I've had a Sharp MM20 ultralight notebook for over a year and have been very happy with it. All the hardware is Linux-supported, it gets good battery life, and it's both tiny and light weight. One thing has always bugged me, though: the small 20GB hard drive. However, there was nothing to be done for it, since the system has a 1.8" disk and I could not find any replacements -- I think these things mostly end up in iPods...
Then, about a month ago, I found the
Hitachi C4K60 60GB 1.8" disk at CDW. "Ah-ha!", I thought. "My disk troubles are over! I'm sure I can figure out how to get this little machine open and wedge the disk in! World domination is near at hand!"
After getting the little thing in the mail after a couple weeks' wait, I set about installing it. I had noticed there was a slight difference in height between the 20GB C4K40 and this disk, since the 60GB drive had two platters instead of one, but I was confident that this was not an insurmountable obstacle.
The process is detailed below, complete with illustrations and commentary. Click on the images for larger versions. *WARNING* if you choose to follow in my footsteps, BE AWARE that you will be voiding your warranty and could irreparably damage your laptop and/or loose all of your data. I didn't, but I am a trained professional computery person.
PS. I can't get the images to stop floating over the menu bar on the right side. If anyone has ideas of how to fix this, please, let me know.
Step 1: remove the keyboard screws
Take out the two screws circled above. Put them somewhere safe. In fact, decide now where to put all the screws for this little project, to make sure you won't accidently knock them off your desk and have to crawl around on the floor looking for them. Not that I have ever done this.
Step 2: remove the rear lid screws
Take out the three screws circled in red above. The little dimple, circled in yellow, becomes important later.
Step 3: remove the keyboard
Open the LCD panel. Look down at the keyboard. You'll notice on the front side (towards the trackpad) that there are several small tabs that hook under the metal cover. Slide the keyboard up, towards the LCD, and these will come free.
Lift the keyboard up and unplug the cable from the system board. Be careful, this ribbon cable is delicate.
Step 4: remove the upper lid
Take out all the screws circled in red above. Reach around the back of the machine and un-hook the lid from that little dimpled bit circled in yellow in step 2 above. Tilt the LCD back all the way so that it lies flat.
Tilt the lid forward and disconnect the trackpad cable. Just like the keyboard, this part is delicate, so be careful. Slide the lid forward at a bit of an angle to get it off. Don't tilt it up too far, there are little metal tabs holding it down and you don't want to bend them.
The bottom of the lid, complete with trackpad.
Step 5: take out the hard drive
Behold, the guts of the machine! I'm impressed, this thing is really very elegantly designed. From here, remove the four screws holding in the disk, unplug it, and take it out. If you can't do that without more explicit instructions, you should probably just stop now.
Step 6: make the new disk fit
Mmmmm, the scary part! This is not for the faint of heart. You'll see, under the disk, a couple of ridges and sundry bits of molding that stick up from the bottom of the metal case. These need to be scraped down for the slightly thicker 60GB disk to fit. I used a small file. Be careful with this, and make sure you thoroughly clean out the inside of the case when you're done! You don't want short anything out...that would suck.
And no, I don't have any "before" pictures of the scraped bits. I took these pictures after I was already done.
A closer, but blurry, image of the scraped bits.
A different angle. Still blurry. Sorry about that.
The two disks. The old one is on the left, the new one on the right.
Step 7: put it all back together
Reverse the above instructions, and you should be in good shape. One thing to note, however: the case does not fit 100% correct. I ended up with a slight bulge on the front of the case near the trackpad. I took a picture of that, but you really can't see it so I didn't bother to put the picture up here. You can feel the slight bulge, but it's hard to demonstrate that via the Inter-Web.
To compensate, I loosened the two screws visible here:
about 1/4 turn. They aren't loose, exactly, but they allow a tiny bit more play then if they're tightened all the way down.
Misc.
While I had the machine open, I noticed that the mini-PCI WLAN card has a second, unused, antenna connector. This opens up all sorts of fascinating ideas, like rigging up an external antenna connector. I'm pretty sure one could actually be put on the machine's side panel pretty easily. Not a project for today, however...
PS: the keyboard part number is hmb989-g01. The sticker under the keyboard says "hmb989-g01 us 0403260043a" in all...