Hard drive upgrade questions on a PC laptop

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My dad has a Acer Aspire 3100 and is needing to upgrade the size of the hard drive. Can you guys recommend a really good do-it-yourself website that would be similar to ifixit that could help him out?
 

chscag

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You posted in the wrong forum. Does not belong in "Anything Goes". Moved here where it belongs.

Swapping out a hard drive in a notebook computer can be either a difficult task or easy. Depends on the manufacturer. Best bet is to get hold of a service manual for the Acer. Here's a web site that "claims" to have one for download. LINK

The Acer Aspire 3100 can take a hard drive of 40 GB or more according to Acer. Probably SATA 2.5" but don't take my word for that. Get the service manual.
 
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chscag, sorry about the mis-post. Thank you for helping me out. You have also helped me out in the past when I upgraded my HDD on my Macbook. I really appreciate it. For my dad, I don't think the problem will really be with the actual swap, but rather in migrating the files from his old HDD to the new one. I'm sure there is a technical website somewhere that would give detailed instructions on how to do it. I think he is going to get one of those kits that come with the new HDD and an enclosure. If there was a way for him to clone his existing HDD to the new HDD by using the enclosure, then he could just swap them out after cloning it. IDK, when it comes to PCs my knowledge is pretty limited. What do you guys think?
 

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For cloning Windows, Acronis and Paragon Software would probably be the most recommended.


If he's using Win7, here's a nice walkthrough using it's own included backup and restore.
 

chscag

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+1 for bobtomay's advice for using Acronis True Image. I have a copy and have used over and over with success. I have twice replaced a defective hard drive in my Toshiba notebook and other than the aggravation of buying Toshiba drives as a replacement which turned out to be defective, it was an easy swap and restore.
 
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I think we're gonna use the Acronis as you guys have recommended. Will it do a perfect clone of the existing HDD onto the new one? I guess what I'm asking is, will it also clone the operating system and everything? That way all we'll have to do is pop in the new drive after cloning it and it should be good to go. Also, the drive that is in there currently is a WD800BEVS-22RST0, so i'm assuming any 2.5" SATA drive will work right?
 

chscag

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True Image will do a perfect clone including the boot sector. As a matter of fact, if the new drive is larger than the old one that was cloned, it will even adjust the sectors and drive size. Very good stuff. Highly recommended for Windows and Linux.
 

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