Upgrading an HP EliteBook 2530p Laptop from 80GB SSD to 160GB SSD

This week, I upgraded one of my client’s out-of-space hard drive in his HP EliteBook 2530p laptop from the factory-shipped first generation 80GB Intel X18-M 1.8in SATA solid state drive (p/n SSDSA1MH080G1) to a newer second generation 160GB Intel X18-M 1.8in SATA solid state drive (p/n SSDSA1MH160G2).  The first generation 5mm drives max out at 80GB and there are no other Intel drives with more capacity.  Since the 8mm X18 drives don’t physically fit into the 2530p, we had to wait for Intel to release the second generation drives, which are 5mm and come with 160GB capacity.

The upgrade was fairly simple and worked as I had planned.  However, I am documenting what I did in case someone else wants the info.  I did not find any forum post on how to do such an upgrade on this particular hardware.

First, I used the Windows 7 Backup and Restore feature to “Create a system image” onto an external USB hard drive.  This will be used to restore the image onto the new drive.  This works also with Windows Vista Business and Ultimate using the “Complete PC Backup”.

I downloaded the HP EliteBook 2530p “Maintenance and Service Guide” from hp.com and followed the instructions on removing and re-installing the SSD.  This was painless and there were just a few screws to deal with.

Once the new 160GB SSD was installed, I booted with the Windows 7 installation CD and restored the previously saved image from the USB drive.  The restore process actually works great but it does not use the “unallocated” space at the end of the disk.  So, we still have an 80GB SSD with 80GB wasted.  To expand the partition, I used the latest stable gparted release (which today is 0.6.1.2).

I booted with the CD onto which I burned the gparted .iso image and accepted all the defaults and booted with gparted live.

When in gparted, I selected the “HP_TOOLS” partition (1GB, located at the end of our 80GB partition) and dragged it all the way to the end of the unallocated space of the new 160GB drive using the mouse pointer.  That left some unallocated space in between the C: drive and the HP_TOOLS drive.  So, I was able to expand the C: drive onto this unallocated space, again by dragging the mouse pointer.  We now have a roughly 159GB drive!  I applied the changes, which returned a success message.  I exited gparted and rebooted the notebook.  C: drive now has lots of additional space!

UPDATED 5/16/2011--  Unrelated note- notebooks with regular hard drives must have their BIOS Device Configuration “SATA Mode” set to AHCI, whereas ones with SSD must have it set to “IDE”.  Otherwise, Windows will fail to start, and a “Startup Repair” will not be successful.

UPDATED 5/19/2011-- I also have been aware of a few BSOD due to a bug in firmware 02HD.  Updating to 02M3 on the 160GB SSD is supposed to fix this.  However, upgrading the firmware has been a bit difficult.  Downloaded the new firmware from “Software & Drivers” on hp.com however, running that in Windows will not work because the SSD I purchased was not from HP so it says it’s incompatible.  So, downloaded the update from Intel.com, which consists of an ISO image to be burned on a CD for use to boot/update outside the OS.  The problem is the CD is not detected by any BIOS/Boot Device in any PC or laptop I’ve tried.  So, I followed instructions in http://communities.intel.com/thread/8906, except I skipped step “C)” as my ISO CD did not have a config.sys file.  The upgrade was quick and worked just fine with the 2 files that were on the CD.