The controller (?) appears to have went south in the 160GB 5400 Seagate in one of the Asus EEE-PC 1005HA netbooks in my house. After a lot of troubleshooting I reluctantly decided to upgrade the hard drive to a 200GB 7200 Seagate I happen to have on hand, that I really had another use for. Oh well, at least I have it to use.
Now I upgraded the memory in these netbooks when I got them, and it was no big deal. Take the plate off the bottom replace the board boom done. I’ve also done lots of other hard drive replacements in laptops, and it is usually essentially the same deal, pop off the cover, a couple of screws maybe a ribbon cable, 5 minutes tops.
A netbook hard drive is a whole ‘nother ball of wax unfortunately. They aren’t meant to be end-user replaceable. There’s no little door! The operation reminded me a lot more of the time I spilled soda into a tiny Dell laptop I had, and I took the whole machine apart, every component separated from the motherboard, and various skeletons of the laptop all separated, to dry. Also it reminded me of the game, “Operation”!
Here’s a couple of resources that helped for this particular netbook, and I’m sure to a certain extent other EEE’s and other netbooks:
At this point (reinstalling Windows) the operation appears to be a success, so a story with a happy ending rather than a cautionary tale. How nice!
