[Tutorial] Upgrading the Fujitsu Lifebook UH552

[Monovertex]

Hy guys! I just bought this laptop and I wanted to replace its HDD and I decided to document my progress.

You can view the tutorial hijacked link removed

In case anyone is interested in it and has questions, please ask .

 

[tom_mai78101]

In case anyone is interested in it and has questions, please ask .

Just read your tutorial. Seems very simple. I'm curious on the ultrabook that you've bought (I don't own one, but I'm intrigued by them), so here are some of my questions:

1. I don't get how the SSD connector that you pulled away from the SSD metal connector pins is connected to the motherboard. Unless your picture hides some of the obscure wirings, it looks like the head is separated from the laptop.

2. By taking out your original SSD, and place in a larger one, where do you boot your operating system? Or you have the larger SSD pre-installed with an operating system? What about the laptop's recovery system?

 

[Accname]

The recovery utility is often hard coded into the motherboard or something like that. It is usually not stored on the drive in case the drive is damaged and/or destroyed.

 

[tom_mai78101]

The recovery utility is often hard coded into the motherboard or something like that. It is usually not stored on the drive in case the drive is damaged and/or destroyed.

Oh. Thanks for the info.

 

[Monovertex]

Just read your tutorial. Seems very simple. I'm curious on the ultrabook that you've bought (I don't own one, but I'm intrigued by them), so here are some of my questions:

1. I don't get how the SSD connector that you pulled away from the SSD metal connector pins is connected to the motherboard. Unless your picture hides some of the obscure wirings, it looks like the head is separated from the laptop.

2. By taking out your original SSD, and place in a larger one, where do you boot your operating system? Or you have the larger SSD pre-installed with an operating system? What about the laptop's recovery system?

1. The SATA connector is the large black things, and is connected to the motherboard through a thin black wire. See this picture, it show the empty HDD bay and you can see the connector with its wire:

2. The SSD I placed instead was blank. I just installed a fresh copy of Windows 8. You have to understand that the BIOS is not stored on the hard driver, but rather on a special memory chip placed in the computer.

Recovery can mean a lot of things. If you mean Windows' recovery, that is stored on the HDD, contrary to what Accname said and it just got overwritten when I installed Windows.

If you mean the BIOS, that is not a recovery utility and I said earlier where it's stored.

 

[tom_mai78101]

I finally saw the black wires, so obscure.

Installed Windows 8 via USB?

 

[Monovertex]

Yeah. USB-booting for installations is pretty standard these days, I installed a lot of Linux flavors and Windows 7 / 8 via USB.

It's becoming standard especially because a lot of laptops, especially because ultrabooks and netbooks don't have a CD-ROM, they're too thin. Besides, who uses CDs / DVDs anymore? When I built my desktop a few months ago, I didn't even took a DVD-ROM in consideration, lol.

 

[The Helper]

Just read your tutorial. Seems very simple. I'm curious on the ultrabook that you've bought (I don't own one, but I'm intrigued by them), so here are some of my questions:

1. I don't get how the SSD connector that you pulled away from the SSD metal connector pins is connected to the motherboard. Unless your picture hides some of the obscure wirings, it looks like the head is separated from the laptop.
---------------------------------
The SATA Controller

2. By taking out your original SSD, and place in a larger one, where do you boot your operating system? Or you have the larger SSD pre-installed with an operating system? What about the laptop's recovery system?

-----------------------------------
Bios autodetects the drive and you can boot from any media that is set to startup in bios.

Flash Memory is Cheapo and there are huge flash drives and OS does not take up that much. You can boot off a usb flash drive as long as you set it before your hard drive in your motherboard boot priorities.

For some reason people do not connect this and lots of viruses were spread back in the day. Windows used to come preset to open bootable usb devices by default. It was a hackers paradise.

You had to go into Windows and disable that shit if you wanted to be safe which they finally did with some patch but it was open for a long time. One of the things that got the botnets so entrenched in the beginning.

 

[axlwinter]

Yeah. USB-booting for installations is pretty standard these days, I installed a lot of Linux flavors and Windows 7 / 8 via USB.

It's becoming standard especially because a lot of laptops, especially because ultrabooks and netbooks don't have a CD-ROM, they're too thin. Besides, who uses CDs / DVDs anymore? When I built my desktop a few months ago, I didn't even took a DVD-ROM in consideration, lol.

Thanks for your tutorial. Are you running dual boot Linux/Windows? That is what I want to do but I only have Windows 7 Home Premium at the moment. If so, how did you handle the Fujitsu Recovery Partitions? Did you delete them and if so how?

Any help is much appreciated!

 

[Monovertex]

Hello axlwinter and welcome to the TheHelper.net forums!

I currently do not run dual boot, because I did so in the past and I found it really cumbersome. I mainly use Linux for some of my development work, and I found it easier to run it in virtual machines, depending on the dev environment I work in. This way I can swap and manipulate them really easy. It was time consuming for me to keep restarting the computer to switch the OS.

However, lately I started using Windows 8 + Cygwin + virtual machines, which gives me the most powerful and versatile configuration. So it really depends on what you want to use the OS's for.

As for the recovery partition, I didn't have them, as I remember, since the laptop did not come with a pre-installed OS. But generally such recovery partitions are used for restoring the native OS (usually Windows) and when you do have those, you usually also have the option to create DVDs (and probably USBs) for recovery. At least this is how it was on my older Toshiba. Generally I did not care much for the recovery partitions, because if you do have the Windows serial key for your installation, you can pretty much use any other setup, even a trail or something. I guess Windows even provides digital downloads lately (don't quote me on that though).

As for deleting them, you should certainly be able to do that from an OS installation setup (Linux or Windows) as they usually include a partition manager which pretty much lets you do anything. If you can't do it that way, GParted is a great Unix-based tool which you can install on an USB and manage your partitions from it however you want. If you wish I can give you some more instructions on how to install GParted on a USB (how I do it).

 

[axlwinter]

Hello MonoVertex!

Thanks for your reply.

I am not that concerned about the contents of the recovery partitions either. I have a legitimate Windows serial which came with the laptop and as you say, Windows ISOs can be downloaded directly from Microsoft, and so can the drivers needed from Fujitsu.

I am little freaked out about just deleting them though because I am afraid I will lose my current Windows installation or make it unbootable...

This is the partitions I have at the moment, as you can see I have allocated 100Gb for Linux which is currently unallocated.

I burned Linux Mint 16 to a USB flash drive and it booted up fine but when I ran the installation, from within the Cinnamon desktop, it said that "No operating system" could be found... so it seems Linux does not recognize Windows being there since Windows is booting from the recovery partitions or something?

What would you advice me to do? Is there any safe way of removing the recovery partitions and making Windows boot from drive C: instead so that the Linux dual boot installation will be a bit simpler?

I guess I could always remove all partitions except C: and reinstall Windows but I would rather avoid reinstalling if possible.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks

 

[The Helper]

I gave a call out to a big gun. Hopefully he will respond and can give additional help. He is real busy though so I am not promising.

 

[Bookworm]

What you're seeing is more than one thing.

First, the HDBR partitions are the Hard Disk Boot Recovery partitions. If you've created the 'factory restore' disks/flash drive image, you can safely nuke those - on any computer.
WinRE, is Windows Recovery/Repair Environment. (Where startup repair comes from).
I don't think I need to explain C: and D:.

Next is that Linux Mint is not UEFI aware (or wasn't from the last few articles I could find). Meaning it doesn't like GPT partitions, or EFI bios, but wants standard GRUB. If the BIOS is pointing towards UEFI, and Mint looks for the normal boot sector, it's not going to think there's actually an operating system - just a bunch of partitions.

Here's an article with some quick explanations about multi boot and UEFI.

http://www.zdnet.com/my-experiments-with-multi-boot-selection-with-uefi-boot-manager-7000013627/

My _personal_ recommendation? Back everything up, turn UEFI off in the BIOS, reload the system without UEFI, then try installing Mint. (or Ubuntu, or Kubuntu, or SuSE, or whatever floats your kayak)

I hope that helps!

Bookworm

 

[Bookworm]

The recovery utility is often hard coded into the motherboard or something like that. It is usually not stored on the drive in case the drive is damaged and/or destroyed.

This is extremely misleading. The recovery _utility_ is often part of the CMOS, but the recovery media is _absolutely_ stored on the hard drive. I can't imagine a manufacturer being willing to install 20 GB of NAND flash to a system, just to make sure you could reinstall if your hard drive crashed.

 

[Monovertex]

I'm sorry, I forgot to mention the UEFI thing that new Windows laptops seem to have turned on.

In my opinion, the recovery partitions are pretty much useless. If you have a Windows nstallation disc or USB stick ready, you can also use the repair process with those, instead of the recovery partitions. I personally have never used one of those partitions or one of the DVD's I used to make for recovery (and then I stopped burning those DVD altogether).

I agree with what Bookworm suggested and I would add that me personally, to make everything smoother and stop worrying about any extra partition, I would back up any personal data and information, then wipe clean the HDD, disable UEFI, partition the HDD to my liking with GParted (or anything similar) then proceed to install Windows first and then Linux (whatever flavor you wish). This way you ensure that Linux's GRUB takes over the Windows boot program.

In my experience I always save time by just installing everything clean than dealing with the crap that comes with the laptop when you buy it, especially when you want to dual boot and there are a lot of things that can go south.

 

[axlwinter]

Thanks everyone who took the time to reply!

I will follow your advice and backup my personal data on the C: drive and then nuke all other partitions (apart from my data partition, D, disable UEFI and then first install Windows and then Linux afterwards.

Fingers crossed it will work

Thanks again

 

[axlwinter]

Hi all,

I have had my UH552 for about a year now and I am quite happy with it overall. The fan had to be replaced at one stage but other than that its performed well. I am getting tired of the slow disk though that came with it so I am thinking about upgrading to a SSD which looks very easy thanks to Monovortex great tutorial .

However, I am a bit confused as to what kind of SSD speeds you can expect if you do make the upgrade. At some pages I have found it seems the UH552 can do SATA2 and at some pages it lists it as being SATA3 compatible. I will probably upgrade to a SSD regardless but it would be fun if I could get SATA3 speeds since thats what most new SSDs are capable of.

If anyone who has upgraded to a SSD could shed some light on SATA and what read/transfer speeds you are getting I would be most grateful.

Below is a copy/paste from my machine using CrystalDiskInfo:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskInfo 5.6.2 (C) 2008-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

OS : Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
Date : 2015/04/01 21:33:18

-- Controller Map ----------------------------------------------------------
+ Intel(R) 7 Series Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller [ATA]
- WDC WD5000LPVT-16G33T0
+ Virtual CloneDrive [SCSI]
- ELBY CLONEDRIVE SCSI CdRom Device

-- Disk List ---------------------------------------------------------------
(1) WDC WD5000LPVT-16G33T0 : 500,1 GB [0/0/0, pd1] - wd

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) WDC WD5000LPVT-16G33T0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : WDC WD5000LPVT-16G33T0
Firmware : 01.01A01
Serial Number : WD-WXM1C52W8351
Disk Size : 500,1 GB (8,4/137,4/500,1/500,1)
Buffer Size : 8192 KB
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 976773168
Rotation Rate : 5400 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ATA8-ACS
Minor Version : ----
Transfer Mode : SATA/300
Power On Hours : 3707 hours
Power On Count : 1575 count
Temparature : 24 C (75 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ
APM Level : 0060h [ON]
AAM Level : ----