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Well well well. Its been over 4 years since i bought my beauty little laptop, and until now no major problems.
Recently i couldnt boot up due to an unmountable boot volume error message. I took it to my PC tech friend and after running CHKDISC or whatever it was he did, he said the hard drive has had it. Like any machine he said, some just pack in after time, especially in notebooks where a slight bang could cause malfunction. Or maybe iv just pounded my poor HD into the ground over the past 4 years (what is the average life span do you think guys?) I have to say my laptop has been quite labour intensive over the years.
My hard drive was partitioned (15gig on each). I suppose the upside is that i could upgrade and put in a bigger one. How big could i go? Id hope to keep the partition system. My mate has now taken my laptop away to see what he can salvage in terms of my lost data. The D drive is no problem he says, but C is not letting him in. He then said he has some special software that may allow him to salvage certain things on my C drive (like hopefully, the VAT folder for my familys business!)
Anyway, just wanted to know, if i have to choose a certain hard disk to replace with, and what limitations on size i may have. Also what id need to pay? I saw an internal 80gig HD on dabs for £35, but i dont know if that would do.
any comments welcome 
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Anything that spins at 10,000 RPM an has an arm speeding up and down at 60 mph has to have a shelf life. A chinese hardware tech once told me that a hard disk has 30,000 hours of life. He was refering to a toshiba related HD. This was dependant on what you do with your HD. For example he refered to defragmentation as being a particulary wearing operation due to the amount of work the reader does moving sectors and rewriting them. Another thing was if you get unstable software or power failure. As far as the the size of your HD go for it as you can alway partition it up but even then common sense should dictate that your processors speed should limit your HD size to 80gig assuming you have around a 1 Ghz and 256RAM. I'm about to go to 100gig HD but I have a 3.06Ghz Pantie 4
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Hi Kee-lo, hope your well
Thanks for the information. I think my laptop must be a 2001 model, so not sure about the bios. So are you saying that even if i could have a bigger disk and the bios allowed it, your personal preference would be to still stick with the original 30gb. Can you explain a bit more on the whys of that please (i know you are busy!)
Good point on the rpm speed! Though hopefully that doesnt mean it will last 3 years instead of 4 the next time for spinning faster 😛
last thing - any ideas on how much for the HD replacement (exc labour)
cheers
profile.country.en_GB.title
Hi Zero, yeah doing pretty well thanks
Well the BIOS in those days didn't have to deal with such huge disks, at the time if you had 5GB you were considered to have a big hard disk, but now hard disks go right the way through to 500GB, so the BIOS makers had to improve the handling so Windows could use the whole disk.
(Not sure if thats a good explaination, but you get the idea).
I guess the hard disk won't cost more than £100
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I gave my ancient Toshiba Tecra CDT to my brother in law and his teckie mate managed to upgrade (or fool) the bios to accept a 50 gig HD. I suggest you look into that. Partitioning it into 3 it worked at a simular speed when a 9 gig HD was onboard. If you can describe a 233MMX Pentie as 'speed' with 96 meg of RAM. I really like my bro in law LOL
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