Hi everyone,

I have an old Hitachi M120D laptop and I would like to remove its hard drive to back up on another system. I have only disassembled a few laptops and I was always able to find the HDD, but this one has been a lot trickier. Also, I wasn't able to find a manual or anything online that I could use for a reference, so I was hoping that someone here could provide some advice.

First of all, I tried removing every cover that I could open or unscrew. While I didn't find the drive, I think it may be located under the part of the circuit board with the coin battery.

There are four large screws which I assume are connected to the drive.

I also popped out the floppy drive, which I assume allows the drive to be accessed. I marked the presumed HDD with an arrow.

Before I start unscrewing stuff, I thought I'd check here for advice, as I don't want to start messing around with stuff that could be hard to put back together again. Can anyone confirm if I'm correct in my assumptions here? Also, this looks like it might be hard to replace the drive after removing it. Has anyone worked with similar laptops and was this a challenge? Are there any tools that could make things easier?

Although I wanted to replace the drive with compact flash, I'm thinking that it might be better to just back it up over a null modem connection and just leave it in the laptop until it fails. Once I get to that point, I can worry about a replacement.

Anyways, thank you for reading this and thanks in advance!