Notebook (Laptop) Upgrade FAQ

[TREZEGOOL]

The manual states that the requirements for the modules are:

ATI Discrete PCI Express MXM

nVidia Discrete PCI Express MXM

The nVidia GTX 560M is available in an MXM 3.0b (82mm) footprint.  The problem with that is that your systemboard has a MXM 2.0 (73mm) slot and the width is not the same. So a GTX560M will not work since it physically won't fit.

______________________________________________________-

Sorry ... Any Motherboard Slove This Problem ????

Sorry Again If I Bothering You ...

Thank You ...Prof.

[erico]

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@ullwn wrote:

On a HP Pavillion dv6324us;

What is the maximum amount of memory that may be installed?

What fastest CPU that can be installed?

Please Advise?

Thank You

Joseph

---

If your notebook is an Intel type: Intel Core Duo T7200 (2.00-GHz)  Max RAM is 2GB. 1GB Ram in each slot

If yours has an  AMD chipset :                                             AMD Turion ML-60 2.0-GHz    Max RAM is 2GB. 1GB Ram in each slot

Best regards,

erico

[NeoKate]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post this but I have a question about how much memory I can put in my ZV5410 laptop.  The specs on the site say I can have up to 1280MB DDR SDRAM (1 x 256MB, 1 x 1024MB).  The laptop came with 512mb. So, when I opened the laptop to install some more memory, I assumed there would be two 256 cards.   I planned to remove one to add a 1gb card,   When I opened up the laptop, there was only one card total and only one slot.  I put in the new memory but I really had hoped to have the max amount. 

Is there another slot somewhere?

[EddieN120]

Once I have the drive in my hands, I shall try it out and report my results here.

Well, I wrote that back in February but it wasn't until today that I finally got around to installing my new drive. Might as well give my update now 🙂

As it turns out, my favorite webstore doesn't have the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT 500 GB drive in stock, so I am going to go for the next highest model, the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WDBABC6400ANC-NRSN 640GB drive instead (details here, here and here).

And as it turned out, the WDBABC6400ANC-NRSN 640 GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue also goes by the model number WD6400BEVT -- so you should use that model number when you're searching for information on the Western Digital site.

Apparently, these higher-capacity WD drives require more than just merely formating the drive -- you need to use a program to "align" the partitions due to the Advanced Format Technology newer drives use. The program is free from WD's Website and it can clone the old drive to the new one too.

I was slightly mistaken there -- you can use the Western Digital edition of Acronis True Image to do formatting, backing-up, restoring and cloning just fine.

I finally got sick of all the "Your memory is running low" errors that my machine was giving me any time I had more than 10 tabs open in Firefox for any length of time, so today I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the HDD of my HP Pavilion dv6910us laptop. I dug out the WD drive, and my USB 2.0-to-IDE/SATA cable adapter, and set to work.

It took me about 15 minutes to find everything, to assemble the cable adapter, remove the new HDD from its electrostatic bag, and plug it all into my laptop. I had long since downloaded my copy of ATI WD, and now that everything was plugged in, I could run it. As soon as the program started running, a popup appeared to the effect of: "We have detected an unformatted drive. Do you want to format this drive and make it bootable?" Since I was going to clone the old drive onto the new one, I clicked "No". Then I chose the "Cloning" option and a popup that read "Preparing..." appeared. There was no other indication of what was going on and so I felt a little nervous but 3 minutes later, the "Cloning" menu  appeared. I chose the "Automatic" option. Some more "Preparing..." and after 10 minutes, it asked me to reboot my machine.

When it came back from the reboot, it was now in a DOS-like state, and it started prepping and copying the main partition (drive C) from my old drive (157 GB) to the new drive (538 GB). That took two hours to complete. Then it started prepping and copying the HP recovery partition (drive D) from my old drive (12 GB) to the new one (38 GB). That went much quicker, and finished in 5 minutes. Then it copied the MBR from the old drive to the new one (or so I thought, see below). Finally, it came up with a congratulations message, telling me that I had successfully cloned the drive, and that I should press any key to shut down the system.

Once the system was shut down, I removed the battery, and then unscrewed the case to get at the old hard drive. That was easy, but actually yanking the old drive from the laptop was unexpectedly difficult. It took me four or five tries (and consulting a YouTube video or two to make sure I was doing it right) before I was able to get the old drive (in its sled) out of the machine. I noticed there was some sort of double-sided sticky tape stuck to the inside of the drive enclosure, apparently for no good reason. And I found it pretty difficult to take out the four screws holding the drive to the sled too. But I finally was able to do it. Then I installed the new drive in the sled, put the sled back in the drive enclosure, screwed the drive cover back on, re-installed the battery, unplugged the IDE/SATA adapter from the USB port, and turned on my laptop. It showed "Acronis True Image Clone Complete", rebooted...

...and: nothing. The machine would start to boot up, show the HP logo page, trundle for a bit, then reboot. And this cycle repeated indefinitely. I tried going into the BIOS (which I had earlier updated as per erico's directive) to run a drive diagnostic but it would show "IDE Drive Not Detected". Once during the reboot cycle, it showed the words "Operating System Not Found", but rebooting would make it go away and continue the "HP logo, trundle, reboot" cycle again.

I was getting a bit worried now, so I put the old drive back into the machine -- and it came up without a hitch (which was a relief, since I was afraid that everything had been borked). Then I reattached the new drive to the cable adapter and plugged that back into my USB port. After a few seconds, Windows Vista recognized that there was a new HDD attached to the machine, and when I looked at the contents of it in Windows Explorer, it was an exact copy of my old drive, with all the contents of the old drive replicated on the new. The only difference between the old and new drives was that the new drive had much more free space available, and the size of the HP recovery partition on the new drive was just over three times the size of the one on the old drive.

So, that's the situation I'm in. The good news is, I have a recent backup of my files contained on my new HDD. The bad news is, it doesn't seem to want to work when I place it in my laptop.

Any ideas what I need to do, will be gratefully accepted. Thank you in advance, erico!

[erico]

---

@EddieN120 wrote:

Once I have the drive in my hands, I shall try it out and report my results here.

Well, I wrote that back in February but it wasn't until today that I finally got around to installing my new drive. Might as well give my update now 🙂

As it turns out, my favorite webstore doesn't have the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT 500 GB drive in stock, so I am going to go for the next highest model, the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WDBABC6400ANC-NRSN 640GB drive instead (details here, here and here).

And as it turned out, the WDBABC6400ANC-NRSN 640 GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue also goes by the model number WD6400BEVT -- so you should use that model number when you're searching for information on the Western Digital site.

Apparently, these higher-capacity WD drives require more than just merely formating the drive -- you need to use a program to "align" the partitions due to the Advanced Format Technology newer drives use. The program is free from WD's Website and it can clone the old drive to the new one too.

I was slightly mistaken there -- you can use the Western Digital edition of Acronis True Image to do formatting, backing-up, restoring and cloning just fine.

I finally got sick of all the "Your memory is running low" errors that my machine was giving me any time I had more than 10 tabs open in Firefox for any length of time, so today I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the HDD of my HP Pavilion dv6910us laptop. I dug out the WD drive, and my USB 2.0-to-IDE/SATA cable adapter, and set to work.

It took me about 15 minutes to find everything, to assemble the cable adapter, remove the new HDD from its electrostatic bag, and plug it all into my laptop. I had long since downloaded my copy of ATI WD, and now that everything was plugged in, I could run it. As soon as the program started running, a popup appeared to the effect of: "We have detected an unformatted drive. Do you want to format this drive and make it bootable?" Since I was going to clone the old drive onto the new one, I clicked "No". Then I chose the "Cloning" option and a popup that read "Preparing..." appeared. There was no other indication of what was going on and so I felt a little nervous but 3 minutes later, the "Cloning" menu  appeared. I chose the "Automatic" option. Some more "Preparing..." and after 10 minutes, it asked me to reboot my machine.

When it came back from the reboot, it was now in a DOS-like state, and it started prepping and copying the main partition (drive C) from my old drive (157 GB) to the new drive (538 GB). That took two hours to complete. Then it started prepping and copying the HP recovery partition (drive D) from my old drive (12 GB) to the new one (38 GB). That went much quicker, and finished in 5 minutes. Then it copied the MBR from the old drive to the new one (or so I thought, see below). Finally, it came up with a congratulations message, telling me that I had successfully cloned the drive, and that I should press any key to shut down the system.

Once the system was shut down, I removed the battery, and then unscrewed the case to get at the old hard drive. That was easy, but actually yanking the old drive from the laptop was unexpectedly difficult. It took me four or five tries (and consulting a YouTube video or two to make sure I was doing it right) before I was able to get the old drive (in its sled) out of the machine. I noticed there was some sort of double-sided sticky tape stuck to the inside of the drive enclosure, apparently for no good reason. And I found it pretty difficult to take out the four screws holding the drive to the sled too. But I finally was able to do it. Then I installed the new drive in the sled, put the sled back in the drive enclosure, screwed the drive cover back on, re-installed the battery, unplugged the IDE/SATA adapter from the USB port, and turned on my laptop. It showed "Acronis True Image Clone Complete", rebooted...

...and: nothing. The machine would start to boot up, show the HP logo page, trundle for a bit, then reboot. And this cycle repeated indefinitely. I tried going into the BIOS (which I had earlier updated as per erico's directive) to run a drive diagnostic but it would show "IDE Drive Not Detected". Once during the reboot cycle, it showed the words "Operating System Not Found", but rebooting would make it go away and continue the "HP logo, trundle, reboot" cycle again.

I was getting a bit worried now, so I put the old drive back into the machine -- and it came up without a hitch (which was a relief, since I was afraid that everything had been borked). Then I reattached the new drive to the cable adapter and plugged that back into my USB port. After a few seconds, Windows Vista recognized that there was a new HDD attached to the machine, and when I looked at the contents of it in Windows Explorer, it was an exact copy of my old drive, with all the contents of the old drive replicated on the new. The only difference between the old and new drives was that the new drive had much more free space available, and the size of the HP recovery partition on the new drive was just over three times the size of the one on the old drive.

So, that's the situation I'm in. The good news is, I have a recent backup of my files contained on my new HDD. The bad news is, it doesn't seem to want to work when I place it in my laptop.

Any ideas what I need to do, will be gratefully accepted. Thank you in advance, erico!

---

What is the installed operating system ?

You might want to consider starting the cloning process over. Delete the partitions on the disk and this time when asked if you want to format the disk, answer yes so the automated script will make the disk bootable. Sounds as if the bootsector was not made active. 

Best regards,
erico

[EddieN120]

Hi erico!

My OS is Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1.

And yes, I was thinking of redoing the cloning but I was loath to spend three hours again 🙂 When I do the cloning again, and I delete the partitions, and after it formats the drive to make it bootable, should I choose "Automatic" cloning (which is the easier option) or should I choose "Manual" cloning? If I choose "Manual", it will allow me to size the cloned partittions the way I want, and I don't know if I should allow the cloned drive's recovery partition to be resized proportionally (which took the original , drive D, partition from 12 GB to 38 GB on the cloned drive), or to resize it manually (so that on both the original and on the clone, the drive D recovery partition is 12 GB)?

Thanks again for all your help!

[erico]

---

@EddieN120 wrote:

Hi erico!

My OS is Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1.

And yes, I was thinking of redoing the cloning but I was loath to spend three hours again 🙂 When I do the cloning again, and I delete the partitions, and after it formats the drive to make it bootable, should I choose "Automatic" cloning (which is the easier option) or should I choose "Manual" cloning? If I choose "Manual", it will allow me to size the cloned partittions the way I want, and I don't know if I should allow the cloned drive's recovery partition to be resized proportionally (which took the original , drive D, partition from 12 GB to 38 GB on the cloned drive), or to resize it manually (so that on both the original and on the clone, the drive D recovery partition is 12 GB)?

Thanks again for all your help!

---

I would go with the manual option. 

Best regards,

erico

[EddieN120]

I will start off the cloning procedure again later tonight and hopefully it will have completed before morning. Will report back then. Thanks again, erico!

[EddieN120]

OK, now I am at my wits' end.

I just re-cloned my laptop's HDD, manually, onto the WD Scorpio Blue 640 GB drive, using Acronis True Image Western Digital Edition. I put it into my laptop, and it doesn't boot up, still. Even more annoying, I have noticed that my DVD drive no longer appears in My Computer. I suspect that this has something to do with ATIWD being installed. I can plug in external DVD drives and they will appear in My Computer after a second or two though. I have gone through all the steps in posts like these, and still no joy.

How do I make the cloned HDD a bootable drive, without having to just format it and then re-clone it? I am sick and tired of spending four hours at a pop cloning this thing, with me being unable to use my laptop for anything else, only for this to happen, over and over again. I just want my laptop to work with a huge HDD in it already!

Help.

[erico]

You can try EasyBCD to see if it recognizes your Windows installation as a bootable one. If it does then you can use the utility to repair it.

An alternative that I previously suggested, is to use a Microsoft's Windows utility, called Diskpart to make the partition active (bootable) before beginning the manual cloning process. You can use another person's Vista install DVD to accomplish it. The install DVD must be the same type as what will be installed on your notebook's hard disk (32-bit or 64-bit)  You should give that a try. Diskpart will show you if there is a bootable partition, as you can see in the image below.

Both of the preceding suggestions are advanced users tools, and quite powerful, so be careful while using them.

Best regards,
erico