Help!

G

Guest

Guest
Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

I have a Dell Latitude CPX 500. I need to upgrade the hard drive. I
only have an external cdrw that I use to back up data. Need assistance
on how to go about it and will what I have availble work to get the
job done. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. :cry:

Thanks!
 
G

Guest

Guest
Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

Several other people with notebooks have asked this sort of question in the last
few months. Here is a quick summary:

First, make sure that the Latitude CPX 500 BIOS will handle the capacity of the
replacement hard drive. If not, you are buying trouble. Also understand the
limits of the operating system you are using re. max partition size.
Next, get yourself a kit to attach an IDE device to a USB port. These come in
all flavors, from bare bones wires and widgets to a nice-looking case in which
the drive is mounted.
Next, mount/attach the drive to the kit, plug in the kit. BTW, the kit you use
MUST have an external power supply, because your Latitude CPX 500 has an older
USB 1.1 port which will not provide power to an external device.
Next, make sure the drive is recognized by the operating system, then partition
and format it using either the operating system built-in tools or the special
software that comes with the drive.
Next, copy the entire contents of the internal hard drive to the replacement
drive. This will take a while with older slower USB 1.1. You can use Norton
Ghost, the disk copy software that comes with Seagate's Seatools (even with a
non-Seagate drive), or some other software. Make sure that the software doing
the copying marks the partition as bootable.
Finally, switch drives.

This approach worked for me with a much newer Dell notebook when the hard drive
began to fail. My client got the replacement drive from Dell, I did the
copying, and the old failing drive was returned to Dell. In my case, we lost
one icon (easily re-created) which happened to be on a bad sector.

.... Ben Myers

On 24 Nov 2004 18:13:50 -0500, homerx1@bellsouth-dot-net.no-spam.invalid
(charlise) wrote:

>I have a Dell Latitude CPX 500. I need to upgrade the hard drive. I
>only have an external cdrw that I use to back up data. Need assistance
>on how to go about it and will what I have availble work to get the
>job done. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. :cry:
>
>Thanks!
>