Posted: 6/21/2002 10:59:24 PM EDT
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Okay, got a Q.... Older lap top computer. Hitachi E133TC 133 Pentium chip 1 gig HD 64MB? of mem (can't recall) My old beloved lap top... The HD went out a while back. Motor just stop turning..... For you computer experts, is there a place I can get a HD that is economical? The one's I have seen are pricey.... 300 or more. I know it's old, but ... well, sentamental value. I'd like to get it going. If there is, how hard is it to reload the stuff? I have the original Disks to load everything..... |
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Depends on whether it's a proprietary drive interface, or if it's a standard "compact IDE" setup... Check with Kingston, Targus, and outfits like that. You may also want to look for an outfit that does laptop upgrade and repair - check your phone book. Someone may have upgraded from a drive similar in size to yours, and you may be able to buy the old one fairly cheap... Laptop drives do, however, tend to get spendy! Loading should be farily simple, just time-comsuming. From the sounds of it, everything is on FDD, no? It'll take a while... FfZ |
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Your main problem isn't going to be finding a drive - it's either going to be SCSI, IDE, or standard laptop interface connection - most likely the latter. The problem is going to be finding a drive that small. And when you do find that drive, there will be a premium on it - all the older, smaller drives seem to be more expensive than today's typical fare. Ad to that fact that it is a laptop hard drive. I would call up Hitachi and see if you can buy the part from them - they should still have them. I know here at Compaq/HP, the Compaq policy was to keep parts laying around for 10 years after the product was declared obsolete. Reloading it won't be too difficult. In most cases, disk restores are automated - you hit a few keys, and it dumps the image to your HDD. One final reboot, and you are cookin' with gas! HTH, the_reject |
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I work in the computer industry. We probably have a drive in stock that will work. Shoot me an e-mail and I will look on Monday and see what we have. I am sure we can sell them cheap. We have a ton of Toshiba laptops that we just got back off of lease that are being parted out. Brandon |
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Thanks for the info. I forgot to add this bit: Original OS is Win 95. The computer was purchased back in 1997 and if I recall, the Bios said it was loaded Dec of 1996. I would look in the owners manual to see what HD type (if listed), but it's floating right now... location unknown. |
| Hm, I've bought off the shelf 2.5" IDE drives to replace dead IBM, HP and even Apple laptop (PowerBook 190 and above, older Apple PowerBooks used SCSI drives) drives without any problem. To get the replacement parts from the manufacturer is going to be expensive, just get an IBM 2.5" drive and it will work, a 20GB will cost you $150, I think you should just toss your old laptop and get a new one, but buying the drive from your local big computer store is what I'd do if I wanted to get it fixed. |
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Quoted: One question. Seems to me if I remember right that most of the chipsets that were out around 97 wouldnt support any hard drives over 2-2.5gigs unless you partitioned it. No biggie but something to keep in mind if true. That might be true. I have a dell latitude lm that is a 133 that sees a 3.2 gig hard drive with no problems. Author I can ship you a 3.2 gig and if i can find one i will ship a 2 gig also. |
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Quoted: Are you sure it's the chipset not the OS that wouldn't support large partitions? With Win98 you can use FAT32, with FAT you'll have to partition the disk into 2GB logical drives. It's both. There is a BIOS limitation on earlier chipsets, as well as an OS limitation. the_reject |
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Thank you for the HD 5isalive. But...(nothing is ever easy/simple w/ me..... ) Both the 3.xgig HD and the 1.4Gig HD fit and ran. The 3 gig was 'seen' the the computer. It listed it on the info page that pops up. Tried to boot to see if it had an OS that would work. Nope. Any how, I followed the owners manual in new HD install. Followed the info on the screen, but when it got to format, said it found an error on the HD and stopped setup... exited. Tried to retry, but can't get past the intro of the memory size and what ever.... then nothing. HD light is on, like it's spinning.... Tried the smaller one. Says it has an OS on it, but won't boot from it. I get a message.... that my setup program only works on 'empty' hard drives. (said this on smaller HD) Any suggestions on putting the Win system back on? Oh, it's 32 MB of memory, not 64......opps. (I hardly know anything about computers..... enough to get by, but not much about HD or loading OS. Heck ... don't even know how to format a hard drive....) |
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To format the hard drive, you'll need to boot to floppy, which should probably be as simple as rebooting with an appropriate floppy in the floppy drive. Do you have a working version of Windows 95 somewhere that you can use to copy files to a floppy? Or if not, maybe one of your setup floppies is labeled as a "boot disk" or something similar. If you have Win95 running somewhere, you can put the floppy in the drive, go to Start -> Run, and type "sys a:", which copies files to the floppy to make it bootable. Then copy the format.com file to the floppy. It is probably located in C:\Windows\Command. Assuming you can get a bootable floppy with format.com, boot from that floppy. Then run A:\format.com. For the smaller drive, you'll probably want to make the whole thing one partition. If you have a drive bigger than 2 GB, you may need to divide it into two or more partitions. |