Changing internal hard drive

I am replacing my internal HD; it keeps getting corrupted files on the OS. Anyway; I havent done this for a very long time on a PC (12 years, and even then I didnt know what I was doing). But opening up the box its easy to unplug and take out the old HD. Question is, can I just go out and buy a new HD off Amazon or somewhere, and plug it in? Are these things universal fittings or will i have to mess about soldering and changing connections? PC is fairly old - Dell optiplex GX270 desktop - HD will be new but fairly cheap, 3.5" same as the one coming out

 

There is no problem changing the HDD just by unplugging it and replacing it with another of the same fitting (see photo)
a lot of older PCs have IDE connectors and most modern have the SATA coupling, there are converters to change from one to the other but it is always best to replace one with the same sort.

 

You might run into supported capacity issues if you replace with a much higher capacity drive. I've just been looking at Dells website but as usual I cant find anything about supported drive capacity. I also looked at the bios fixes & enhancements but I see nothing about capacity.
Judging by the age of that system it will probably work with drives in excess of 80gig, just don't go to far.

 

The computer is 8 years old and has an IDE hard drive.
There are three models of Optiplex GX270 and all the models have at least 1 SATA connector (covered by white plastic).
You might have a problem with a large IDE hd. I'm not even sure if you can find a new, small size IDE drive as in under 320 GB). Using a SATA would not present the size problem but I have been reading some posts where people replaced the IDE with a SATA and are having trouble getting the computer to boot from it.
XP, pre SP2 did not include drivers to boot from SATA drives so perhaps that is part of the problem those posters were facing. You need to load the SATA drivers first.

 

I was going to get 160gig, this should be ok?

 

Mine has 2 connectors, one is a white plastic covered plug and the other is a longer black plastic one that connects to a sort of flat ribbon of wires covered in grey plastic; looking at pics of the connection of the one I was going to buy it looks the same as the existing one. Interesting what you say about XP pre SP2 not booting from SATA drives though; I loaded my last installation from a pre SP2 XP disc, that didnt pose any problems in terms of booting, but it had the SATA connection? (And I am guessing the grey wire ribbon is IDE? So is the drive a IDE or SATA and if so does it make any difference?

 

Gray wire means it is IDE. SATA connections are thin, bright red with a black connector on the end.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

 

It would be best to go with SATA as you don't have the same capacity limits as you do with IDE and you may get a slight increase in access time. If you do go with SATA you will most likely need to get a MOLEX to SATA power adapter EBAY is flooded with them and they are very cheap.

Plodr says it's 8 years old that would make it around 2004 so 160gig in IDE should be OK, it was pre 2001 machines that often suffered with the 137gig limit but later machines could take bigger drives unfortunately the manufactures don't like to tell us the maximum supported capacity.
Sometimes a BIOS update can increase the maximum capacity limit but not always.

 

Got my new HD; its IDE and ready to go in. Do I need to change boot settings on the old system, before I plug in, such as change to boot from disc, or anything else? Or just plug the drive and WinXP disk in at same time and fire it up?

 

I personally leave my PCs on "boot from disk" as the first option because if there is not a disk in the player it automatically goes to the "boot from HDD" option (thats in windows 7 not sure about XP)

 

Set the jumper on the new drive to whatever the old one was set to either master or cable select, connect the wide data connector and the 4 pin molex connector.
Fire the machine up and if all is well it will prompt you to hit F12 at start up that will give you a boot menu, with the XP disk in the CD drive select to boot from CD/DVD. When it gives the drive formatting options select NTFS.

 

This page might be of use as it explains boot settings on that model-
https://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/opgx270/en/ug/advfeat.htm#1128164

 

All good, new HD now in, no glitches for once! Thanks to all