I have a laptop with a 60 gig hard drive. I'm running out of space. I bring it along on trips where I'll be editing a lot of photos, and store my photos on it, and well, yeah. It's filling up.

How would I go about putting in say, a 100 gig drive in its place? The only thing that occurs to me is buying an external drive enclosure along with the drive, hooking up the new drive as an external, copying the existing drive to the external, then swapping the new drive in to the laptop.

Is there some easier way to go about it that I'm missing over or is that my best chance?

 

uhh... best would be to get a usb encosure, put the old drive in that, install new drive, reinstall xp, copy files over.

 

Well I don't exactly have a copy of XP per se, just the restore disk from the manufacturer. Not sure if that'll let me install XP fresh on a drive...

 

it should

 

the restore disk should work. if it doesnt... then youll have the original drive intact

 

I got this enclosure for my old drive. Works great and is only $8.99

http://www.thetechgeek.com/content/p...?pid=9288&cid=

I don't know about your restore disk though. I had a copy of windows for my fresh install.

 

i might buy a laptop hard drive and an external case, just so i have a slim external

 

Your idea is good. You can also probably hook up the new drive in parallel and dump the data that way. I would recommend at least 200gig for your new drive. You don't want to run out of space for pron

Then, if you want to, turn the old 60 gig into an external with a USB kit for backups.

 

its a laptop.... you cant (easily) run drives parallel in a laptop, and the largest notebook drive out is 160gb.

 

2.5 hard drives are expensive. You could get a 3.5 hard drive with a lot more space and a lot cheaper and make it into an external hard drive. Only thing then is that you need to plug it into AC power.