Hard Drive Replacement

jymmiejamz

Well-known member
Dec 5, 2004
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361
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Los Angeles, Ca
I have a Panasonic CF-53 (I think it is an MK1) that I use a work for SDD and Picoscope. The JLR software takes up a ton of space and Land Rover requires there to be 20% free space. With the latest update I am at 3.4% free. Right now it has about a 128GB SSD. I would like to stick with SSD since it seems to be a lot quicker than the Land Rover supplied CF-53s that have a 500GB HDD. I don't know where to begin to look for a hard drive or what makes one good or bad. I am definitely not a computer person. Can anyone recommend a replacement hard drive with 200+GB and ideally under $300? I mostly work on Maseratis, so I don't want to dump a ton of money into this.
 

jymmiejamz

Well-known member
Dec 5, 2004
6,008
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Los Angeles, Ca
Those seem perfect. Would that be a direct swap? Those don't look like the hard drive in my computer. Here is the only pic I have of the hard drive from when my computer stopped working. It was just a backed out connector.

 

az_max

1
Apr 22, 2005
7,463
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The panasonic drives are in a carrier. The other end of that connector is a standard sata connector. Panasonic will have a drive to fit, but will cost a fortune. You should be able to shop Frys/Amazon/Google for a 2.5 SATA SDD. You'll probably want to pick up a drive duplicator of some sort. Either drive to drive or computer to usb converter.
 

chris snell

Administrator
Staff member
Aug 15, 2005
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+1 on duplicating your drive. If you had a duplicator device, you could have it do the magic. Otherwise, any desktop PC that has two SATA connectors can do the trick.

There's a pretty good set of free tools on this thing called the Ultimate Boot CD.

The idea is that you take a desktop computer and unplug the desktop's hard drive and plug yours in, along with your new SSD. Then you boot UBCD and use one of its disk cloning tools to copy your old drive to the new drive. Then you use a partition editor (also on UBCD) to resize the partition that you just copied to your new drive to take advantage of the larger capacity of the newer drive. Then you put the new drive into the sled and back into your laptop.
 

chris snell

Administrator
Staff member
Aug 15, 2005
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Another idea: if you have another machine that has a bunch of free space (i.e. more than your almost-full laptop's hard drive size), you can use Clonezilla Live (also free) to save an image of your laptop's disk and copy it to some other computer on your network.

Once you have that image safely stored elsewhere on your network, replace the laptop's hard drive with your new larger SSD.

Then, boot up Clonezilla Live again and restore the image you saved earlier across the network back to your laptop.

Once that's done, your laptop should boot normally. Next, you'll want to resize (extend) your partition to fill the now-larger disk. I believe that can be done from within Windows or you can use a tool like gparted to do it easily.
 

JohnC

Well-known member
Dec 8, 2005
896
13
Tappan, NY
I can get you a 1TB for free, I also have cloning software and extra computers to clone to.

Let me know if you need help.
 

jymmiejamz

Well-known member
Dec 5, 2004
6,008
361
35
Los Angeles, Ca
Another idea: if you have another machine that has a bunch of free space (i.e. more than your almost-full laptop's hard drive size), you can use Clonezilla Live (also free) to save an image of your laptop's disk and copy it to some other computer on your network.

Once you have that image safely stored elsewhere on your network, replace the laptop's hard drive with your new larger SSD.

Then, boot up Clonezilla Live again and restore the image you saved earlier across the network back to your laptop.

Once that's done, your laptop should boot normally. Next, you'll want to resize (extend) your partition to fill the now-larger disk. I believe that can be done from within Windows or you can use a tool like gparted to do it easily.

I think you are overestimating my computer abilities. I don't even know how to connect my computer to the printer at work.

I can get you a 1TB for free, I also have cloning software and extra computers to clone to.

Let me know if you need help.

That would be awesome! Let me know what I need to do to make this happen.