PATA/100 Barracuda 3.5 Internal Hard Drive

I have An AMD Duron processor 1.60 GHz with 512MB of RAM. Will I be able to use the PATA/100 Hard Drive? it is 750 GB. I really don't know a lot about installing but am going to try to do this myself. Is there anything you can tell me so that I don't mess this up. I believe my old hard drive, which is a 39 GB is going out. It makes a lot of noise when booting. Also should I make the new HD the master or the slave. I have already bought this drive and realize now that I should have done my homework first so I don't want to take it out of the box until I know I can actually use it. Thanks for any help:confused

 

If you are installing this as second drive (keeping the old one) then you should set this drive as a slave.
Your OS (XP - Vista etc.) should be on the "master" hard drive.

They should both be on the same IDE controller ribbon.
You should also check your older drive's settings and be sure that it is set to "master". Many times a factory set HDD will be set to "single".

 

There are 2 requirements for HDD>137Gb to be detected. First your mobo's bios must be 48bit LBA enabled and second your o/s must have the capabilty to address drives in excess of this size.

If you are using XP as an o/s, then you must have at least SP1. In respect of whether your bios is 48-bit LBA enabled I cannot help you. However, if your system is say 2003 or newer then the likely hood is that it is and that the 750Gb hard disk drive will work.

If your old HDD is making noises, I would not waste any time backing up your data if this is of value to you.

Most HDD manufacturers will have prog to clone the contents of one HDD to another. PATA drives connect as master / slave on the IDE data connector. If you are connecting the new drive on the data cable of the old drive then set it as slave.

the howstuffworks website can be useful and below is a link to adding a hard drive with pictures....

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/adding-a-hard-drive.htm

Good Luck

 

Thank you so much, everyone. I am a 68 year old woman and know a little bit about a lot of things which can sometimes be dangerous. I will go to the web sight and study it before attempting to install. Also, how do I find out if I have 48 bit BIOS? I do believe my system is younger than 2003. Thanks again.

 

Need to know what motherboard you have ie make model and what bios version you are running.

To determine the make and model of the mobo, you could open the case or install Everest the last free version which I beleive is 2.20.

The bios version will come up on your post screen and will either give a date and perhaps some other info. If the info is going past you too fast, use the pause key on your kb to stop the sequence and hit the space bar to restart.

Good Luck

 

I have AMD Duron 1.60 GHz processor 512 MB RAM. I am running Windows XP 2002

 

Still need to know the mobo's details to ascertain if the bios is 48bit enabled.

Please forgive my next comment but your reply

Would be comparable to you asking me the make and model of my car and I replied well it has 4 wheels and is blue

Cheers

 

Sorry...I feel so stupid. BIOS Phoenix Technologies LTD 6.00 PG 9-10-03 SMB108 Ver 2.2

Is this correct?

Thanks for your patience.

 

Ok well you didn't supply the mobo's model or version but the date on the bios states Sept-2003 and on that basis I would say that your bios is +99% 48bit lba and would support your drive.

Prior to connecting the drive boot into your bios look for instructions on the post screen on how to access ie the screen that shows the bios version will say HIT Del to enter set up and check your current drive it will be listed under Advanced CMOS features (doing this from memory but pretty sure).

After you install go to the bios and check your new drive. The bios will list the model and size or just size. Do this before you format the drive to remove the 1% doubt in my mind.

Good Luck