HP Pavilion dv6000 Hard Drive Upgrade Question

[Chris_8318]

I have an HP Pavilion dv6500 entertainment laptop, Intel centrino duo processor and 2GB Ram running on Vista. The original 160 Gbt SATA HD is getting full and slow and I would like to upgrade to a new HD. I am thinking of getting a Seagate 1TB 2.5 inch Laptop Solid State Hybrid Drive. Will this fit and will it work without any issues on this laptop? Is this a recommended option?

Your advice would be appreciated.

Kind regards

Chris

[Mrstenter · Accepted solution]

Hi @Chris_8318,

Thank you for visiting the HP Forums! A great place where you can find solutions for your issues with help from the community!

I came across your post about the Notebook, and wanted to assist you! I have looked into your issue about your HP Pavilion dv6500 CTO Entertainment Notebook and concerns with installing a New Hard Drive. If you keep the new SSD larger than your original and it supports 9.5-mm, 2.5-inch hard drives Sata 5400-rpm, you will have no issues.

Here is a link to your manual page 23 for the specs.

Please let me know how this goes.

Thanks.

[Chris_8318]

Thank you for this information. I have ordered the new hard drive and will let you know how I get along.

Kind Regards

Chris.

[Chris_8318]

Thank you very much.  I have installed the ITB seagate hybrid drive and the laptop now works fine. 

I also had to install the latest version of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver.

http://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c02219204

This is the procedure I followed. I configured the bios to boot from a usb. Then I booted up the laptop from a backup programme* from the usb and backed up an image of the entire system to an external portable hard drive. Then I removed the old hard drive and removed the special multi pin adapter and attached it to the new 1TB Hybrid HD before inserting it. Then  I booted up from the USB and restored the computer system image to the new HD. Then I shut down, reset the bios to defaults and booted up Windows Vista Home for the first time with the new HD. It tookquite a while for Windows to load for the first time with the new HD because it had to adjust to the new hardware. After that it booted up normally.

I would like to mention that Windows update stopped working after installing the new HD. I got the error message. Windows Update Cannot Check For Updates, Because The Service Is Not Running. I ran the Windows Update automatic fix but this did not solve the problem for me.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2730071

Evidently this is a common problem. The link below can help.

http://www.wintips.org/windows-update-cannot-check-for-updates-windows-8-7-or-vista-solved/

To solve this problem I had to install the latest version of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver

http://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c02219204

I hope this information will be helpful to others. Thanks again for your help and advice.

Kind regards

Chris

* I used Farstone Drive Clone but there are others available. Seagate have their own free drive backup software.

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/support/downloads/discwizard/

There are also other free backup software like Aomei.

http://www.backup-utility.com/free-backup-software.html

[Hotrod666]

🙂

[Chris_8318]

I got my dv600 to work fine with a 1TB Seagate hybrid drive. Please follow the above steps in the previous posts. Clone your drive to the new drive. There are various free programes you can use to do this.  

Make sure you have installed the driver for the latest version of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver.

http://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c02219204

Another option to consider if you don't need 1TB of space is instaling a 240Tbt or a 450 Tbt ssd drive which will work faster.  SSD drives have the advantage that the page file ram will also work faster from the SSD compared to a regular HD. This is useful because this machine can only have 2TBt of physical ram.

Whatever drive you install remember all drives will eventually fail so make sure you regularly make a back up.

Kind regards

Chris