Replace laptop hard drive

[dana7254]

My hard drive failed. I ordered the 500gb drive I thought I needed. When I opened up the laptop there are two drives. Now what do I do? I assume they are each 250gb but I don't know if they are both bad. Do I need to return this one drive and get two smaller drives? What should I do?

 

[Jsplinter]

You have several options. If you need more than 250gb of storage I recommend taking out both 250gb HDD and sticking in the new 500gb. The amount of data it can hold does not effect whether it will fit in your case. If it's a 2.5 inch HDD it should fit. Stick it in the slot labeled HDD1 and completely reformat. Then if you want to you can try adding the 250gb drives one at a time to see which one of them is good.

 

[WyomingKnott]

The good news is that unless those two HDDs were in a RAID 0, you should be able to recover the data from the one that did not fail. Indeed, you should try some of the data recovery tools to see if you can recover from both of them. Unless you had full backups and didn't lose anything.

A member with the suggestive name of FreeDataRecovery can recommend some tools.