Upgrading the HDD on a T43

[adityanag]

Hey,

I have a T43 1875-E5U. I love the damm thing, and want it to work forever. Lately, I've been wishing I had more hard drive space.

Can I just buy a standard 2.5 inch HDD and plug it in? I want at least a 160 GB, preferably a 250 GB. Will it just work, or do I need to do some firmware hack or something.

I'm ok with losing the IBM service partition. I will just install Windows XP OEM, with my key, and download all the drivers.


http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=

I read through this, and am confused. Can I just Ghost my old drive onto the new one and use it? Or is it essential to flash the firmware?

I also read
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-60169

And i don't care if it gives me an error, as long as it boots up properly and works fine.

Are there any specific model of drives that I need to buy? I was planning to buy WD, or Seagate.

Please let me know if anyone has done this.

Regards.
Aditya

[ricerocket]

Only one company makes a Parallel ATA 250GB drive, and that's Western Digital.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136159

It'll work, but your BIOS will pause about 3 seconds every boot to yell at you. Otherwise, smooth sailing.

If you buy Acronis True Image, you can clone your existing HD w/ service partition and all to your new drive. It's the only piece of software that I've tried that'll do it successfully (Norton Ghost fails, and you can't really create the partition w/ Partition Magic or anything).

Oh, another thing. If you're like me and rarely use your optical drive, you can get a Ultrabay adapter and run a 2nd HD.