Resurrecting my Dad's laptop

skale · 2006-10-28 01:28:40

My Dad has a laptop which recently blue-screened. It turns out some rogue process corrupted the partition table (not sure what) and with a lemon disk anyway (bad sectors all over) He bought a new one.
Now, it's not a bad piece of hardware (Pentium M 1.7Ghz, 512MB RAM) I don't want to just chuck it. I figure that if I can just replace the Disk drive, I could take this with me to college next year. I've got a bunch of kinks, however.

How tough is it to replace the hard drive at home? It is a Dell Latitude D600, if you care.

Can you recommend me a good reliable drive to install? 40-60 GB is plenty.

I have had serious issues with the ATI video card in the laptop and Ubuntu. Does Arch support them well?

That's it for now. I really want to save some money by salvaging this computer, since everything else besides the hard drive works fine.

rayjgu3 · 2006-10-28 02:15:20

ive had no troubles with my HITACHI Travelstar 7200rpm's
or the wifes HITACHI Travelstar 5400 rpm's

the 5400 is 3 years no problems
the 7200 is 2 years no problems

lessthanjake · 2006-10-28 02:32:39

It should be no problem changing the hard drive. Done it several times on laptops. The laptops manual usually show how its done, and if not its just a matter of losening a few tiny screws.

Mr Green · 2006-10-28 06:44:50

replaced hd in my laptop not a problem .... bigger the better ;-)

tomk · 2006-10-28 07:08:09

Yeah, replacing the drive is no problem - just be careful with it. And I'd agree with rayjgu3 about the Travelstars.

Which ATI card is it? My rather old laptop has the Rage Mobility, which does what I need it to do using the xorg ati driver. If it's more up to date, you probably need ati-fglrx - never used it myself, but maybe someone else will have some advice about it.

rayjgu3 · 2006-10-28 10:29:27

oh yeah duh i was gonna mention my wifes laptop is a dell latitude c500
video is rage mobility & yes xorg works no problem if i recall correctly the module is r128

as for replacing a hard drive its not that complicated
look here just follow directions what it does not say there is the drive is in a cradle should only be 4 screws
now if your looking for places to buy the drive in the us i recommend looking here or if they dont have any deals on them try this
when shopping i always start in these places

Arch Linux

#1 2006-10-28 01:28:40

Resurrecting my Dad's laptop

#2 2006-10-28 02:15:20

Re: Resurrecting my Dad's laptop

#3 2006-10-28 02:32:39

Re: Resurrecting my Dad's laptop

#4 2006-10-28 06:44:50

Re: Resurrecting my Dad's laptop

#5 2006-10-28 07:08:09

Re: Resurrecting my Dad's laptop

#6 2006-10-28 10:29:27

Re: Resurrecting my Dad's laptop

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