2. Let The Operation Begin

I should point out that sadly enough no products mentioned in this review were presented to me or offered up for review in any way. This article originated with this thought, "OMG! My hard drive is about to die! What do I do?" The answer: Dr. Chu wanted in hardware surgery!

Before I begin, here is a list of the surgical tools I'm going to use to perform this high risk operation.

A replacement Hard Drive: This will have to be a 2.5" notebook drive, preferably something that is bigger, better, and meaner than the failing drive. (After all, the drive that was in there is in its death throes, why put another one in there like it?) I chose a 60 GB Hitachi Travelstar drive. Important note: A faster platter means more heat, as I found out. It's a personal choice. Either an external USB/Firewire backup drive or a networked computer with a nice large shared drive to perform a safety backup of key files and settings. A hard disk drive upgrade kit: The one I'll be using is the Apricorn EZ Upgrade 2.5" Kit. Screwdrivers of various sizes

Backup: Be Careful And Be Happy

Before beginning any major hard disk task, I recommend doing a safety backup. Some may argue that the process of upgrading the drive automatically makes a backup as a matter of course, making this step unnecessary. I disagree. As a master of hard drive destruction, it's never too safe to have an extra fall-back step. A safety backup is a quick-and-dirty backup copy that does not take a lot of time or effort, and is predicated on the idea that the drive may imminently fail. So you save the minimum necessary before doing any complex operations. This can be accomplished as easily as dragging your important files onto a USB key or emailing them to a server that can handle large files or copying them to an external USB drive. However, I prefer another way.

If you are a Microsoft junkie and neatly store all your files in the expected places (My Documents, My Pictures, My Videos, Desktop, and so on) and you have access to a second machine on the network with decent storage then I recommend using Windows XP's little talked about Files and Settings Wizard. The process below should be repeated for every user on the machine. In my experience, this tool does a pretty good job of making sure all my files and settings are backed up without having to back up all the errata and junk that's been accreted over years of installations.

Here is a series of screen captures that demonstrate the steps for accomplishing this trick:

Starting the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard

Click Next.

Choose "Old" Computer.