How to upgrade Acer Revo Hard Drive

I’m the happy owner of an Acer Revo. I’ve purchased that small box in order to setup a media center, powered by Ubuntu 9.10 and Boxee. As you can see on this post, this is a pretty good way to setup an open-source based media center.

It was working pretty fine until the hard disk started to die. Maybe the fact I’ve put the box too close to my DVD player did some damages (I don’t know if that’s possible, but after a month or so, the HDD was damaged).

I started by contacting Acer’s customer support, explaining my hard disk was damaged. It was the worst customer-support experience I’ve ever had. They didn’t want to agree that it was possible the hard drive was physically damaged if the BIOS managed to detect it…

After a long hour of arguing, they told me it was my fault because I’ve installed Linux instead of keeping the original Windows system… No comment.

After that pretty bad experience, I decided to manually upgrade the hard drive, afterall, that was a good opportunity to upgrade from 160 GB to 320 GB. Here is how to proceed.

Disclaimer : Opening the box of your Acer Revo will break the warranty. Do it with extreme care and be aware that you’re on your own once the box is opened.

First of all you need to open the box, this post on Netbooked.net explains how to do it and is fully illustrated with high-quality pictures and video.

Open the box

Netbooked.net has a good video that explains how to do that:

Now that the box is open, the challenge is to remove the original hard drive from its slot. To do that, you’ll have to be able to remove the motherboard from the box, because the hard drive is stucked by four screws. Removing the motherboard is not as easy as opening the box, here are the needed steps you have to follow.

Unlock the motherboard

The motherboard is locked by four screws, they are easy to find (located in the four corners) and easy to remove.

Remove the fan

The trick is that removing the 4 motherboard screws isn’t enough to unlock it from the box. The fan is actually still locking it, so you’ll have to remove it as well.

First, you have 3 screws to remove, then you can put aside the fan.

Remove the processor protector

Then, you also have to remove the piece of metal that protect the processors, for the same reason.

Unlock and remove the motherboard

Now you just have to unlock the motherboard from the box. In the upper left corner, there is an USB slot locked by 2 white pieces of plastic. It’s easy to unlock. When done, just remove the motherboard starting by taking up the left side.

You can now unscrew the hard drive from the motherboard and change it.

Happy upgrade!