Putting a new HD in a laptop ??

Just had our first hard-drive failure in my wire's Toshiba laptop.

I've replaced or added countless HDs in desk-tops, but never in a laptop until now.

My main question is this. Has anyone here used a freeware cloning program and had it work well?

I'm sure I can get my wife's laptop to boot up a few more times if I leave it outside and let it get cold. So, if I get it to boot up - I want to install a program on it - and have it clone itself - and hopefully burn to a CD or DVD. Stick in a new HD, and then resinstall everything.

I don't want to buy any special adapters to hook the laptop HD to a Deskttop IDE or SATA cable. I know that's what many computer shops do, but I don't want to buy the adapters.

I don't want to pay $60 for Norton Ghost. There are many free-ware programs around - but hate to install one unless I hear it actually worked for somebody.

I'm not going to search any computer-geek forums because - mainly - I'm looking for simpler "non-geek" answers.

The laptop has a Vista OS, and we really want to keep it and NOT install Windows 7. Too many programs that run under Vista will not run under 7. In fact, "compatibilty mode" has been eliminated in Windows Home premium.

If anybody's used a freeware cloning program that has worked well - please post. Or if you know another way to do this, without spending money on adapters - please advise. I already made a recovery disk, but that won't include all the extra programs we're trying to save.

I just had the same thing happen in my wife's Dell laptop. I'v replaced the old drive(last night matter of fact) with out trying to save anything yet. She's a senior finance major and this is the week before finals. I've done a little research and CNET has good reveiws(both editor and user, user being the important one) of Macrium Reflect Free, GFI Backup 2009 Home Edition, and Easeus Todo Backup. The GFI program had the fewest reveiws, but looked decent enough. The other two both had a few hundred reveiws, so they are bound to work. After she's finished with finals next week I'll be using one of these, unless I find something better by then. Hope this is of some help. By the way, if you've not bought another hard drive, newegg.com has had some really good deals on hard drives for the holidays.

JD,

For the past couple of weeks, I've been using the Macrium Reflect program to back up our critical drives.

Just cannot say enough good about it. Just works like a maniac and never misses a cluster. The timer works just great and the program builds you a boot CD.

Free download at 31 megs and for a hard drive failure, it just cannot be beat IMHO.

Allan

Looks like I found the winner of the 3 I posted...thanks.

Should have added:

It's fast too. 14 gigs in just over 5 minutes. Each direction.

Allan

I dunno,

Thinkin' hard about buying the full version, but the free download really does the trick for us.

Allan

As for leaving it outside, we've found on our militarized disk drives that you want to keep them above 5C. We've experienced problems with the drives not reading reliably at temps below that. Sometimes they'll operate okay down to 0C, sometimes they'll work a bit lower, but since we run RAID configuration, we selected 5C as the temperature where we could depend on having all the disks in a RAID operating.

Yes, I already downloaded both of thos plus one other - but didn't want to actually install any of them until I heard some "user reviews." I've had too many programs dig their way into my compouter and get stuck there, forever.

I used to work part-time in a computer shop. Standard procedure for a non-working hard-drive is to remove it, stick it in a freezer, then quickly re-install, turn-upside down, and try. If often works and enables a person to get data back.

When my wife's laptop crashed yesterday, I stuck it outside for a few hours at 18 degrees F. Then brought it back in, and it booted right up. Once booted up and warm, it works fine -for now. But I assume it will not boot up again once turned off, unless I help it along - by freezing and holding it upside down, doing a rain-dance, etc.

another trick "last resort" before tossing a dead hard drive:

smack it flat on table top, my brother had given up on one so we had nothing to lose, got it working long enuf to get the data off, he would have bet money that data was lost for good

saw it done in Sunnyvale at computer shop back in the days

JD, let us know how it goes. I have a 120 gig I'd like to upgrade to 500 gig so it can have all my wife's photos and videos without being tethered to the backup drive. Not sure where the operating system disks are and definitely don't want to reload programs and re set them up. It's vista and I have an xp pro that could use an upgrade as well. Best Buy was reasonable on replacement hard drives.

By the way, when I put parts in frig or freezer to cool them, I use plastic baggies to keep the moisture out.

I will repost. The drive that failed is a SATA 160 GB. I just ordered a new 500 GB laptop drive
for $69.99 from NewEgg. No tax and free shipping - pretty good deal.

If I were you, I'd stick with XP Pro or Vista unless you really need Windows 7. Microsoft left many features out of Windows 7 Home premium, that came standard with the cheapest versions of XP and Vista. There are many programs that run on XP and Vista that will not run on Windows 7 Home Premium. To make it work you have to pay for an upgrade AND have special hardware on your motherboad (Virtual Machine).

The new drive I just ordered is:

Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA
3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

I use Easeus Disk Copy.
Disk Copy

Have a question on partitioning a new hard drive:

Let's say I use Easeus or Macrium reflect to make bootable ghost disk copies of a hard drive, would I be able to create separate partitions on a new hard drive to add bootable copies of 2 or 3 old computers and have one for Linux as well?

I've got a few older computers with XP Pro that vary with service packs installed as well as a Vista computer. They all have separate programs on them. It would be nice to consolidate them on a new large hard drive.