My brother bought me a new hard drive for my laptop for Christmas. The old one was whining too much, and particularly because I sleep with the laptop a foot or two from my head, the noise has been a nuisance for many months. It was a bit low on space too. I bought a regular (parallel) IDE to mini (laptop) IDE adapter on eBay for 5 cents plus $5 shipping and handling. I powered down the linuxbox and hooked up the drive to the adapter and the adapter to the IDE cable that was used by the CD ROM. I then booted the linuxbox and copied the contents of the old 12GB drive to a file using 'dd if=/dev/hdb of=/r/backup/seanslaptop'. After it finished, I powered down again and hooked up the new one, a 60GB Hitachi with fluid bearings. The old contents were copied to the new with 'dd if=/r/backup/seanslaptop of=/dev/hdb' and in fifteen minutes or so it was finished. I then installed the new drive in the laptop and it works great. It is very quiet; I can just hear the head seeks, but they don't bother me. To enjoy the added space, I used my dad's copy of Partition Magic version 8.0 to resize the NTFS partition from 12GB to 25GB. (I decided to leave room for another OS, just in case.)