Technical @ Updates

It’s recession economics 101—you can’t always afford to shell out for a whole new PC! HTG is here to help you repair and upgrade the parts that are in desperate need. Today’s topic: how to upgrade your hard drive.

In this first of a new series of “Hardware Upgrade” posts, we’ll cover the basics for buying new drives, backing up old system disks, and opening up your PC to swap out drives. It’s great geeky fun, and it can help you put off a new PC purchase for just a little bit longer. Check it out!

Installing a hard drive is a fairly simple—although intimidating—affair. Here’s the lowdown on what you’re going to need to upgrade your storage.

 

Most standard internal hard drives have a form factor of 3.5 inches, and come in one of two major connection styles. Neither are cutting edge new, so most PCs you upgrade should have the capability of one or the other. Pictured above, the left cable is a SATA cable, which is a newer standard, and easier to work with. The older connection is called IDE, and the drives are sometimes called PATA. While there’s nothing wrong with IDE hard drives, you’ll want to check if you have the capacity to use SATA before buying a IDE drive.

 

Not all PCs will have the connections to read a SATA drive. If your machine is older, you may wish to open up your case first, and see if your mother board has the connections for SATA. In most situations, you’re going to want to opt for SATA, because the setup is easier and the transfer rate is faster than IDE.

The red connectors like the ones on the left connect up to SATA cables—you can even see the beginning of “SATA” behind the right side of the connector. Most motherboards (that aren’t terribly old) should support it. If you don’t see these connectors, you’ll have to use the IDE connectors, like those pictured on the right.

There are, of course, loads of other ways to connect hard disks to a PC. For today, and for the sake simplicity, we’ll stick with what’s most likely to be inside most PC cases.

When you buy a drive, you buy based on several different factors. The first is usually “can my system handle it?”

Older systems have drive capacity limits and will struggle to recognize large disks. Systemsolder than 1998 will be limited to 8.4 GB, while systems older than 2002 may have a drive capacity limit of 137 GB imposed by the motherboard’s BIOS. You’ll require a PC that supports 48 Bit LBA (Logical Block Address), at the very least by the OS, if not the BIOS as well. If your machine is running XP with Service Pack 1, Windows Vista, or Windows 7, your machine likely supports these large drives over 137 GB, and you shouldn’t have to worry about this. If you’re running Windows 98, or something just as old, you’re likely to have some trouble with this upgrade—maybe more than it’s worth.

Once you’ve determined the size disk your PC can support, and found out what kind of of drives you can connect to your motherboard (IDE or SATA) you can start to answer the other big questions that go into buying a drive. Here’s a short list of the three main criteria you should go over before shelling out your hard earned cash for a drive.

There are lots of other factors that go into buying a drive, although these are the major ones. If you can determine what kind of drive your PC can handle, you’ll be able to pick a drive based on these criteria. You might be able to get a high capacity drive (1TB +) for very cheap, but you’ll likely be sacrificing performance, and end up with a slow drive. High performance drives are often expensive, no matter the capacity, but can be worth it if you’re replacing your system disk.

Once you’re satisfied with your HDD purchase, you’re ready for the next steps.

Before you open up your PC and start ripping out hardware, it might behoove you to make a copy of the disk you’re planning to remove. This is where the aforementioned (see above, in tools) hard drive enclosure can come in handy. There are several ways to make a perfect, bootable copy of your system disk, like PING, DriveImage XML and FOG Project, as well asClonezilla, which we covered in an extensive hard drive-saving how-to.

If you’re simply adding a second drive for storage, you don’t need to back up your system disk. But many of you may want to replace it with a newer, larger, faster drive and keep your OS and files intact. If that’s the case, check out some of the many imaging programs listed above, or read our how-to on cloning your disk.

With your prep out of the way, you’re finally ready to start ripping out hardware. A couple of warnings—removing hardware from a PC is done at your own risk and at the risk of your own hardware, so only do it if you’re prepared to learn some potentially expensive lessons!

Step one is always removing these screws that hold on the case sides. Notice how the PC is also unplugged, and make sure that yours is, as well.

 

If the sides of your case don’t come off the way the red arrows are directing, you’ll likely find more screws holding them in place. Double-check and try them again. If this doesn’t work, your case may be built differently—look to see what catches or releases might be holding the sides in place.

If you’re unfamiliar with the innerworkings of a PC, here’s a rundown of the parts we will be working with today, and the parts we’ll need to avoid. Notice that the optical drive and the hard disk are in roughly the same place, and may even be connected with the same cables. Make sure you remove the right one!

Remove the cables from the old hard drive as shown. You’ll need to remove two cables from each disk—one for power, and one for data. The cables above are IDE data cables, the more difficult of the two to remove. SATA cables are fairly easy to remove from a drive, while IDE cables are wide and firmly seated on a large row of pins. You may struggle when removing them—be firm, but careful not to warp the pins, break any part of the cable, or yank to hard on any part that is connected to the motherboard.

There are typically four screws holding a HDD in place. Look for this cage in the front of your PC case and undo the screws as shown.

The opposite side of the PC case should also have screws holding the drives in place. You’ll have to remove them from the hole illustrated here to get the drive out.

Depending on how tight the inside of your case is, you may have to remove other hardware. In this case, the easiest part to remove would be the power supply, shown top left, rather than the processor fan and heatsink, shown bottom left. Pull the drive out as shown, and you’ll be ready to connect up your new drive. You can expect to install the new drive the same way you removed this one, but backwards—but for more detailed directions and solutions to common problems, check back next Monday for part 2.

Installing a new hard drive can get complicated if something goes wrong, and we’re already getting into tl;dr territory. Check back next week, when we’ll cover common problems with installing new hard drives, how to get your system to recognize your new disk, and some tips for fresh installs of an OS.

March 31st, 2011 is “World Backup Day”—celebrate it by using free software Clonezilla to clone an exact copy of your OS system disk, regardless if you use Windows, Mac OS, or Linux!

In the event of tragic hardware failure, a backup image or completely cloned disk can save you from loads of worry, and get you back on your feet effortlessly. Get in the spirit of the day—keep reading to see how to resurrect that machine with bootable copy of your OS.

In addition to this, you’ll need a working PC capable of booting from your optical (DVD & CD) drive, and your system disk will have to be capable of running at least long enough to clone your data. It is possible to clone disks with bad sectors or problems starting up—but healthy disks are the best ones to work with and clone, so ensure you have a backup before it is too late.

Download Clonezilla Live

Clonezilla.org is the home to the Clonezilla project, where you can learn a bit about it, or simply download it. For most HTG readers, you can expect to use a x86 Live CD to clone, image, or restore your system disk. This will work with all Intel Macs, and likely any machine running Windows, and many distros of Linux.

As stated above, download the Clonezilla Live CD. If you navigate to Clonezilla.org, you’ll find there are a lot of options to sort through.

We’ll be using the ISO version of the Live CD…

As well as the latest stable release. Cut out the middleman, and download the x86 Live CD Stable Release ISO of Clonezilla by going here.

Once your ISO file is done downloading, the simplest thing to do is to burn it to a CD-R. One great program for burning ISO files is ImgBurn, although many other exist, including a solution built into Windows 7, if you happen to be running it.

Boot The Clonezilla Live CD

Many computers will automatically boot from a bootable CD like the Clonezilla Live Disc. However, if you have trouble booting from a CD, you’ll have to change your boot order in your BIOS, most of which can be reached by pressing Tab, Delete, or F8 immediately as you hear the machine beeps or chimes to let you know it is turning on.

Intel Mac users can boot from a CD by holding down the “C” key or the Alt/Option key on the keyboard immediately after you hear the trademark Mac startup noise.

Clonezilla should boot up on nearly any PC without a hitch. Default settings on most screens will work for most readers, like this one, which requests which environment to boot. Press enter at the default choice to load Clonezilla in an 800 x 600 pixel environment.

Assuming you’re reading this, you can select the default language of English.

Again, choosing the default of “Don’t Touch Keymap” will suffice. If you want to pick your keyboard, do so, but Clonezilla mostly uses the Enter and Arrow keys.

Clonezilla gives you the opportunity to use the command prompt to clone or image your disks, although we’ll consider that an option for expert users. Press enter to begin using Clonezilla.

This is the major branch within the program. Do you want to create an image file to restore multiple copies of later, or simply clone a system disk to another hard drive to begin using immediately?

Here’s a breakdown of the two methods, and how to navigate through the prompts in Clonezilla to do them:

Refer back to this chart to help demystify Clonezilla as you navigate through its options and menus, particularly if you choose to create image files over cloning your entire disk.

Local Device to Local Device Cloning

Select “Device-device” to clone one drive onto another and not work with images. This will allow you to create a perfect clone of your system disk on a USB disk—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Beginner mode is fine for almost all purposes. There is no need to venture into “Expert Mode” territory unless you’re feeling brave (or already know what you’re doing).

Here you can elect to use local disks (drives hooked into your machine, either internally or via USB) or remote disks (LAN or SSH drives, for more advanced users). If you wish to only clone partitions, you can also do that here with the two “Part to Part” options. For our purposes, we’ll use “Disk to Local Disk.”

(Author’s Note: If you’re not familiar with Linux or OS X’s more elaborate partitions, you probably shouldn’t clone just one of them. You may end up missing a key partition or a swap your OS might be looking for. To be safe, clone your entire disk, unless you’re absolutely certain you know what you’re doing!)

If you have many drives installed, including your USB drive, you may have trouble locating your source drive. This is the drive you want to clone, so make sure you pick it out correctly. Keep in mind that Clonezilla is based on GNU/Linux, so its drive naming structures may be unfamiliar to those of us that aren’t Linux users. (In other words, don’t go looking for your C:/ drive!)

Likely you’ll have to rely on the size and brand name of your hard disk. In the example above, this PC’s system disk was a 300GB Samsung disk, which Clonezilla identifies as sda. Pick the disk that you want to clone, and press enter.

The second choice is your destination, or target disk. On this PC, the choice was obvious, because the drive was 10x larger, and connected by USB. Depending on how you’ve got your drives connected, it may be more or less obvious. Simply keep in mind you choose thesource first, then the destination.

With your Source and Destination drives sorted out, Clonezilla has enough information from you to clone your disk. Clonezilla will expect you to press Enter to continue and then print a lot of information to the screen.

You’ll be given two opportunities to stop it from writing to your destination disk if you think you’ve chosen the wrong one. You should see the information listed above the Y/N prompt for the drive you’re writing your clone to, so double check it and hit Y for yes.

Here, you’re given the opportunity to clone the boot loader, which boots your operating system. If you’re plan to ever replace your system drive with this new one, you won’t want to deal with setting up a bootloader, so clone your existing one by selecting y for yes.

You’re given one final opportunity to back out before your target disk is formatted and written to, erasing all data on it and replacing it with a clone of your system drive. Y for yes to continue!

And Clonezilla begins to work its magic.

And continues.

And still continues. Don’t expect it to happen quickly, as creating a perfect clone of your operating system and all your partitions can take quite a long time, particularly over USB speeds. Be prepared to walk away, and come back after an hour, or two or three, depending on the size of your drive.

Once your cloning is complete, you can expect more “Enter to Continue” prompts. From there, you can restart Clonezilla for more cloning action, or power down, or reboot.

Booting Up Your New (Old) Machine

Excited to test your clone? Install your new system disk, and set your BIOS to use it as your primary master drive. If everything has gone without a hitch, your computer (at least your operating system) won’t even realize it has a different disk inside it. You may find a big grin on your face—even the most minor details have been cloned, like this bootloader looking for the “Earlier Version of Windows.”

And your Operating System, be it Linux, OS X, or Windows, will load like normal, without any issues. Again, this is providing that everything has gone smoothly and Clonezilla has been allowed to do its job correctly. So congrats! You’ve created a perfect backup of your system disk to keep for a rainy day—or a day when your hard drive breaks. All of your programs, personalizations, and installs will be complete—it’s almost too good to be true!

So happy World Backup Day, everyone, and keep your data safe!