P770 Hard drive replacement

Looking for information on replacing the hard drive in the Lifebook P770. I need guidance from someone with real world experience replacing the drive in this model. Pictures would be a big plus!

I need more space, and am wary because there does not seem to be room to slide the drive off the connectors without damage.

Help!

Thanks in advance.

 

I have replaced mine twice - and replaced the optical drive with a second hard drive. No problem. Well, actually, there were a couple of issues, but those came from taking the laptop apart to get inside, and having ribbon cables come out, then trying to get those cables back in. That only relates to the second drive, and the internal memory upgrade.

Currently running a Seagate Momentus XT 500Gb for boot, and a WD 750GB as second drive. Now thinking of replacing the 500Gb with a Western Digital Scorpio Black 750Gb, for a total of 1.5Tb. There are reasons why the XT drive was not the best choice for how my laptop is used.

Yes, you have to pull the end of the hard drive up then pull it back to get it out. Does not seem right, but it works as long as you are careful. The real hassle is getting the rubber holder to sit down right when you put in the new drive.

What drive are you going to install?

 

Thanks for the reply!

I am either going with a Seagate 750GB or Samsung 640GB.

So you say I do have to wedge up the hard drive to slide it off the connectors? Wow! It sounds risky, but I really do require a ton of hard drive space for my work files. I guess there is nothing left to do but try.

Any other hints or details I should know before diving in. Pictures would be a tremendous help.

It's times like this I really miss the LeoG.net site for help with Fujitsu products. There was no better site for owners to share info. Sadly he closed it down due to spammers.

 

A quick update.

The P770 didn't like the Seagate 750GB drive. It kept giving an error when it was initializing the drive with the recovery utility.

I ended up installing the Samsung 640GB, and everything went great.

Thank you rfielder for the helpful reply to my plea! Like you, I had the most trouble with the rubber shock holder.

Thanks again!

 

Glad that it went well with the smaller drive. FYI, I have a WD 750Gb drive running flawlessly in mine, as the second hard drive.

I ended up installing a fresh version of both on my P770, and currently have XP Pro and Win7 Ultimate in a dual boot setup.

A bit concerned about the issue you encountered with the Seagate. I am very close to getting one of those for myself. May I ask for a few more details?

Are you running XP or Win7? Which version? What was your process for moving to the new drive - did you do a backup to a server, or what? I am not clear which recovery utility you are referring to.

Thanks!

If you are considering moving to a full 8Gb memory on yours, be sure to post here - I went through that as part of replacing the optical drive with a hard drive, and there are something to watch out for.....

 

I think the issue was with the recovery disks that came with the P770. Windows 7 Pro 32 bit. It was not creating the proper size partitions, so it gave an error. I tried a 7 Pro 64 bit disk I had and everything worked fine. I just didn't want to pay for an additional license at this time, so I used the Fujitsu disks.

I will put 64 bit on it in the future.

Thanks again for your help. It was needed to help me get over my qualms with an unknown install.

 

That is good to know! A local vendor has the Seagate 750Gb drive on sale right now, so it was tempting - but I am going to hold out for the Western Digital Black 750Gb drive instead. It is supposed to be faster and run cooler and draw less power, which will make it worth the $30 extra (over the current sale price on the Seagate, which ends at noon today).

This will give me 1.5Tb storage. A bit more than needed, but the bragging rights are cool! Seriously, this enhances the use of the laptop as a photo editor and video editor as needed - in spite of the low clock speed, this little laptop can do some pretty serious work.

Thanks!!!