acer aspire 5735-hard drive swap

my laptop is an acer which has:
intel core 2 duo t6400 (2 ghz,800mhz fsb, 2 mb l2 cache)
15.6" hd acer cinecrystal lcd
1244mb mobile intel graphics media accelerator 4500mhd
4gb ddr2
500gb hdd
dvd-super multi dl
802.11a/b/g/draft-n wlan
.........................................
its a hardware thing....................
its one hard drive which has vista home premium|acers erecovery partition-hidden| Ubuntu 9.04...........with Grub bootloader

basically i want to remove the hardrive, then put in a smaller capacity hardrive where i install ubuntu and windows 7 on it......

the question is would i be able to swap the hardrives around... without damage to the 500gb installed OS'....i.e. when i dont' want to use the 80gb i plug in the 500gb and the installed OS' load normally with no errors...

If I understand you correctly I think you mean you want to be able to swap between 2 hard drives on your laptop, please correct me if I'm wrong

In answer to your question, yes you can do this without damaging the operating system on your HDDs but be sure to remove them when the machine is powered down.

I have had experience with replacing HDDs on various laptops including Acers and just wanted to give you the heads up that it can be more difficult than you think to get into the HDD bay; especially if you have to remove the whole plastic case to get to it.

However why do you not simply buy a cheap USB 2.5" caddy and put your smaller drive in there, then boot from it via USB? It would not require you to open up the laptop every time and would in most case be more convenient for both sharing files and quick OS changes. The only downside is that your drive may not have the performance of it's internal counterpart but that shouldn't be too noticeable in most cases.

Oli

thanks