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As my internal 100Gb hard disk on the Toshiba M400 (T2400) had only 5% free space: even after archiv­ing pho­tos and pod­casts, I could not reduce the free space to under 10%.

Time for a new HD. Pur­chased from Aus­p­cmar­ket, 200Gb 7200 RPM Seag­ate Momentum drive.

As much as this Toshiba has lim­it­a­tions that are start­ing to annoy me (read: screen real-estate: can I have a new XPS now, please. ta.) — adding and delet­ing the hard drive was extremely simple.

Pro­cess

1. Win­dows Vista “Win­dows Com­plete Backup” (in Backup and Restore) to second hard drive
2. Phys­ic­ally remove old drive, install new drive
1. remove two screws hold­ing in the plastic cover
2. use the plastic tab to remove the hard disk in it alu­minium bay
3. remove four screws hold­ing the SATA hard disk in the bay
4. insert and replug new SATA hard disk
5. reverse install procedure.
3. PXE boot from net­work, where we have a net­work based, Sys­tem Recovery
4. A pleas­ant UI appears; only con­fus­ing part was ensur­ing I had a copy of my disk drivers on USB
5. Restore from the backup, onto the new hard disk.
6. Reboot from new hard disk
7. Using Com­puter Management>Disk Man­age­ment, Right-click “Extend Volume” to the full 200Gb
8. Done

Per­form­ance of the disk drive: 4.9 to 5.4; that is a10% increase.