Replacing T510 hard disk - 2 questions...

[James_e_t]

Hello All,

I have a T510 with 320Gb hard disk. I want to replace the hard disk with something with more capacity. I have 2 questions:

1. Will this void my warranty - I have 500+ days left
2. Can I take a complete copy of the hard disk and have all my applications and settings work exactly as they did on the old disk?

Thanks in advance,

James

[TheDude · Accepted solution]

No and yes.

What I would do is get a new drive with a transfer kit, external USB dock, or a drive tray for your DVD bay and use Acronis free software to clone to it.  It sometimes works best to put in the new bland drive and boot from the connected one then clone to the internal. 

I would then pull and store the original drive as a backup.

Also consider just adding a 2nd drive in a drive tray.  I have an 80 GB SSD boot drive and a 320 GB data drive since I rarely use a CD or DVD drive.

[CorkyG]

Just as The Dude says.  I swap my drives weekely in my T510.  I use Acronis True Image and create Rescue Media on a Thumb drive.  I boot to it and clone my internal HDD to an external eSATA drive.  That takes 8+ minutes.  I then swap drives and clone from the external eSATA to the new internal drive.  When done, I remove the thumb drive and boot to the new drive - now exactly a duplicate of what is on the eSATA external.

This was, I have two complete backups of everything - and when I travel, I carry the "reserve" HDD in a small neoprene bag.

If you use the Ultrabay adapter, you can clone drive to drive internally.