Replacing laptop's primary hard drive?

Supreme

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I apologize in advance if these questions seem idiotic, but I just want to be 100% sure about this.

So the hard drive on my laptop just died and I'm looking to replace it correctly and for the least amount of money possible. I checked on HP's site and a replacement hard drive costs about $160, which is ridiculous for a 160GB hard drive. What I'm not sure about is whether I can replace my hdd with any other one just as long as I match the specs (should I try to buy the same one, or will any other drive do?).

Can I replace my laptop's hard drive with a "third party" one? How exact do I have to be on matching the specs (I believe the hdd I have is Fujitsu 160GB, SATA, 5400RPM, 1.5 Gb/s)? Am I better off buying a new one of the drive I have in there, buying another more reliable drive, or buying a replacement directly from HP?

Will my recovery disc work on the new hard drive, or will I have to use a Windows Vista install disc and use the serial on the bottom of my laptop? If possible, I prefer to use the recovery disc because I'd like to keep all of the HP programs that came installed on my laptop when I bought it.

I keep reading things like "HP tattoos their hard drive, so you'll have to buy it directly from HP" and "third party hard drives might work at first, but will eventually damage your computer". Any truth to this?

Also, if I can replace the hard drive with any other one, feel free to recommend any drives that are reliable. I've read on the HP forums that just about any brand works well with HP laptops other than Seagate for some reason.

Thanks to anyone that can help me out here.
 
I'd do some research regarding your specific model of laptop and "hard drive upgrade" to see if there are any known issues...BUT GENERALLY...you can just buy another SATA notebook drive from someplace (like newegg) and replace your old, dead drive. If you have the recovery disc(s), those should work to reinstall the factory OS image to the new drive.
 
You should be fine with the recovery CD an HD matching those specs.

Here is a similar HD off of newegg.com for around $50.00

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...67&cm_re=Fujitsu_160GB-_-22-116-167-_-Product


Never heard of HP tattoo issues on other drives. I do know that recovery disks are most likely tied to the Motherboard or System BIOS of the machine they came with. I could be wrong however since most machines come with their recovery software on the HD (which I hate)
 
[quote name='m6oo']I'd do some research regarding your specific model of laptop and "hard drive upgrade" to see if there are any known issues...BUT GENERALLY...you can just buy another SATA notebook drive from someplace (like newegg) and replace your old, dead drive. If you have the recovery disc(s), those should work to reinstall the factory OS image to the new drive.[/QUOTE]

I did a bit of searching but couldn't find anything on my specific model, just some general info on HP Pavilions.

[quote name='Ultramontane']You should be fine with the recovery CD an HD matching those specs.

Here is a similar HD off of newegg.com for around $50.00

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...67&cm_re=Fujitsu_160GB-_-22-116-167-_-Product


Never heard of HP tattoo issues on other drives. I do know that recovery disks are most likely tied to the Motherboard or System BIOS of the machine they came with. I could be wrong however since most machines come with their recovery software on the HD (which I hate)[/QUOTE]

That drive's 3.0 Gb/s. So I'm assuming the specs on the new drive don't matter just as long as it's a SATA, 160gb, and 5400RPM. Or am I better off sticking with the same Fujitsu I have?
 
as long as its sata you should be fine with any HDD. like ultramontane said, recovery discs rely more on the mobo, bios etc than it does the actually HDD.
 
Actually, my laptop can only handle 200GB maximum, according to the service manual on HP's site. Kind of odd, but it's no problem since I have a 500GB external.

Thanks a lot for the info though guys, really appreciate it. I'm gonna take a look on newegg and amazon and see what looks nice.
 
[quote name='Supreme']Actually, my laptop can only handle 200GB maximum, according to the service manual on HP's site. Kind of odd, but it's no problem since I have a 500GB external.

Thanks a lot for the info though guys, really appreciate it. I'm gonna take a look on newegg and amazon and see what looks nice.[/QUOTE]

Sometimes the SATA controller on your MOBO, or more likely your BIOS, can only recognize a SATA HDD size up to a certain number until it 'caps it', if it accepts the drive at all. Sometimes 'flashing' (or updating) your built in BIOS could unlock this number so it could accept a bigger drive, but this is sometimes more trouble that it's worth.

USB/Firewire externals usually don't have these caps, since the HDD Controller is built in to the external drive, and your usb/firewire port wont give a flying crap how big your HDD is, save for some OS limitation.
 
[quote name='rumarudrathas']Sometimes the SATA controller on your MOBO, or more likely your BIOS, can only recognize a SATA HDD size up to a certain number until it 'caps it', if it accepts the drive at all. Sometimes 'flashing' (or updating) your built in BIOS could unlock this number so it could accept a bigger drive, but this is sometimes more trouble that it's worth.
[/QUOTE]


Good call. I would check out HP's site to see there is a BIOS upgrade that would extend the size of drives you could use.

Let us know how it turns out - always nice to see feedback for the PC folk
 
Everyone is pretty much spot on. Just make sure you follow the specs of your laptop and the recovery discs should work just fine. In 10 years of working on laptops here and there the main problem I've come across is RAM and not so much the hard drive. Every so often you'll have to go into the BIOS and turn off the SMART capability. That someone makes it where you cannot load the OS.
 
So I got my new hard drive today, installed it, had the recovery disc in the cd/dvd drive, yet I still get the same "Operating System Not Found" message on a black screen. Just out of curiousity, I tried to use the recovery disc with my old hdd still in and the disc didn't boot up then either. With the new drive in, I ran a hard drive diagnostic test and while the quick test passed, the comprehensive one gave me an error message that I got with the old hard drive. Is there anything I can do here, or is my laptop just done? Would a hard reset do anything?
 
... What I would pay to see that error message, or better yet, be there...

Is your system detecting the new hard drive at all (go into the BIOS and see if it can read the drive)? Was the new drive properly set to 'Master' (SATA still have that master-slave-auto pin settings, right?).

Damn you HP/modern pc manufacturers and your 'recovery CDs'. Try seeing if you could fire up the Windows Recovery Mode/CD and see if you could see the drive that way, and better yet, reformat that new drive to NTFS, which might help the HP recovery disk in installing itself to your hard drive.

You should not getting the OS not found error if you fired up that CD and installed everything in your new drive. Did you miss anything, like an install prompt?

Something smells fishy here and this is starting to smell like a mobo or SATA controller issue, and if that's the case, that laptop is toast.
 
Are you sure that you're set to boot from the CD drive first? The recovery disc should be bootable. See if you can boot that CD on some other machine.
 
[quote name='m6oo']Are you sure that you're set to boot from the CD drive first? The recovery disc should be bootable. See if you can boot that CD on some other machine.[/QUOTE]

I did that. I went into the BIOS, boot options, then moved the CD/DVD ROM drive to the top of the list and that changed nothing.

As far as installing anything on the hard drive, all I did was screw it into the caddy and put it into the laptop. When I went into the BIOS, it said that the diag. didn't support it or something like that, but I was still able to run a test.
 
Did you try booting the recovery CD in some other machine??? (I hate having to ask things twice) Just see if you can boot from the CD. Do NOT run the recovery program. If you can't boot from the CD in another (working) system, it's likely that what you think is a recovery CD really isn't, you are missing another (bootable) CD required for the recovery process, or the recovery CD is bad.

I don't understand your last paragraph. Sounds like you talking about two different things. Does the new drive show up in the BIOS? Also sounds like you ran a diagnostic program (not usually part of the BIOS). What diagnostic program did you run? How did you run it (from CD?) What exactly were the error messages and test results when you ran it?
 
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