Changing the Hard Drive in a Panasonic CF-R3

The laptop I use is a Panasonic Let's Note CF-R3E which I got in Hong Kong in December of 2004. Last winter, I slipped on some ice and fell on my back: crushing my backpack and the R3. Thankfully, only a bit of plastic got broken, and I thought all was well.

As it turns out, the corner of the laptop which I fell on was also where the hard disk is at. And a few weeks ago, I began to notice some intermittent hard drive flakiness. It looked to me like I would need to change it out soon.

The stock disk in the CF-R3E is a 3.3V Toshiba MK4025GASL, a 40GB 2.5" 4200RPM drive. This site claims that it can be replaced by a 5.0V Toshiba MK1031GAS, which is a 100GB 4200RPM drive that costs $85 from ewiz.com. Apparently, you can convert a 5.0V drive to a 3.3V drive by clipping pins 41 and 44. Since my stock drive was clearly on its way out, I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

Fortunately, there are instructions online for disassembling a CF-R3E. Unfortunately, it's all in Japanese. I had to infer what to do from the pictures, and I spent the morning installing the drive. Thankfully, it went well. Here is an account of what I did.

1. Back up my hard disk. I did this by booting with Bart's Network Boot Disk (you'll need the rtsnd.cab package, to drive the R3's Realtek RTL8139/810X Family PCI Fast Ethernet controller), mounting a large drive on another computer through the network, and using Norton Ghost to back up the drive.
2. Disassemble the computer. The Japanese site's pictures come in handy. The first step is to remove the battery, revealing two metal brackets---one on the left and one on the right---which keep the keyboard affixed:
   
   Just slide each bracket upwards to take it off.
   
   The second task is to remove two sets of screws from the back of the computer:
   
   Each set is a different kind of screw: so there are two "cyan" style screws and six "yellow" style screws. Make sure you remember which is which (though that's easy since there are only two of one and six of the other.) The cyan screws go down all the way to the keyboard: make sure you're gentle with these. Don't press down too hard as you remove them.
   
   The third task is to remove two screws from the front, one underneath each hinge:
   
   You'll have to peel off the rubber covers to get to these screws.
   
   The fourth task is to detach the keyboard from the case. You can get the keyboard up off the case by pushing on the tabs in the back, where the brackets were grabbing the keyboard. Then you can grab the keyboard by the corners behind the ESC and DEL key. Slowly angle the top of the keyboard towards you. There's a bit of adhesive behind the P-key that keeps the keyboard down. Take care not to stress the keyboard too much, and make sure you watch out for the ribbon cable that attaches the keyboard (near the space bar) to the motherboard. You'll have to unplug this cable.
   
   You'll then find a metal heat spreader: just pull that up off the system. You'll find some thermal grease connecting it to two chips. You'll have to replace this grease later, when you reattach things.
   
   Now on to the fifth task: removing seven more screws!
   
   
   At this point you can remove the front cover from the system. A couple of notes on this: 1) be careful since there's another ribbon cable connecting the touch pad to the motherboard. 2) the cover to the ethernet and phone jacks can get snagged on the front case. Make sure you keep that cover open.
3. Now we can replace the hard drive. It's in the lower right of the computer:
   
   
   Lift up the drive, taking care not to stress the ribbon cable connecting the drive to the laptop. You can pry the cable off the hard drive without having to detach the cable from the motherboard.
   
4. Look at the 40GB 3.3V hard drive. Compare that drive with the 100GB. You'll notice that the 40GB drive is missing a pin. You'll have to get rid of that pin, and another one, on the 100GB drive. I was able to bend them away, and plug it in. Here's a diagram indicating which pins need to be modified:
   

   ◆◆ 　◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◇◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◇
   ◆◆ 　◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◇◆

5. Reverse the procedure in step 2 and you will have reassembled your laptop!
6. Finally, boot up using Bart's network boot disk and use Norton Ghost to restore the backup you made in step 1. Start it up and Windows XP should boot. To use the new space, run disk administrator and create a new partition with the extra 60GB. Alternatively, you can use Partition Magic to resize your existing partition.

All done! You now have a 1kg (2.2 lbs) notebook with 100GB of hard disk space! You can also install a 1GB PC2700 MicroDIMM to bump the total RAM to 1.25GB (this is 512MB more than the R3 is officially supposed to go to). Though the processor (a 1.1GHz Pentium M-733 with 2MB L2 cache and 400MHz FSB) limits performance significantly, the system is still quite functional. The extra ram cuts the battery life from the rated 9hrs to around 6hrs.

By comparison: the current model, just released a week ago by Panasonic, is the Let's Note CF-R5L, which features 512MB RAM (expandable to 1.5GB), a 60GB 4200RPM HD, a 1.2GHz Core Solo U1400 (2MB L2 cache, 533MHz FSB), and an 11-hr rated battery life.

So... Anyone want to buy a used Toshiba MK4025GASL drive? :)