Laptops and hard disk problems
 

I think that the hard disk on my four-year old laptop may have gone. Is it possible to get it replaced?

If so, could someone give me a ballpark estimation of the replacement costs, please?

Yes, about £40 if you do it yourself.

Remember that you will need to reload your OS and all applications, and will have lost all your data from the old hard drive. Also, dependent upon the laptop you might need a 2.5" SATA or a 2.5" PATA drive (or even maybe a 1.8" drive if you've gone for a mega-tiny laptop). Hence quoting the make and model of the laptop here would help us identify which drive you need to purchase.

Thank you for your prompt response, Mike-Bracknell.

Ah! It is a Sony Vaio VGN-AR41M.

Having read many of the cautionary tales related here, I had already backed up all my data to a separate storage device, so that is alright.

For starters, it's got a Serial ATA drive so you should be able to pick the size of 2.5" SATA drive you wish/need.

Drive costs? It all depends. A look at Aria gives prices from £24 for a 160gig drive to £68.39 for a Terabyte (plus postage, of course). Your laptop came with a 200Gb drive, so the choice is yours regarding whether you want to go higher or lower regarding capacity and that depends on your own usage (personally I always believe "bigger is better").

Fitting should be VERY easy, normally you only undo a couple of small screws, remove a small cover and there you have the drive which might be in some sort of caddy meaning there's some more screws to remove, I don't have a Sony laptop so I can't be more specific. But it uis generally a very simple operation. After that, the fun starts as you will need a Windows DVD (for Win7, cd for XP) or some sort of backup tool which can be run from cd as the recovery option on the laptop will not work with the new drive and your backup, it only works by reinstalling from the recovery partition on the old drive. Hiren's Boot CD is a nice option to use as it has verious tools you can use and it's free.

Hope that helps.

Thank you, Hellsbrink.

That's where things fall down. Sony have the unerring habit of cocking up the design of their laptops so that you end up dismantling almost the entire thing to replace the most trivial of parts. Hopefully your Vaio is easier than the last 2 Vaios I had to deal with, but neither of those were particularly trivial. Good luck.

Also, where Hellsbrink says "bigger is better" for hard disks, I would say that spin speed is a pretty good pointer to general satisfaction with a hard drive. A 5400rpm drive is probably what you had from new in that laptop, but replacing it with a 7200rpm drive will bring noticeable speed improvements (as a laptop's slowest component is the hard drive). If you want to treat yourself then an SSD would work even better, but they're a lot more cash and given the age of your laptop probably throwing good money after bad.

If you are considering replacing the HD then you have nothing to lose by dowloading and using Ultimate boot disk. I have recovered a few hard drives by using the utilities on there.
I sort of guessed my way through it as I had no idea what I was actually doing. I ran a diagnostic test and just clicked repair when it had finished. It worked for me.

good luck.

Thank you to all those kind people who offered advice. I was relieved to read that salvation was possible - and that it would not cost the earth.