Hard Disk Upgrade

Hi Platinum,
I'll let someone more conversant with this stuff answer the technical end, my comment comes from personal (and work) experience.

Compaq machines seem to be very much 'what you get is what you get'

When I wanted to upgrade my personal machine at home, I phone a bunch of computer stores to see what was available, and was almost universally told that if it is a Compaq, there is really nothing you can do.

Had I bought a cheaper IBM clone type machine, my upgrade possibilities would have been almost endless.

At work, we replaced all our machines which Compaqs, only to find that when our operating system was upgraded (to SAP B1 from R3) the Compaqs lacked sufficient memory to run it. Even worse, there was no way to upgrade them to have sufficient memory. So we had to replace all the machines again, this time with upgradeable IBMs!

Sorry if this seems like a downer for you, but that has been my experience with Compaq

what most people do with these is get a larger drive and 'clone' your old drive onto the new one, and then install the new one. You now have a drive that works the same as before, but has more space, cache and speed in most cases.

Another thing you can do is get an external 250 Gig hard drive and take it with you and plug it in as needed. This will need a battery pack or power adapter.

Where do you live? big city? find a Chinese computer store.

when you remove the old hard disk see whether you can remove the end portion with pins by unscrewing. that part will fit nicely with the new hard disk. Then you can fit combined unit. I have a Compq machine and that is how they did it when i got mine upgraded at a shop.

This is what i am doing i am hooking up a portable external hard disk 40GB through USB port to a 20GB Laptop it works very well for me its in expensive also and you need not tamper with your laptop.

crm

Of course there is nothing wrong with what you do.

Only disadvantage is when you run programs you may find it slow to run.

Data transfer to and from a USB disk is very much slower than that between the hard disk and the processor.

So if you do not mind that extra fraction of a second wait good luck.

you can change the plastic connector of a hard disk or buy a new connector,but you must take your hard disk as well as your laptop so that they can give you the right connector that will fit to your laptop...hope this will help you!!!!!!

OK! Finally something that I can help with here.

I have been doing this a long time here is what you need to know.

1) Your gonna need some adapters. Two of them. To convert the laptop hard drive to the standard size IDE connectors in your Desktop (about 10 bucks for the pair)

2) You will need to take the old hard drive OUT of its mounting/carrier. Once you do it will become clear how to re-install the new drive.

3) Next you need a program called Norton Ghost. This is by far the fastest and easiest way to clone your drive. Install the program and create a boot disk (a floppy...Yes they still make them)

4) Disconnect your original drive in your Desktop (I always do this cause once I over-wrote MY drive trying to help a friend) This is just to be safe! Also unless you want to figure out the jumper settings for the hard drives (master, slave, CS) you will want to just leave them both as masters and install them on different IDE ports. (So you will likely have to disconnect your CD device as well)

5) using the adapters install BOTH drives in the desktop and boot with the ghost disk.

6) choose clone>local disk>(I think that is it) from the menu and the rest is pretty straight forward. (Wait for it to finish, reinstall everything etc...)

Email me or post back if you need help.

Thanks!

bill12780

Ok... are you sure!

Bill I think you got your wires crossed (meant as a joke please)

The guy wants to change his note book hard disk with a new high capacity hard disk.

Anyway software part of what you mentioned is still valid.

Have a good day (or it is night here in Sri Lanka!)

Thanks a ton for all your replies. An external drive will not work for me, as its not just more storage space - I need to replace my hard drive before it crashes (fingers crossed that it never does - though there have been signs that sometimes make me not so sure). I am not very keen on tampering with the interfaces because if I cannot make it work, the vendor will not accept my RMA for the new hard drive. I cannot use any adapter in between the two interfaces because there just isn't any space. The hard drive screws onto a piece of the laptop undercarriage and it is aligned so that when you sort of snap the piece in, the interfaces mate - no cables, etc.

I would like some help with figuring out how do I select a notebook hard disk that will be compatible with this interface so that I can look for good deals on newegg or tigerdirect.

Thanks.

Your old hard drive is inside a house/case. Take that apart, remove old drive and install new drive. No adaptor needed because you're holding it in your hand already. Remove all the screw on the plastic housing and you'll see.

Or try Google "Compaq Presario R3310US hard drive change" to see if someone already have instruction.

I wish to share my experience i had a Compaq contoura laptop with 250Mb hard disk and changed to 750Mb hard disk Purchased from Honkang it worked very well but i couldn't up grade Ram it had 8Mb which came with the laptop.I had to discard the laptop because i could not load win95 because of RAM issue.two years back i lost the log in password with IBM think-pad with 1GB hard disk and could not retrieve the same then changed the hard disk with 40GB again purchased from Honkang and up graded the RAM to 750Mb from 64MB even to day My grand old IBM think pad works very well.If you tinker around you can up grade your system but it takes lot of time looking for junk in the junk yards.

crm