Upgrading Hard Drive in Panasonic CF-18

With a recent introduction of SATA drives, please make sure you are getting the old fashioned ATA-6. In our case it’s Western Digital 250GB, 5400RPM, 8MB Buffer, man. part number WD250BEVE.

In order to make a smooth upgrade it will be handy to have an external USB hard drive enclosure kit (around $8) and ~~Power Quest Drive Image 7.0 or higher~~ CopyWipe freeware program. There are many similar programs available.

First, connect new HDD using USB enclosure kit. Once recognized by Windows, go to Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management. The new hard drive will be shown as an unallocated space with approximately 232GB of space available.

Right click->Create new partition-> Follow wizard prompts.

I made 2 primary partitions 120GB each. One for operating system, another one for data.

Now it’s time to launch CopyWipe. I used Window version. The interface is very simple. Choose drive to copy, destination drive but don’t forget to pick “Copy MBR” at the last screen.

It took 60 minutes to copy a 60GB HDD.

Note: I also had success with Western Digital 320GB HDD, man. part number WD320BEVE.