Replacing Hard Drive

M

McNavdo

New Member
I have an Advent 7000 laptop and about 2 years ago i replaced it with a Toshiba 120gb Hard Drive. My laptop has recently become useless to me and i have been offered an Acer Aspire 3680 but the hard drive is too small for me. is it possible to replace the hard drive with the one from my Advent and then do a system recovery? If so can anyone explain to me how to do this?
 
Both drives should be IDE so that much shouldn't be a problem. I don't see why you can't just pop the old drive out and the new one in. As for a system recovery, I'm not really sure what you mean. Unless you have restore disks for the Acer, I'd say just format the disk and reload it. That should give you the cleanest install, and drivers should be readily available.
 
The_Other_One said:
Both drives should be IDE so that much shouldn't be a problem. I don't see why you can't just pop the old drive out and the new one in. As for a system recovery, I'm not really sure what you mean. Unless you have restore disks for the Acer, I'd say just format the disk and reload it. That should give you the cleanest install, and drivers should be readily available.
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Thanks. i do realy appreciate your help and if what you say is true then i will be saving myself some money :) I do know my fair share about computers but when it comes to anything like this im clueless. what worries me is that my Advent was on windows XP whilst the Acer is on Vista. will that make any difference? I hope im not sounding like a pain in the **** but could you explain to me how to format the disk and reload it? finally should i swap the hard drive over to the acer before trying to format it?
 
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Best thing to do if you've not started the process is look for XP drivers. Sometimes you'll luck up and they'll be located on the manufacturers website. Other times you'll have to locate alternative drivers that just happen to work.

As for formatting, again, assuming it's IDE and all, you shouldn't need to do much of anything. Just start the windows setup and there will be an option early on about partitioning and formatting the drive. Make one large partition and format to NTFS.

And when to format, like I said above, you'll be given the option when starting the Windows setup. Best to wait until then just in case you find something like the newer laptop is actually SATA :P
 
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