Hard Drive Image creation

[denbor6]

My primary need is to cost effectively maintain my S10e , as a pensioner I cannot afford to pay the going labour rates. The more I can do with the right advice, the better. I am not a techy, but I am capable of following step by step instructions.

My foremost concerns are to be able to:
(1) replace the hard drive with everything it has should it cease to function or crash & burn! Meaning as if nothing went wrong!
(2) To access the least cost way of migrating to Windows 7 in the near future.

Hard Drive Replacement
Kindly recommend; hopefully a plug and play freeware solution that works. I sense the need to maintain an ongoing accurate image of the hard drive and also a replacement hard drive brand that in fututre has the ability to create a back up image with it's built in capability.

WINDOWS 7 Migration
Is there a marginal cost Lenovo solution to upgrade from XP to Windows 7. This may be better to do before any catastrophy and if so would the restore button work ? Because I travel I need a recovery solution without having to call a halt to my travels!

Most appreciated if you can alleviate these concerns so that I can manage the cost of ownership of the S10e. I have just returned from 2 months of backpacking. It did a great job reducing my costs of travelling. In Feb I'll be heading out to SE Asia for another 2 months; backpacking! Simply have to know how to take care of this baby before then!

Dennis

[pseudo]

replacing the hard drive (HDD) couldn't be easier... you need a 2.5" SATA HDD (not IDE - old standard, or 3.5" - desktop size) and a small phillips screwdriver (find one that fits )

Unscrew the two silver screws on the back of the case, pop open the cover and you have access to the HDD.

Slide the HDD back and remove it... it is in a thin frame that you need to remove (four screws of the same size as the cover).

Replace this frame on your new HDD, slide the new one back in and replace the cover... done!

I'm not sure about creating an image of the drive, but I have read on this forum that the one key restore (OKR) function fails if any changes are made to the partition table or the OSes installed.

You could always carry a USB key with a bootable OS on it (Windows, Linux or your choice) so you can always use your netbook regardless of the state of the HDD... you can even get a big one (like 8 or 16GB - mine was about £12) and use it to back up your important files/data too.

[SilverZero]

As for imaging your hard drive, you could take a look at Acronis TrueImage. It's a great program and easy to use. Make a full disk image and restore it to the new disk (you'll need to make bootable media for TI as well). Here's one guide, but there may be better ones out there:

http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hard ... 16043.aspx