On Mon, 09 Mar 2015 15:56:14 -0000, Stormin' Norman wrote:

On Mon, 9 Mar 2015 10:13:19 -0500, Johnny wrote:


I would like to replace the hard drive in my wife's Dell laptop
computer. It has a 5400 RPM drive now, and I want to install a 7200
RPM hard drive.

I went to Seagate, Amazon and Newegg, and they don't recognize the
product number.

I'm going to have to get Windows 8.1 installed on the new drive, and
the laptop didn't come with a DVD, only a restore partition. Is there
some way I can move the existing operating system to the new hard drive?

It also doesn't have a DVD drive, only usb ports.

Also I have never worked on a laptop. Is it very difficult to replace
the hard drive, and is it easy to damage the computer while changing
the drive?



description: ATA Disk
product: ST500LT012-1DG14
vendor: Seagate
physical id:
0.0.0
bus info:

logical name:
/dev/sda
version: 0001
serial: S3P9582G
size: 465GiB (500GB)
capabilities: gpt-1.00 partitioned partitioned:gpt
configuration:
ansiversion = 5
guid = 88a640ee-cbad-4852-88d7-26494c9fdf02
sectorsize = 4096


description: CPU
product: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU N2830 @ 2.16GHz
vendor: Intel Corp.
physical id:
4
bus info:
cpu@0
version: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU N2830 @ 2.16GHz
slot: CPU 1
size: 1992MHz
capacity: 2407MHz
width: 64 bits

It is very easy to physically replace the hard drive in most modern notebooks.

You would first need to make an image of the entire disk (all partitions) with
something like Clonezilla that can be installed on a bootable USB flash drive.
You would write that image to an externally connected USB drive of the correct
size. The size of the storage drive all depends upon how much data is on the
existing drive. See:

http://clonezilla.org/

I've done this several times for friends and myself and just cloned straight from the old disk to the new one, placing one of them in a USB caddy. I used the free software EaseUs Backup.

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