Removing Hard drive

[Pyotr]

My HD's busted and I want to remove it (and play with it). I've got an IBM Thinkpad and am used to tinker with stationary computers. Is it difficult to remove a laptop hard drive? How do I do it?

 

[robina_80]

best not unless you knowe what you are doing might aswell get a brand new one there cheap as 40 gb 30 pounds

 

[deathbysunshine]

you didnt answer his question, (and neither did i)

 

[Pyotr]

No, none of you did. It's broken and I want to remove it, and possibly install a new one. Might sell it to a friend and let him do it though, but I want to try and fix it if I can.

 

[Yeti]

It really has to do with the laptop. Look at the manual to see if there are any instructions on removing the HDD. I have an older Compaq Presario that I still haven't found out how to remove the busted HDD.

 

[Pyotr]

I don't have a manual. It's from the school, and we didn't really get any documentation when we bought the junk. >_<

 

[Yeti]

There should be some documentation online.
Try this and put in your model number

 

[Pyotr]

Anyone have any experience with it? I don't want to break the machine, considering someone's interested in buying it.

 

[Switch]

Laptops were a little scary for me to get into at first, but after the first one, I am not afraid to take any machine apart.

I don't know your model # of think pad, but here is a movie that shows how to remove a think pad HDD.

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&uid=psg1MIGR-54551&loc=en_US

I just typed "replacing a hard drive in a think pad" into google and that it what I got.

 

[Pyotr]

Ooooh, nice..
Is there any way to salvage what information is still left on it?

 

[Switch]

Ooooh, nice..
Is there any way to salvage what information is still left on it?

It depends on what happened to the drive. Does it function at all? Does it spin up? You may have a corrupted sector that only affected the OS and the rest of the data may be ok. You will have to go through some extra work to get the data off there,..depending on what tools you have at hand.

In a case like that, I hook the hard drive in question up to my tower workstation and run a hard drive diagnostic utility on it. I use UBCD and Bart PE for various diagnostic utilities.

If your data on there is important enough to salvage, find someone that can help you locally to get it off there. You can most likely still retrieve what is on there if the drive still powers up.

Good luck.

 

[Echo_]

its not that hard but first open it up and see what type of harddrive s ata or regular ide one
then get one of those from newegg that is 2.5 in and pop it in. should be that easy

 

[Echo_]

just get a 2.5 inch harddrive and ur set

 

[kof2000]

the 5.25 ones at newegg works with 2.5 too.

 

[Pyotr]

It depends on what happened to the drive. Does it function at all? Does it spin up? You may have a corrupted sector that only affected the OS and the rest of the data may be ok. You will have to go through some extra work to get the data off there,..depending on what tools you have at hand.

I'm not sure what happened, but one day it just took 20 minutes to boot, and all the time, the machine sounded like it couldn't read the hd. I got into OS (Win98), and when running scandisk, it deleted a lot of files (mostly from my documents, I think), and it can't complete the scan.