Laptop harddrives

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i have a laptop drive. 20gb. but speaking of, can anyone tell me if there is a way i can hook it up to my laptop and use it as a second drive? id like to restore my system to a factory settings, but the recovery cd doesnt work on the 60gig drive! so i want to restore the 20 gig drive, then simply format and repartition the existing 60gig drive, before copying the thing across!

Fergal

 

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well the rather pricey option is....
buy a 2.5" -> 3.5" ide converter
then buy a IDE -> USB converter and shove it into a USB slot

 

OK COOL. so thats a decent option, assuming i did that, how would i install the recovery cd onto the drive, and how would i boot to it in order to copy it to the internal drive. i suppose i could open the laptop up, reinstall the 20gig drive, and use the recovery cd, then put the 60 gig into the usb connector, before formatting it and copying the entire 20gig drive across, but would that make the 60 a bootable drive?

also, i dont know how confident id feel about opening the laptop and installing another drive into it

Fergal

 

how about this option?

http://www.maplin.co.uk/products/module.asp?CartID=040827190055712&moduleno=-445

 

wehey!
didnt realise there was a 2.5" version, hence why i mentioned the IDE converter
yup that should be perfect provided you have some form of USB port (check the device is backward compatible, it should be, as USB2 is supposed to be)

be warned you will likely need to install drivers to see the device, so you wont be able to use it during installation or anything
only once windows is installed
it might not though (generally it does unless it treats it as a standard USB Mass Storage device)

 

hang on im missing the point

the laptop came with a 20gb drive? and you replaced it with a 60gb drive?
so you have already opened the laptop and swapped the drive out no?

your best bet is going tobe just use the 20gb drive as the laptop drive, and carry the 60gb one around with you for storage and such

 

yeah it came with a 20gig drive, but i had another company open it and put it the 60gig. the most complex thing ive done with a laptop is take out the RAM, and only to mess around with it. id rather have the 60gig as the main drive to be honest, set it up as a dual boot with linux, and need a heap of space for games/stuff (its currently my primary pc). at a later date it probably be looking at replacing the 20gig back in, and using the 60gig for external storage, but not until i get a decent pc im afraid.

 

do you not have a normal WinXP cd?
you dont need teh restore cd if you do
and you wont be limited by the disk capacity

what company did you buy it from?

 

toshiba. was shipped with the recovery cd only.

 

Same thing when I had trouble with my dell laptop. Recovery cd was worthless. Fortunately, I <ahem> also have an XP install cd and that fixed it right up.

 

lol yep. i was hoping that microsoft might give me an xp home cd at a nominal fee since i actually HAVE the installation, but i seriously doubt that they will. evil people.