R51 HDD Upgrade

[thetimerider]

I have an R51 1830 wcn with 60 gig hdd,
I found a Sea Gate momentus 5400 rpm 500GB 2.5 SATA laptop hdd.
I was wondering if it will work in my computer?
I have read in previous post that IBM firmware will not allow just any HDD to be installed.
Also it seems i remember reading that the 5400rpm drives run faster in these old computers than the 7200rpm- is this correct?

Thanks
thetimerider

[Neil]

Welcome to the forum. Your R51 needs a PATA, drive so the 500GB SATA drive will not work. PATA (IDE) drive are becoming rather difficult to find, but are still available in sizes up to 320GB. Here is what Newegg has.

[RealBlackStuff]

And the R51 does not have any HD restrictions, that's on R52/T43/X41.

[thetimerider]

Thanks for the onfo, I will consider the Samsung 160 GB from the link you posted

Thanks
thetimerider

[mediasponge]

And the R51 does not have any HD restrictions, that's on R52/T43/X41.

What HD restrictions are there on an X41 (non-tablet)? Is it the dreaded 2010 error?

[RealBlackStuff]

yep, but with the proper BIOS version, 2010 can be ignored.

[thetimerider]

Well I have finally purchased a
WD 160 gig PATA hdd, and a StarTech 2.5" USB IDE drive enclosure and downloaded Macrium reflects free edition. And now am looking back through old post to find one i read a month or more ago explaining a similar HDD swap that seemed to work out well. If i would take the time to figure out how to use the bookmark feature on this forum i wouldn't be searching.

Anyway i was thinking now of just putting the new drive in the enclosure and using it for backup until my current drive fails or seems to be failing, as it actually is working well. I have just been concerned with its age (7+ yrs) and the fact that PATA drives seem to be more difficult to find. I though of doing it the other way around install the new drive in the laptop and the old drive in the enclosure, but it seems wiser to use a new drive to back up the old drive instead of an old drive to back up a new one.
Ideally i will soon purchase another new drive for the enclosure?

I would welcome any thoughts or advise.

[schen]

Anyway i was thinking now of just putting the new drive in the enclosure and using it for backup until my current drive fails or seems to be failing, as it actually is working well. I have just been concerned with its age (7+ yrs) and the fact that PATA drives seem to be more difficult to find. I though of doing it the other way around install the new drive in the laptop and the old drive in the enclosure, but it seems wiser to use a new drive to back up the old drive instead of an old drive to back up a new one.
Ideally i will soon purchase another new drive for the enclosure?

Actually I do exactly the opposite of what you were thinking. My rationale is that the drive in your computer is the one getting the bulk of the wear-and-tear on a daily basis. And unless you constantly have the backup connected it doesn't have to be spun up very often, so having an old drive in that situation isn't big of a deal. You'd just periodically connect it to backup new files and then shut it down again. Of course, that's all dependent on how you do your backup, I suppose.

[mediasponge]

What I do is keep the original in storage for emergencies, and do backups to another external drive. Using the original drive for backups may be limited because the new drive is bigger than the old one. You'll eventually run out of space.

[alanr51e]

I would welcome any thoughts or advise.

Hi TR,

2 years ago in inherited an R51e which I upgraded by maxing out the RAM and obtaining a 250 G HDD.

Then the trouble started . No matter what I did I could not get a succesful clone of the original drive (and I had some serious help from members here - thanks guys).

Long story short - eventually I managed to burn a set of recovery discs from the IBM service partition and then reload the operating system from those - this was a painless exercise.

If you have burned a set of recovery discs I'd encourage you to travel this path - in my experience it's quicker. If you haven't burned a set and you have owned the Thinkpad (TP)since new then it ought to be easy - access IBM button at boot and choose the recovery option, follow the prompts. If you see a greyed out recovery option for generating these discs then it means they have already been burned (You can only do this once - and it sometimes happens that a previous owner does this but doesn't hand the discs over when selling the TP, this happened to me but using the return to "as delivered" (Make a backup ) the option to make recovery discs reappeared). Or you may have a TP that doesn't have the Service Partition - easy to check right click my computer>Properties>manage>disc management if it exists it shows in the partition list a FAT 32 partition of about 3.5 GByte. If the partition does not show then you can't travel this path. In this event PM me.

I'd try to get the OS onto the new drive installed into the TP and put the old drive into an external enclosure. It means you can get the TP running again if things go wrong - if things go right you can get at all your data on the old drive and do a simple copy of any data you need onto the new drive.

Cheers

[thetimerider]

Thanks Guy's for posting, I was concerned that this post was to far down the list for anyone to notice that i was ready to proceed with this project. And i appreciate your input and own experience's. I did buy the new drive to put in the TP so I'll go ahead with that.

I don't have any experience with backing up or keeping a computer backed up, but i tend to think like (mediasponge) that the old drive is just going to be to small (it's a 60 gig but only shows a little over 50 gigs total) Im not sure whats up with that? I did start another post asking why every time ive done a fresh install more and more space is lost, i did get a little feed back on that but it didnt seem to be useful to me. I guess i misunderstood the R&R options, not knowing i could just go into R&R and restore the machine without using the disc's, It seems by using the disc's it either builds a new factory partition or expands the original.

In any event back to the HDD swap, alanr51e i do obviously have a set of recovery disc's but was hoping to clone to avoid the tons of updates and to get some experience with cloning, but i have done the update thing a few times now, i suppose once more wont kill me.
I did also check in the disc management dialog box and it shows a IBM service 4.72 gig Fat 32 partition, i knew it was there but was unsure of the size. And a system C 51.17 NTFS partition. Both healthy.

Thanks again i will post as to my success with the project soon.

[alanr51e]

Hi TR,

What's up with that is that HDD manufacturers' quote HDD capacity in actual millions of bytes ie 1 MB = 1,000,000 Bytes, but the software measures capacity in powers of 2 and a software megabyte = 2**20 ie 2 raised to the power 20 which equals 1048576 Bytes. Thus the software will report a drive capacity about 5% less than the manufacturers' figure.

So your 60 GB drive will show as about 57GB and as the Service partition is "hidden" the space used by this doesn't show - in your case another 4+ GB missing. the combination of these will get you something over 52GB of capacity on a drive that "has" 60 GB as a manufacturers' figure.

One other caution about using the recovery discs - before you start switch off the wireless network capability if you have wireless capability and if you use a cable to the modem disconnect the cable from the computer. Have a copy of your antivirus software available and once the rebuild is done load the AV software and reboot so the AV software is activated - now reconnect to the web and invoke the "update" process provided by Windows. The rebuild will get you back to the state the R50 was delivered in and there will be a lot of updates to load and many of them are security patches. To minimise the time here obtaining the SP2 and SP3 update discs can shorten the process.

Good luck

Alan

[thetimerider]

Alan thanks for the extra information. When you say turn off the wireless capabilities, i think your talking about more than the wireless antenna, but instead disable it in ms configuration panel?
Also i have a couple of windows xp w/sp2 included disc, i wonder if sp2 can be loaded separately from them?

[alanr51e]

Alan thanks for the extra information. When you say turn off the wireless capabilities, i think your talking about more than the wireless antenna, but instead disable it in ms configuration panel?
Also i have a couple of windows xp w/sp2 included disc, i wonder if sp2 can be loaded separately from them?

Hi TR,

Apologies for the delay in replying.

My caution about the wireless network stems form a report I read a while ago that indicated an unprotected computer has a very high chance of being compromised within a very short time of connecting to the web (I seem to recall 5 minutes - short anyway). I think that the default condition for the wireless capability is "active" and after a rebuild it will go looking for a connection and attach if it finds one, simply deactivating it in control panel should be sufficient. My Compaq had a physical switch to achieve this but the R51e requires it be done through the software. Also as the first thing you do after the OS rebuild and loading the AV/Anti-malware programme is get the virus signature database updated when you re-attach to the web..

So far as using a Windows XP disc with SP2, I think you can, but watch the informative pop ups. I would expect it to indicate that an OS is already present and do you want it upgraded. If so then check the "yes" box.

Good luck,

Alan