Here are photos of the process of opening my Sony VAIO Z505JSK laptop and upgrading the hard drive. The pictures are linked to larger versions.

The pictures on this page should apply to most Sony VAIO Z505 laptop / notebook computers, as well as to the Z600 laptops since they're the same (just renumbered for the European market). I've received a few comments about folks who've had the hard drive light staying constantly on after they replace the drive, but I have no idea what would cause it.

Troubleshooting and questions are at the end of this page.

If you have questions, suggestions or need to report something inaccurate on this page, please send email to z505pics@fencepost.net.

Basic Procedure

The basic procedure for opening the Sony VAIO Z505 series laptops is:

Remove several plastic clips and covers,
Remove quite a few screws,
Partially open the cover,
Disconnect and/or reroute some internal cables,
Disconnect and remove the drive,
Reverse the steps to put everything back together.

To do all of this you'll need a small flathead screwdriver (for gently prying up some clip connections), a small phillips-head screwdriver for removing the case screws and a regular phillips-head screwdriver to remove the rails from the hard drive.

You'll also need a replacement hard drive - probably a 9.5mm high one, but check the stats for your current drive if possible before ordering a new one. If you're running Windows, the easiest way to get information about your current drive is:

Bring up Device Manager,
Expand the Disk Drives entry,
Copy down the name of the only drive there (if it ends with -0, leave that part off),
Google for that string,
Find out what the specs are,
Find a drive that matches those physical specs.

Be careful if the new drive's power consumption is much higher than the old one - higher power consumption will mean more heat and shorter battery life. You'll need to get data moved from the old drive to the new one on your own; there are several software packages available to do that including Symantec/Norton Ghost.

CAUTION: If you do hook your laptop drive up to another system, be very careful about drive settings! On an earlier laptop I mistakenly connected my laptop drive to an IDE chain that already had a "master" drive without setting the laptop drive to be a "slave." This completely corrupted the partition information on both drives - I was only able to recover one of them, and that required going out and buying some specialized drive recovery software.

Removing the Covers and Clips

z505-01-FirstClips

z505-02-RightClipClose

z505-03-LeftClipClose

z505-04-RightClipDetail

z505-05-LeftClipDetail1

z505-06-LeftClipDetail2

z505-07-LeftScreenCap

z505-08-LeftEndCapTop

z505-09-LeftEndCapBottom

z505-10-RightEndCapTop

Removing Screws

z505-11-LeftHiddenScrew

z505-12-RightHiddenScrew

z505-13-KeyboardScrews

z505-14-KeyboardScrewDetail

z505-15-RAMandHiddenKeyboardScrew1

z505-16-RAMandHiddenKeyboardScrew2

Partially Opening the Case

z505-17-DriveSeeButDontTouch

Disconnecting and Shifting Cables

z505-18-TouchpadCable1

z505-19-TouchpadCable2

z505-20-TouchpadCableOpen

z505-21-TouchpadCableLoose

z505-22-KeyboardNormal

z505-23-KeyboardRerouted

z505-24-DriveReachable

z505-25-DriveScrews

z505-26-JogDialScrew

z505-27-JogDialDismounted

Extracting the Drive

z505-28-DriveDisconnected

z505-29-DriveRails1

z505-30-DriveRails2

z505-31-DriveRails3

Troubleshooting and Questions

Removing the Master/Slave jumper

The first time I did this I did the data transfer by hooking the old and new drives up to a desktop system using a 2.5 to IDE adapter. I had the laptop drive set as the slave drive (drive 1, the master is drive 0) but forgot to remove the jumper before I put my laptop back together. I removed it by opening the laptop up partially and pulling it off with tweezers.