bit-for-bit. But it's probably not so user-friendly.

Having said that, I think Windows systems (even XP!) need a good razing to the ground and rebuilding from scratch every couple of years. You might get better performance if you just salvage your data and reinstall the OS.

Although this notebook computer is almost 3 years old, it really hasn't been used much- hardly any software installed on it at all. So I don't think it's in need of a full reinstall of WinXP (if I could find that darned disk!)

I went done to Fry's to research the situation- the parallel 2.5" drives use a standard IDE interface, but with an extra 4 pins for power. I got an adaptor so I can connect any PATA or SATA hard drive to a USB 2.0 port. That way I can do a full partition backup of the existing drive, and then copy it to the new drive.

I have a registered copy of Ghost, but it is many years old and really is overkill for what I want to do (just copy the partition outside of WinXP so that there is no problem with all of those protected files!) Since I'll be using my main computer for the copying now, I can use my choice of Maxtor, Seagate or WD partitioning software (since I think I have one of each). I believe all of that software is the same, only it is branded and looks for at least one of its own drives before allowing you to run the program.

I'm still letting the hard drive cool down... LOL Maybe I'll get to it tomorrow.

Thanks to all, and to all a good night!

Steve Ahola

[bob p]

Perhaps someone could recommend software to do that which would run on its own OS on a boot CD rather than through the WinXP operating system.

you have the Acronis Disk Director Suite, right?

[bob p]

Having said that, I think Windows systems (even XP!) need a good razing to the ground and rebuilding from scratch every couple of years. You might get better performance if you just salvage your data and reinstall the OS.

Yes, although there are many people who claim that they've never had a problem with Windows, I find that Windows systems perform much better if they're frequently backed-up, wiped clean, and reinstalled.

After performing a fresh install of Windows and all of my desired software, I use the Acronis Disk Director suite to image the hard drive. I keep the HD image on a DVD (and on a networked backup drive) so that I can reinstall the OS cleanly in one fell swoop. there's no need to go through the painful process of reinstalling windows. (this is how companies like Dell load the software onto your computer when you buy it.) the only thing that you have to worry about then is backing up your documents. for the sake of simplicity, i map them to a dedicated linux file server.

for the laptop, i perform the software install and use Acronis to image the drive when I'm done. I offload that image to the network or a bunch of CDs for sake keeping. with the laptop the My Documents folder has to remain on the laptop, I can't store them on the network server. but whenever i am hooked up to the network, i make the point of running a batch file that copies all of the My Documents data onto a network drive on the file server. I image the hard disk once, and back up the data files every time i connect to the network.

Steve, you've got the Acronis software too, don't you? its really easy to use once you figure it out.