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Replacing a laptop hard drive with an Intel SSD

By Lasa Information Systems Team

Instructions for replacing your laptop hard drive with an Intel solid state drive

This article explains how to make a copy of your existing hard drive (a clone), replace the drive with a 160Gb Intel Solid State Drive (SSD) and restore the image of the old drive to the SSD. It can also be helpful if you are replacing a drive with a traditional SATA or ATA drive or another brand of SSD.

What’s an SSD?

An SSD is a direct replacement for the hard drive on laptops which currently have SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drives. The advantage of an SSD is that there are no moving parts, it is faster to load files from disc to memory and it produces less heat. See further information on Intel’s SSDs

See larger image of Intel Solid State Drive

Will my laptop take an Intel SSD?

You'll need to check that your computer is compatible. It will need a SATA drive controller. If you are using  Windows you can find this out through the Device Manager under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers (see the screenshot below) – and Intel’s Solid State Drive Compatibility Guide (PDF)for more information and help.

If it is not SATA (probably ATA) then unfortunately you will not be able to use the SSD in your laptop. If you are replacing you existing drive with a traditional hard drive, then make sure you either get a SATA or ATA drive as appropriate.

Preparing for the swap over

If your laptop is SATA compatible, (and most recent up to 3 years old are), then you will be able to fit the SSD.

Things to consider or do:

• If the laptop is less than a year old, it is still covered by the manufacturer’s warranty. You might also have an extended warranty for up to three years from purchase. You’ll need to check that if you do replace the hard drive that you haven’t voided the warranty – see the paperwork that came with the laptop.
• Do a bit of housekeeping – clean and defragment the disk, get rid of any applications you’re not using, delete old files etc. – see the knowledgebase article Good Housekeeping.
  In any case, you’ll need to make sure that the current file size on the disc is less than 153Gb which is the actual capacity of a 160 GB drive. We’d suggest having at least 10% free space so work with a maximum capacity of about 140 GB. That’s plenty of room for an operating system (Windows XP, Vista or 7 for example), office productivity suite and other applications and typical files.
• Back up any user files that are on the laptop, either by using a back up program or just copying them off to an external hard drive, USB stick, CDR or DVDR.
• If you don’t already have them, create system recovery discs – some laptop manufacturers include an application that will create DVDs which back up the system and application files. Alternatively, some supply discs with the machine.

Once you have the SSD you will need: 

• Cloning software – Clonezilla, Norton Ghost , Acronis etc (see Wikipedia’s list of cloning software)
• A CD or DVD rewritable drive
• Somewhere to clone the disc to – we suggest an external USB hard drive that has enough capacity to store the image. The image will be slightly smaller than the amount of data that’s on the existing disc as Clonezilla compresses to a degree.
• A small Phillips head screwdriver – and small pot to put the screws in (so you don’t lose them!)

Three steps to SSD heaven

Essentially there are 3 steps to replacing the drive: 

1. You clone (copy) the existing hard drive to an image on an external hard drive
2. Remove the old drive and put in the SSD
3. Restore the clone image from the external drive to the SSD 

Software requirements

For the purposes of these guidance notes we have used the free open source cloning software Clonezilla. Please note that CLONEZILLA COMES WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  

To start with, go to Clonezilla.org and download the latest stable version of Clonezilla. 

View larger image of Clonezilla download page

It will download as an iso (disc image) and you’ll then need to use your disc burning software to create a disc from an iso file – see the snoekonline article How to successfully burn or write an ISO-image to CD , DVD , HD DVD , Blu-Ray for help and some freeware applications (note that this article was written in 2009).

The methodology will obviously vary depending on what software you are using.

Steps to take when cloning a disc with Clonezilla

We suggest you check out I Love Free Software’s Video Tutorial: How to Clone Disks Using CloneZilla or the video below and this tutorial from Clonezilla.

 

1. Start up the laptop, making sure it’s running on mains power. Insert the Clonezilla disc and restart the machine. Most laptops are set to look at the CD/DVD drive first when booting up so you should see a lot of lines of text as the Clonezilla application loads. If this doesn’t happen and your operating system (Windows etc) loads then you will need to go into the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) and reset it so the CD/DVD drive appears at the top of the boot list. See About.com’s article How to change the boot order in the BIOS.  
2. After a while you’ll see the first of a number of screens which Clonezilla will present with different options. The language used is somewhat technical but if you follow the options below you should successfully burn the disc image. 
3. Language - on the first screen select English as the language - press the enter key. 
4. Keyboard layout - select “Don’t touch keymap” – enter. 
5. Start Clonezilla - select “Start Clonezilla” – enter. 
6. Clonezilla - select “Device-image work with discs or partitions using images” - enter. 
7. Mount Clonezilla image directory - – select “local_dev Use local device (e.g. hard drive, USB hard drive)”. Clonezilla will then prepare a mount point and then request you to insert a USB device. It will confirm it’s found the device – enter. The USB device should then be mounted. 
8. Mount image repository – this will probably appear as sbd1, item 3. Use you arrow key to highlight it – enter. 
9. Which directory for the cloned image – unless you want otherwise, select ”Top directory” – enter. 
10. Choose mode – Beginner – enter. 
11. Savedisk – select “Save disc as image” – enter. 
12. Accept the image name as presented or change it if you wish! – enter. 
13. Choose local disc as the source – will be something like sda Fujitsu 120Gb – enter, enter. 
14. At “Clonezilla advances extra parameters.  After the image is saved, do you want to check if the image is restorable?  NOTE This action will only check the image is restorable, and it will not write any data to the hard drive” Y, then enter. 
15. Do you wish to continue? y then enter. 
16. Clonezilla will then clone the drive to the external drive which will probably take about 45 minutes or so, depending on how much data there is on the disc. Once it’s completed, choose power off, remove the Clonezilla disc when prompted, and wait for it to turn off. Detach the external hard drive. 

Swapping out the drive

You are now ready to swap the old hard drive out for the new SSD. To help you, there are several videos on YouTube which show how to replace a hard drive, including those shown below.

The steps are: 

1. Remove the power lead and battery. 
2. Most laptops will have a cover on the bottom held on place with a small screw or two which protects the drive. Remove the screw(s) to reveal the drive which will probably be in a caddy. 
3. Put the screws in your little pot – they are tiny and if they end up on the floor then you’ll probably never see them again. If it doesn’t look like you’ve uncovered a hard drive, then put the cover back on and try again! 
4. Take out the screws holding the caddy in place, then slide it out. 
5. The disc will be held in the caddy by screws, probably along the edges. Take these out and remove the drive. 
6. Put the SSD in its place, replace the screws, slide it into place securely, more screws and put the cover back on. 
7. Replace the battery and plug the power lead back in again. 

 

Restoring the disc image to the SSD

We’d suggest having a look at Clonezilla’s instructions for restoring a disk image.  

The steps are: 

1. Start up the laptop and insert the Clonezilla disc. 
2. Follow the same steps as in cloning above, except once you get to step 11 you choose sbd1 as the image repository and select “restoreimage”. 
3. Select the image name and the target drive (sda 160.0Gb Intel_SSDSA2MH16_ata_) Continue (y, enter) and if you are sure you want to continue, y and enter. 
4. Let it restore the image, which will take around the same length of time as it did to create it.  
5. Select power off and remove the disc when prompted. 
6. Start up the laptop again and it should boot as normal. The device driver software for the SSD will install and you’ll be asked to restart the machine. Once this is done, well, you’re done! 

Important note – These notes are for guidance only. Lasa accepts no responsibility or liability for loss or damage to systems should anything happen whilst cloning or swapping disc.