Originally Posted by
LIH Prem
...Newegg has the Seagate internal 2.5" 80G IDE drive for around $65 if you want to go the other way and reinstall onto a clean disk. Maybe you can get your friend to pay for the new hard drive?
Let's take this a step further: put a new drive in the laptop, put the old drive in an external enclosure, and use it for backup. You'll need some form of backup anyhow. An external drive is one of the better approaches. That way you'll have all your old files, too.