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Originally Posted by X5Jay
I have a 5 or 6 year-old Gateway PC and the hard drive is beginning to get really noisy and sick sounding. I'm not seeing any ill-effects, but it sure sounds like it's on its last days....
How difficult and time-consuming is it to replace the hard drive myself? While I use a computer all day, every day for work, I'm certainly no IT guy, but I'm not afraid to open up the box and do the mechanical work - that part seems easy. However, I'm concerned that I don't have the skills to replace the drive, OS, programs, data, etc... Given that my current hard drive is not yet dead, does that make it any easier? Any advice or simple how-to instructions that a novice like me can handle, or should I just throw in the towel and get a professional to do it? TIA!
Edit: BTW - it's a desktop with a giant tower, not a laptop...
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jay,
From a process standpoint, it's easy to physically replace the drive. the hard part is getting your applications reinstalled on it and your data moved back onto it from the original disk.
You also have to check with the manufacturer and see what type of drive is supported in the machine, IDE, SATA, ATA, PATA, EIDE, SCSI, etc. and buy the same type of drive.
You also have to check to see what the largest sized drive is supported. There's no use in buying a big fat 250GB SATA drive, if the BIOS on your machine will only support 80GB IDE drives.
You also have to have some experience in knowing how to set up a master drive vs. a slave (not tough, but the first time could be a bitch) and checking to see if you have a multi-port drive cable in the machine and/or a free power cable (you'll need to have both hard drives plugged in at the same time in order to copy from 1 to the other unless you have an external USB case you plug the original disk into).
That being said.
Buy a new machine, buy an external USB case for your old machine's HD and copy your data from 1 to the other. I think that's your biggest bang for the buck and most straightforward in terms of upgrading.