Presario R3000 HDD Needs Replacement -- Suggestions anyone?

[bdwoolman]

New here. Greetings.

Spinrite is digging for data now. Many bad unrecovered sectors. Drive would not boot and probably won't. A new drive is in order.

I have lurked around this nice forum enough to gather that most 2.5 inch laptop drives will (I believe) fit. The crashed disk is 40 GB I thought of going to an 80 GB 5400 solution. Don't need much more.

Am I right in thinking I can order a generic Toshiba or Seagate 2.5 and not get a nasty form factor or connector surprise. Anything to watch out for?

Does anyone have a shout on the best 2.5 drives. Any must have features? Features to avoid?

Are there any landmines I should watch out for during swapout? I am comfortable with desktop hardware, but notebooks are another animal. During my lurking I came across a link to the R3000 repair manual. I snarfed it. Sweet. The removal looks pretty straight forward.

If there is a sticky or how-to I missed I would be grateful for a pointer.

Anyway, all tips warnings welcome. I have got time. Spinrite seems to be counting to forty billion one at a time. Drive is toast.

 

[Que]

Hi, 2.5" drives have a standard connection, any one will fit as long as it is ide. You only have to put your old drive's holder onto the new disk. Capacity choice is yours, I can recommend a rpm of at least 5400, and a large drive cache, larger = faster = better.
You can check google with the drive's brand/type number and your motherboard's chipset's name and "problems", to see if it gives any hits?
Isn't there a specific tool for your brand of harddisk, that might perform better than spinrite?

 

[bdwoolman]

Thanks so kindly for the good advice. Now that Spinrite has finished I got the laptop to boot. Nevertheless with so many damaged partially unrecovered sectors the hdd needs to be replaced. Pronto. Now that the system is up I can see what's in there without unscrewing the thing. Might be a good idea to go with a more modern version of the same drive that is in there. Bigger capacity and bigger cache. Googling for probs is a great shout. Didn't think of it.

Also, Thanks for the suggestion to go to drive manufacturer's web site for their own utility. I'll do that as well. Would like to have the laptop keep working while the new drive is on the way. Glad I am backed up though.

d:-b ruce