HD replacement for A21m

[jhansman]

I did a search of this forum, but could not find an answer to my particular question, so....

I am considering replacing the 20GB HD that came with my A21m with a Fujitsu 40 or 60 GB. Has anyone used a Fujitsu as a replacement in the A series, and are there any capacity restrictions for hard drives in BIOS in this series? Lastly, what other manufacturer's drives have anyone used in the A series. TIA!

[storage_man]

I think the A series uses the same physical size as as the R's and T's I have replaced the IBM disk with both Hitachi, Toshibia and Seagate, with
no problems. Remember that Hitachi bought the IBM disk drive MFG a couple of years back and that is what IBM is using now.

I think you can go up to 120gb with your current BIOS. I have some 60gb drives with no problems

Storage_man

[jack NYC]

Beyond the replacement....
I'm doing the same thing with my A31p, already ordered the 60gig 7200. I think the big question though is migration. What's the best/easiest/most efficient way to migrate the old drive onto the new one. Is it better to start from scratch?? UGH!
Would love some input,
Thanks people

Jack

[storage_man]

I have always thought that If your are replacing a DISK because of a failure, then after replacing the bad hardisk, restoring from a backup is what u should do. Hopefully you have a image copy to restore from so your system looks just like it did before the hardware failure.

Now for an upgrade, I have always been a believer that a clean install should be performed. Windows has a bad habit of eating up disk space unless you manage it daily. The Registry grows every time u intstall a new program (and when u uninstall it it usally doesnot clean up fully). What this means is that this important control file grows and grows. It takes longer to access anything every time. Fresh installs fixes this problem. Over time one also creates files that are never needed again. Best thing to do is go thru all of the files u think u may need in the future. Make a backup for restoration.

A clean install results in optimzation of Windows SWAP file, file allocation for non-moveable file become contiguous - etc etc.

I just upgraded my desktop PC. Its been around for 3 years and I decided that I was going to upgrade to SP2. The registry was huge. What I did was cloned my Harddrive to a backup using Acronis True Image (which I have had for about 3 months). I then swaped the disks and saved the original harddisk and did a fresh install of Windows. It took me about 1 full day to get most everything installed, and a couple of issues where I forgot that I needed some thing else.

Before upgrading, I printed copies of "C:\PROGRAM_FILES" directory - so that I could remember what I needed to re-install. I also did screen prints of my desktop so I wouldn't miss anything. Note that all my data files are on a seperate drive - except for programs that would not let me re-direct where they saved their files. This took a little time, but now I'm up and running clean and all applications are happy.

Again these are just my procedures about doing certain things.

You can image copy or clone your harddrive to the new drive via a External inclosure or a caddie. You can also burn a backup to CD's or DVD's. After swaping your harddisk, you can perform a restore. I would recommend that you look at products such as GHOST or TRUE Image to accomplish this.

Storage_man

[jhansman]

I think the big question though is migration. What's the best/easiest/most efficient way to migrate the old drive onto the new one. Is it better to start from scratch?? UGH!
Jack

Acronis makes a nice product called Migrate Easy (clever...) which works well enough. Linky: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/pr ... grateeasy/