Replacing HD with a Laptop HD, Any complications?

[Charlie Sweatpants]

Wow, it has been a while since I posted here; I'm amazed my user name was still on file.  I read these boards every once and awhile but until recently my Neuros, affectionately known to me as Clyde Frog, was working flawlessly and I had no reason to post.  But now I fear my faithful mp3 player is terminal.  The hard drive began making an irregular clicking noise about a month ago.  Shortly thereafter I noticed that the display would freeze and playback would pause at random times.  These breaks in playback are now becoming much more frequent and the time has come to take action. 

I've read the HD replacement walk through at cool4u2view and I'm pretty comfortable with what that will take.  If Clyde Frog is dying anyway and I screw up and brick it, what's lost, right?  I'm posting because I'm not sure of the hard drive I want to use.  This summer I pulled a perfectly good 40GB drive out of my laptop and replaced it with a 120GB drive.  There is nothing wrong with the HD I pulled from the laptop, I just wanted more space.  (I have an 80 in Clyde Frog now, but since my music collection long ago went over 80 gigs and there's no way I can carry it all around with me anyway, I don't mind stepping down to 40 in the least.)  I still have the old laptop hard drive sitting in a nice static free bag.  It's a Hitachi Travelstar (who thinks up these names?), 4200rpm and says ATA/IDE on the back of it.  I'm not too familiar with the different ATA classifications, but I think that part is all fine. 

I did not format the drive before I pulled it.  There is a full copy of Windows XP sitting dormant on it as I write this.  My plan is to get the drive into the Neuros backpack, plug in the USB 2.0 cable and connect it to my PC, then I'll use Windows to fully format the drive.  Then I'll connect the brain, fire up Sorune, and create a db.  That all sounds like it will work, but since I've never done this before I thought I'd ask for comments.  Does anyone see a problem with this plan?

Thanks in advance,

Charlie

P.S.  I really want this to work.  I have friends who are on their third or fourth iPod since I bought my Neuros and I love lording that over them. 

[Teh Porkchop Express!!]

Well once you swap out hard drives, and when you turn the Neuros on, it will take you to the diagnosis menu.  Here you will reformat everything, then once that is done, you should be good to go.  The format will be in this process:

Format hard drive -> format media -> format file system

then

Format NAND disk -> revive bad blocks -> format NAND disk

Then once all that is done, exit out and let the changes save (little circle at the bottom will be blinking, wait until it stops).  Then you should be good to go, as far as the laptop goes, just be sure the specs are the same, i have a Seagate Momentus 5400 160GB HD in my Neuros.  And i love it.

[Charlie Sweatpants]

Success!  The entire process couldn't have taken more than fifteen minutes, including the time it took to get some old files off the hard drive.  (I forgot to transfer them before I pulled it from my laptop).  Clyde Frog is back and life is good.  Thanks for the help and thanks to Neuros for making a product so robust even an idiot like me can fix it.  The only thing I'd ever want to replace my Neuros with is a Neuros 3. 

[Teh Porkchop Express!!]

Awesome, glad everything worked out for you.