Hard drive problem with laptop PCG K115S

[stvouk]

Apologies if this is already answered, I can't get the search facility to work on the forum.

I purchased a Sony PCG K115S laptiop in 2004. Recently I've been having a problem with the internal hard drive, I get a clicking sound on the drive, the info in control panel states that I've got a paging error on the hard drive, this was confirmed when the chkdsk command found a number of bad sectors.

I am therefore thinking of buying a replacement hard drive. I currently have a Toshiba internal hard drive MK6021GAS 60GB 4200 RPM.

Has anyone experience of attempting this, any recommendations on possible replacement drives, can I use the recovery disk to restore windows xp on the new hard drive? any help gratefully received.

Thanks

Stvouk

[Blencogo]

Hi stvouk and welcome.

It is quite a simple job to replace the hard drive on a K-Series Vaio. Just turn your Vaio upside down and remove the larger of the two panels - I think it just has 1 screw. You can then simply slide the drive out and slide a new one in. A ten minute job. You need an ATA-100 drive like this one: -

http://www.laptopshop.co.uk/samsung-hm121hc-laptop_hard_drive-1-hd2.htm

You can reload the original software onto the new disc using the Recovery Discs.

[stvouk]

Thanks Blencogo.

I've just looked on the link you gave me and it seems quite a reasonable price for the samsung hard drive.

Another question for you. I'm not sure of my bios setting but if my current hard drive is 60gb, would I be able to upgrade to a 120gb drive without chaning the bios? Do you see any problem with using the samsung drive you suggested.

Thanks again for your help on this.

[Thalamus.]

Hi stvouk,

another possible replacement you could consider is the Hitachi Travelstar 5K100 HDD