Dell Studio 1535 Hard Drive Replacement

Gather tools and materials

Flip over laptop, and remove battery as a safety precaution

If you look at the bottom of the laptop, you will notice that there is a panel that is removable

Unscrew the screws that hold the panel in place

Unscrew the screws until they are loose. They will not come out of the panel

After loosening all the screws, lift the panel up from the main chassis

You may need to use a flathead screwdriver to lift the panel

Now we have access to the internals of the laptop, pretty neat

If the battery is away from you, the hard drive should be closer towards you on the left

Start by removing the screws holding the caddy into the chassis

These screws have a more rounded top, and are longer

Once loosened, you can remove with your fingers or tweezers, and then set them aside

Now we remove the screws holding the drive to the caddy

These screws are have a flatter head, and are shorter

These are standard drive screws that are used to mount any hard drive to a mounting device, such as brackets to put it in a desktop computer

The manufacturer likes to put these in very tightly, and it may take some effort to remove. I suggest using a screwdriver with a bigger handle, not the one I am using

Set these screws aside, apart from the screws we removed in the last step

Now that the screws are removed, the caddy can be removed from the chassis and drive

Pull the black tab on the right side of the caddy, and pull up

It might take some wiggling but it should come out

Now that the caddy is removed, we can lift the drive out of it's place

It should lift out easily, but it will still be attached with a cable

Set it aside on top of the optical drive (the metal surface)

Now that the drive is removed, we have to remove the cable connecting it to the motherboard

It may be hard to do at first, but there are some groves that you can use to hold on to

Pull the connector from the drive gently

Wiggling the connector a bit does help a little

If you found it difficult to remove the drive or the cable connecting the drive to the motherboard, you can remove the whole cable at once

If you look to the right of the drive, you will see another tab, this one is black, but I've also seen blue ones

Pull this tab gently in order to remove the cable

Again, wiggling also helps

If you removed the drive using steps 1-7 then what you have should be left in picture 1

If you had trouble removing the drive, and you went through to step 8, then the parts remaining will be in picture 2

The drive should have a SATA interface, so you should be able to mount it into another computer using 2.5" to 3.5" converter brackets and a SATA cable