Dell Inspiron M5010 hard drive replacement – not for the regular user.

Lately, we had a pink Dell Inspiron M5010 which was brought for a hard drive replacement. This notebook has a bit strange design. Its hard drive can not be reached by just taking of a few screws and a plastic cover. It is hidden inside the machine, and the only way to replace it is by taking it apart.

The Dell Inspiron M5010 comes with a 15.6-inch WXGA display, powered by an ATI Radeon HD 4250 graphics. It is equipped with a 2.4GHz AMD V160 processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory (2 x 2GB) and a 250GB HDD (Western Digital – WD Scorpio Blue), and is loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

So what happened – we were told by the user that when he switched on his notebook (and until the system was loading) he bumped his knees under the table and the notebook felt on the floor. Externally nothing seems broken, but the machine started to hang when entering Windows, or to restart by itself with a blue screen error message.

Bellow in the gallery you will find all taken photos from the hard drive replacement – for reference and part numbers.