Harddrive Upgrade
Why?
- More capacity
- Quieter drives
- All hard drives eventually so if you extensively use your thinkpad for several years, you should consider this
Options
Seagate Momentus 2.5-inch notebook drives are highly recommended.
Howto
- Buy the upgrade
- Buy a USB enclosure ~10USD
- Mount upgrade in the USB enclosure
- Boot with a liveCD such as Knoppix or Ubuntu's LiveCD
Normally your hard drive would be /dev/hda and your external USB hard drive upgrade should be /dev/sda. Check with `dmesg` if this is the case. There is several different irksome ways to migrate your data to the upgrade. I've performed the `cat` method:
cat /dev/hda > /dev/sda
This can take as much as 20 hours to perform, depending on the size of your original hard drive. You can work out how long it takes if you know the USB throughput.
And the resized the partition with the tool parted. This takes far less time, 30 minutes in my case.
Now the tricky part, taking your hard drive out and replacing it with the upgrade.
- Shutdown the machine, disconnect from the mains and take out the battery.
- Take the upgrade out the USB enclosure. In my case my upgrade got stuck in the USB enclosure. Be wary of these types of awful situations!
- With a good philips screw driver remove the hard drive. Refer to IBM's documention how to do this. My tips are to have the lid open when performing this. The hard drive is mounted typically just about your audio jacks.
- The side panel covering on the hard drive mount clips off and now mounting the new upgrade should be straight forward.
- You need to put the b(l)ack panel back on the mount, otherwise it is very difficult to get the hard drive out of Thinpad's enclosure.
- Once the swap is complete you should be able to boot into your new hard drive. Thinkpads typically automagically detect the hard drive so, that's it!
