I need to replace the HD in a HP laptop. The original took a spike from lightning and no longer spins. I have WD 60GB Passport external drive that I have removed the drive from and want to install it into the laptop. The Passport is formatted Fat32 and has the WD external utilities on it.

Am I correct in assuming that I can copy the folders off the Passport onto my laptop and then install the drive into the HP and format and install windows on it as NTFS? If there is more damage in the HP and the new drive won't solve the problem, can I return it to being an external drive again and copy the WD utilities back onto it?

Another question, the original HD from the HP (a Hitachi Travelstar) has a jumper across the bottom two pins on the far left of the IDE connector. The WD does not have any jumper on those pins and neither does the drives in my Dell or my son's Acer. Do I need to jumper them on the WD for installation into the HP?

is your WD a SATA drive? I don't think SATA drives have jumpers.

No they are both IDE.

you would have to look at the hdd label to see what the jumpers mean. usually since it's an only hdd, you'll have to select single/master for it to work properly in the laptop.

The original drive only shows the correct position of the jumper with nothing else noted. The WD drive has the same set of 4 pins that are jumped on the original but no mention of what they are. I assume like desktop drives they should all be the same?

According to WD the lower two jumper setting is for CS on all EIDE notebook drives which is what I was thinking.

I've got the HP running it's Quick Restore program on it now. I hope it won't matter that the original HD was 80GB and the replacement is only 60GB.

It shouldn't make one bit of difference.

Boy is it slow, still have 2 discs to go.