Technologic Irrigation

February 26, 2009 4:43 AM

I have a Samsung R70 laptop. I need more hard-drive space. How easy is it going to be for a layperson to upgrade it themselves?

My drive is currently 100gb, split between drives C and D. From memory, these are two separate drives rather than a single partitioned drive. I want to upgrade my D drive to a greater capacity, as C is for programs and D is for music - it would be much easier for me to have all my music on the computer (rather than an external drive) in terms of using iTunes etc.

The hard drive is accessed through a door in the bottom, removable with a screwdriver, and is attached to the machine with a plug-in slot. I upgraded my RAM without problems, but am just wondering whether there's more to doing a hard drive?

posted by mippy to technology (4 comments total)

I upgraded my RAM without problems, but am just wondering whether there's more to doing a hard drive?

Not really. So long as you're not working with the c:\ drive, it's almost always just a matter of putting a new drive in and having it recognized immediately.

If you do in fact have two physical hard drives in the machine, I would just copy the data from D: to an external hard drive and then pop the new drive in and copy it over.

If both partitions live on the same drive, it can be slightly more complex, but there's great software that will allow you to copy the contents of your drive to another drive called ghost. You can create a disk image that you can then restore to your new hard drive, and everything will look exactly the same. You might need a techie friend to hold your hand through the ghosting process, but it doesn't take a long time, nor is it particularly difficult for anyone who has some tech experience.

Besides, you added RAM yourself, which makes you smarter than 99% of computer users.
posted by orville sash at 4:59 AM on February 26, 2009

From personal experience upgrading an HDD...do a google search for HDD upgrades on your specific PC. I upgraded several months ago and after several failed attempts, finally cracked the code based on some weird anomaly specific to the model/vintage of PC I had. The process itself wasn't tough (although it was a replace/clone process rather than a re-partitioning), but figuring out exactly how to do it was.
posted by brandman at 5:30 AM on February 26, 2009

They're two partitions on one drive, since that laptop (like most) only has room for one hard drive. You can verify this, though, by right-clicking on "My Computer", choosing "Properties", clicking the "Hardware" tab, and clicking the [+] to expand the "Disk drives" section. If it has one, you have one.

If you have one, then you're looking at the Ghost process that orville sash mentioned.
posted by mendel at 11:01 AM on February 26, 2009

Agreed with the others -- it's not that difficult, especially for someone who wasn't afraid to pop open their laptop to switch out the RAM. In all likelihood you have a single drive that's partitioned. For the ghosting process, you will need your new hard drive as well as some sort of enclosure to house the extra drive.
posted by puritycontrol at 1:23 PM on February 26, 2009