Dont you hate it

[Phil]

Nice sky tonight so went out got the camera mount running like a dream. Got onto my 2nd subject for the night and half way into the exposure my bloody computer went into melt down just froze up. Great just what i need. Can anyone tell me if it is possible to replace the hard drive in a laptop. I have been having problems with the drive for a while now. Or would it be cheaper to buy a second hand laptop for the observatory. It is just for running the camera mount set-up.
Phil

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

Commiserations about your computer Phil.

[GTB_an_Owl (Geoff)]

new hard drive Phill
possibly look at new ram as well

geoff

[Titan]

New laptop hard drives should be readily available for less then a couple of hundred bucks. If your reasonably confident with computers it shouldn't be too hard to swap out.

All the best

[DJVege]

Don't buy another laptop.

What sort of crash? Blue screen? Or just freeze?

[Marko of Oz (Mark)]

Phil, The Disc Shop in Rocky have 80gb Laptop hard drives for about $105. They're on Gladstone Rd near Windscreens O'brien. If you need help installing let me know and I'll sort it out for you.

cheers

Mark

[Phil]

DJ it just freezes 2nd time the drive has bad sectors in it when i do a scan disc there are allot of unreadable sectors. It could be a heat problem but i don't think so. Mark i will go check the shop out thanks. We will have to get together one night Mark.
Phil

[leon]

Hard drives for lappys, no problem, mine was changed not long ago, but have you lost all your files, or can they still be transfered to the new H/D.

If you intend to get a new drive, make it BBBBIG.

Leon

[Glenhuon (Bill)]

HDD swap on laptops is fairly straightforward, most of them can be pulled out by removing a couple of screws or simply unlatching a catch. If you can get it to boot from floppy disk (assuming you have a FAT32 format) backup what you can first. Alternately replace it and find out if your local puter shop or some friendly puter buff will slave it to another machine and extract your files. The suggestion to go as big as it will handle with the replacement is a good one.

Bill