My Aunt gave me her old laptop, which works well, but the top will not stay up. It makes it almost impossible to use. My mother bought a used laptop, which is beautiful, but the hard drive is crashing, and so it's almost completely unusable. I was wondering if it would be possible to swap out the hardrives? One is a Sony and the other is a Toshiba. If it is possible, how do you do it? Any advise would be GREATLY appreciated!

Hmmm techniaclly it is possible, but a right pain as laptops tend to use a lot of proprietary connections.
Also it will be unlikely, if you can swap the drives that it will work in a different machine due to different drivers.

There is a cool trick you can do with XP if you swap drives to a different spec machine. You boot on to an XP CD and do a repair which normally updates the drivers for the different hardware.
I haven't tried this in a laptop, yet, but it works well with desktop machines.

Good luck

Before you do any of this, make sure to back up any data you will miss!

As Curly says, you will probably have some problems with drivers, and maybe activation if you're on xp, but the hard disks themselves should transfer:

When you take the drives out, look closely at each - they usually have some kind of pin adapter to change a standard 2 1/2 inch drive to the manufacturers connection. You will have to swap these over so make sure you know which way they were on because if you get it wrong you could fry the drive.

On the hard drives, there will usually be an indicator of pin 1 - either a number or an arrow at one end of the row of connecting pins. Make sure the adapter you take off one drive goes on the new drive the same way in relation to pin 1. Sometimes they tell you which is pin 39/40 at the other end.

All 2 1/2 inch drives have the same form factor (as far as I know) so once you've changed the adapters over the other drive should fit the working laptop.
Good Luck

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Originally Posted by OneRay0fSunlight

My Aunt gave me her old laptop, which works well, but the top will not stay up. It makes it almost impossible to use. My mother bought a used laptop, which is beautiful, but the hard drive is crashing, and so it's almost completely unusable. I was wondering if it would be possible to swap out the hardrives? One is a Sony and the other is a Toshiba. If it is possible, how do you do it? Any advise would be GREATLY appreciated!

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One thing I do know about laptops, as I have a Sony Vaio, is that if you swap HDDs you'll have to go to the site of the laptop that is functioning, have the make, model, and serial number ready, and download all the drivers, to incluse the BIOS, keypad, and any other peripherals such as virtual drives USB ports, WLAN, Ethernet, sound card, etc. in order for them to function. If at all possible, and you know how, use a program like Ultra ISO to make a bootable image and then burn the operating system with all it's drivers of the one that's has the messed up lid. Use an app like SIW.EXE (which reveals the Windows XP Code that you need if installing and don't have it written down, or it's not on a sticker on the old laptop), all in all, it will be a process that will take a lot of time and patience. At any rate, before you do anything, try and make a complete backup of both Operating systems, and all other information you want to keep, just in case.
One other thing that might work, is if you purchase an external HDD for laptops, and transfer the Operating System to this, then try and get the old spastic HDD checked somehow, this might save you a few nerves. Good Luck. The SIW.EXE file can be found on the net, and if not PM me and I'll send it to you. It's a great app that gives you all the information about everything and every code on your computer.

http://smileys.smileycentral.com/cat/36/36_13_10.gif You'll need nerves of steel for this chore!