Adding a 2nd hard drive or solid state drive to a laptop by replacing the DVD or Blu-ray drive

so in a previous video I talked about adding a second drive to a laptop and I recommended one of these so what it is is an adapter lets you put a laptop hard drive or solid-state drive inside of it and then this whole adapter goes into a laptop now I'm going to start by removing the laptops battery and taking out the DVD drive and on most laptops the DVD drive will be held in by one screw in this case it's right here and I'll set the screw aside and then the DVD drive just get a thumbnail in the edge and pull it out and that's generally how it's done now if you need help figuring out how to take out the DVD drive in your computer what you can do is find the model number of the computer for instance this final number is ms one six one eight if you do a google search for your laptop model number along with remove DVD drive in most cases you'll find instructions you might also try the model number and service manual to find the instructions okay so put that over there now this caddy there's actually two different sizes of this that you can buy on Amazon this is the larger of the two so what I did before I purchased this I took out the DVD drive and I measured the height of it this one is a little over 12 millimeters the thinner version of the drives are nine millimeter so definitely before you order the Caddy make sure you're getting the correct size now when you go to take out your DVD drive if it turns out to be a different size other than either 12 or 9 mm here these caddies won't work and if it's a slot loaded DVD as opposed to a tray that comes out if it's just a slot that goes in you're not going to be able to use this okay so the the Caddy comes with a generic faceplate it's just a flat basic faceplate and it may fit your laptop but chances are you're going to have to remove it and put on the one that came with your DVD Drive now on this one what I'm going to do you could and this can work although it's dangerous you can break it is just grip the faceplate and pull it off the problem with that is you risk breaking the clips that hold the faceplate onto the DVD Drive and then you won't be able to then transplant it over to the caddy so the safe way to go about it is to eject the tray and I'm just using a paper clip to go in this eject hole which allows the tray to come out so I'll hold it now this is the the top part this is where you put a disc turn it over and there are two clips that need to be released one right here and the other over on the left side and this can be difficult or it can be easy so what I'm going to do is just set it down I'm going to push in with a flathead screwdriver on the clip and then pull with my thumb the faceplate out and that also released it over here and it's all intact if it yours doesn't come out that easily on the other right side basically you do the same process you push down on the clip as you pull out okay so got our faceplate the next thing we need to do is transplant over this little bracket from the DVD drive over to the caddy to do that these are usually held in by two screws so I will unscrew both of them and while I'm doing this I'm having them in the same orientation so the power and data connections are on the left side so then I can just move this over and screw in the bracket onto the caddy so I won't tighten it all the way down until I get the other one started in the hole these are a little bit difficult to get to go in there you go okay so that's been carried over now this we can essentially just put it away you can always put that back in if you ever do need a DVD drive so the caddy looks like clone that came off really easy the temporary one on the caddy alright so basically you just put the faceplate from your DVD Drive on the caddy same way the temporary one came off just give it a good push all right now to install the hard drive I have one right here and what you do is you just line up the data and power connections with the data and power on the drive get that started and then let it drop down into the caddy and then I'll move it over all right so I'll turn this over and now the instructions that came with the caddy I have to tell you we're a disappointment they talk about a caddy retaining latch which this does not have so apparently they changed the version of the caddy and didn't bother to change the instructions so how you actually do it is on the drive there are screw holes on the side and these little pin looking things are actually screws so you take this tiny screwdriver they send along with it and you tighten it down basically you want to get it all the way in so this part is smooth otherwise it'll get caught as you're trying to put the caddy into the laptop just about there okay and then I'll do the other one hmm doesn't look doesn't feel like this is going to go in alright what I'm going to do is just take out this one having one of the two screws in there will be enough to keep it in place I'm just gonna completely unscrew this and take that out okay so the other thing about this the build quality on the Caddy is not very good but you know it's only ten dollars on Amazon and it does work they it feels a little bit flimsy and they have this tape on there and you basically have to peel it off problem I saw is that it kind of goes under some of the parts so it's actually under there but I'll go ahead and take it off back on there yeah so though the faceplate doesn't hold on very well given that this outside piece doesn't actually serve any functions what you could do if yours doesn't clip on very well is put some hot glue on the the clips and then push it in and when the glue hardens it'll stay in place okay so that is ready see if we can slide this back in and basically you just put it in the way that it came the way the the DVD drive came out go ahead and remove this tape from this bracket okay I'll just get it going and it may be a tight fit feels like this is just line it up and wiggle it in there it goes alright so then I'll put the screw back in battery back in and power it up and everything I'm doing from this point on applies to adding a second hard drive or a second drive whether a hard drive or a solid-state drive to any computer the process is the same whether you put it into a caddy like I just did or a regular drive bay okay so we're in Windows I'm gonna click on the file explorer and it's come up to the this PC view by default on Windows 10 it'll come up to the quick access to get to this view just click this PC so it's showing me my C Drive which is a 120 gigabytes solid-state drive and also the new D drive this is the drive that I put into the caddy it's showing up here because this hard drive was previously in another computer now if I had put in a new hard drive or one that was blank had been previously erased it wouldn't show up here so when you do this don't be surprised if the drive doesn't show up because if it's a blank or new drive it won't there's a few other things you have to do before it shows up so to show you what actually happens what I'm going to do is take this blank drive and connect it with a SATA to USB adapter so I'll connect the drive and the computer will detect it and you notice it didn't show up here in this PC that's because the drive is blank first it needs to be initialized and then formatted and given a drive letter so to do that on Windows 10 or Windows 8 you right click that's clicking with the right mouse button on the start button and go to Disk Management if you're running Windows 7 or Windows Vista you left-click on the start button right click on computer and go to manage and click Disk Management on the left so when Disk Management started up it noticed that we have a blank drive connected and it's asking us if we want to initialize the disk basically just take the defaults here and click ok so here in the view we can see the C Drive which is the solid-state drive in the computer and the D Drive which is the drive I put in the caddy and if I scroll down there is a third Drive and it says it's unallocated so to format the drive what you do is you right-click on just a blank spot and click new simple volume click next let it use the whole space on the drive next it will assign a drive letter the next one available and in this case it's the e drive you can click and change that if you like I'll click Next the default choice is to format the drive which is what you want no reason to change the file system or the allocation unit size the volume label you can basically just change it to whatever you like I usually leave it blank we perform a quick format checked otherwise it takes a really long time and click Next and finish it'll format the drive and open it up in a new window so this is a blank Drive I'll go ahead and close it and the disk management and here it is in the list now since that was just to show you what would happen if you did put in a blank or new hard drive I'm going to go ahead and eject that disk and disconnect it so the reason I added a second drive to the computer is that I needed more storage and that is pretty much the only reason you would add a second trap to a computer but on the C Drive it's only a 120 gigabyte solid state drive and that's where Windows is installed and that's where I'll install all the programs that will make the computer nice and responsive now as far as where the files will go I want to put them all on the D Drive and if I go into the D Drive since this came out of another computer it's got a Windows folder and programs folders and users folders now what I'm going to do is go through the process of removing the Windows folder and moving the files that are in the users folders to the root of the D Drive so to start that process I'm going to double click on the user folder that has all the files in it and whenever you try and open up a user folder on a hard drive that was originally in another computer it will ask you to get permission to access the folder just basically just click continue and this can take a long time or a short amount of time it really depends on the speed of the drive and the amount of files you have in the folders ok so here I've got the desktop folder of documents downloads favorites music pictures and videos folders there's a few others but those are the ones I'm really concerned about because they actually have files in them so if right now I'm going to go back to this PC to the C Drive users and living room and this is the user folder for the user account that I'm currently logged into if I click the start button you can see it says living room so what I'm going to do right now these folders are on the C Drive and as I start downloading things and creating files the drive would get full very quickly there's only let's see 75 gigabytes free on this drive so what I'm going to do is I'm going to move these key folders to the root of the D Drive to do that I'm going to right click on the first one and go to properties click on location and right here it's telling me where it's currently located so on the C Drive in the users living room and it's called desktop and I want to move that to the D Drive so I'll click move which brings up select a destination I'm gonna go to this PC double click on my D Drive and I'm going to create a new folder called desktop I'm gonna highlight the folder and click select folder and when I click OK it's going to ask me if I want to remove all the files that are currently on the desktop on the C Drive to the new desktop folder on the D Drive and in this case it's just going to be this utilities folder that gets moved but basically anything that's in the folder on the C Drive will be moved to the new folder on the D Drive I'll click yes and you'll notice the desktop folder is no longer here it's actually now on the D Drive on the root of the drive and there's my utilities folder so what I'm gonna do is go back to the living-room folder on the C Drive and do the same thing to the Documents folder I'm going to right click go to properties location move go to this PC and the D Drive create a folder called documents highlight the folder and click select folder ok and yes to confirm the move I didn't have any files in the Documents folder so it happened instantaneously I'll do the same to downloads only this time I'm going to do it a little bit differently then go to location instead of going through the move process what you can actually do is just type in where you want it to be so I'm going to change it to the D Drive take those extra folders out make it just be downloads and when it when I click OK says it does not exist do you want to create it I'm gonna click yes and say yes to moving any files that are there you so the Downloads folder disappeared and I'll go check and make sure it is definitely under the D Drive so doing it that way shaved off a few steps I'm not really concerned with the favorites and I don't have anything in the music folder but I'll go ahead and move it just in case I do start downloading music and putting it in the music folder so properties location change it to the D Drive into a music folder on the root of the drive okay yes to create it and yes to move in files and again there's nothing there so it was pretty well instantaneous do the same for pictures and the videos folder okay so back on this PC I've freed up some space on the C Drive already which will leave me plenty of space to put on any extra programs and under the D Drive we now have the desktop documents downloads pictures and videos folders on the D Drive so if I go back to this PC all these folders at the top instead of being on the C Drive they're now on the D Drive so if I right-click on any one of them and go to properties under location they are on the D Drive you know what that means is that anytime you're in a program and you want to save something you can just save it to the desktop or the documents or the downloads any one of those folders and you don't have to think about where it's going on the drive it's just automatically put on the D Drive where you have lots of free space now under the D Drive since this hard drive came from another computer there's still a Windows folder and a few programs files folders that don't really need to be there anymore now the issue is getting rid of them it's not easy if you can it all help it it's best to when you move a drive that's previously been used in another computer to a new computer is to format it and start over fresh now in this case this Drive actually had some files on it that I didn't want to just delete because it would take a lot longer to back those up and then put them back on and to do what I'm about to do which is show you how to delete a Windows folder on a second hard drive that was previously used in another computer now in most cases to delete a folder you would right click on it and tell it to delete and in the case of the windows folder and usually the programs files folders as well it won't let you do it it will say that the files are inaccessible because they come from a different version of Windows then you're actually on at the moment so folder access tonight is generally what it says and if you click try again it just tries again and it fails so I'll click cancel so there is a manual way to go about this but I'm going to try a program called unlocker it's going to do a Google search for it looks like I can get it from major geeks major geeks is pretty good about not having too much ads the trick you into downloading things that you don't really need although there was there is one right there but it automatically started to download so I'm going to get it installed and you want to be careful when you're installing a program like this the quick option will install a toolbar into your browser which you don't want so I'm going to click advanced and uncheck the toolbar option it's going to put it on the C Drive and it's going to put an extension in the Explorer what that means is that when I right click on a folder it'll give me the option to use this program on it and I'm going to uncheck the updates option the program should work just as it is without updates and that would more than likely if you lie to do updates put something in your startup so it would constantly be running in the background I'm gonna close that down so now if I right-click on the windows folder and make sure you're doing this on the drive that's not the one that's actually your C Drive so I'm on local disk D if you try and delete the windows directory on your C Drive you're gonna have some problems so again this is a Windows folder that's on a second hard drive and it's a version of Windows that's no longer in use and I just want to delete the folder so I'm going to right-click on it and go to unlocker I'm going to change no action to delete and click OK and at first it made like it's not doing anything but then a little program window will pop up and give you a progress bar and this can take a long time the advantage to this program is that you tell it to delete the folder and it just does everything for you as opposed to going through the manual route which is a multi-step process where you have to do several things and then wait for a period of time for that to get done and then do some more things and wait for that to get done and very often there's a third set of things you have to do in order to just delete the windows folder this program will just take care of it so this is something you probably want to do when when you're not going to need the computer for a period of time it's probably a good idea to do this before you you know go away from the computer for lunch or even when you go to bed at night tell it to do it and you can see it's just now starting to get a green progress bar it's going to take some time so after this got done I would then go on to delete the users folders of the programs folders and all the other folders on the D Drive that I no longer need and you may be thinking well why not just highlight them all and tell it to do them all at the same time well unfortunately that doesn't work if you try doing that the unlocker program just doesn't start at all you can only do it one folder at a time so that's another way to install the second hard drive into a laptop how to move your folders from the C Drive to the D Drive and how to delete no longer needed Windows folders from the second drive thanks for watching

Channel: Michael The Computer Guy

Views: 424,441

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Id: VytfZn2hnh8

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 06 2016