are all hard drives the same?

was given a laptop that is the same as mine except it would not boot up. pulled the hard drive from mine and installed it into "new to me" laptop and it booted / worked fine

so i suspect the hard drive died - it's a toshiba laptop - can i buy any hard drive or does it have to be machine specific?

also is there a way to clone the new drive so that its an except copy of the one i have?

 

Sounds like a project. I can't help you, but I do have Halloween candy if you need a break.

 

great pretty sure they are all the same just need to find a deal on a new one and (ask erick) clone the old one -

 

I have a buddy who raves about a utility called norton ghost. which sounds like what you want to do. but that assumes the source drive is working

drives will have a common form factor but can be very different.
it depends largely on how closely you look and how much you care.

so you need to have the same form factor and interface. i.e. 2.5 inch for a laptop is typical. the interface will be parallel ata or serial ata.
google the part number of what you pulled out, that will tell you what "kind" you need to put back in.

 

you might be able to get away with just reinstalling the OS on the old drive.
could be the OS just got corrupted

 

Thanks Jerry - i think she tried that before she gave it to me so my guess is that the drive is dead - as mentioned took out my old drive (same laptop) and the machine works fine

so it would be cool to clone the drive and have two of the same machines

and you're right 2.5 -

so then my next question - can i get any size drive - don't think i need any more than say a 160 gb

 

i'm actually surprised your disk swap worked btw.

if you ghost that may dictate what size drive you do.

i'll suggest this would be a good time to try windows 7.
how old is the laptop?

 

got ya - pretty sure both are 4 years old