Compaq D300 issues

I bought a Compaq D300 workstation last year because I was low on money and I wanted something faster than my AMD k6 2. Not long afterwards I regretted doing so because I found out that it used RDRAM, which hard to find and expensive even used on Ebay, and it only had 256 mbs.

Then to make things worse, I had problems with my modem and tried doing a clean install of Windows2000 after I tried another modem and could not get it to work either, as a last resort. I have done one clean install previously and it worked OK, but this time after I did a low level format on the hard drive I could not recognize the SCSI drive, and I have no idea why. I don't like the SCSI drive very much anyway, and it's only 15 GB so I was considering putting another hard drive in it, but I'm not sure if I can install just any drive in this system. Does anyone know? I could use it for some games if I could get it working again and right now it's unusable, and the graphics card I bought for it is just sitting around because the computer I'm using now doesn't have an AGP slot in it, plus it's only a Celeron 1.1 mhz, so I think the Pentium 4 1.5 mhz should be somewhat faster than this one, and when I get another computer maybe I can at least sell it and get some of my money back.

 

As long as the motherboard has an IDE connector, you should be able to use any hard drive you like. You may want to do some research and see if the BIOS has a restriction on hard drive sizes....

hopperdave2000

 

Well, I took a 40gb hard drive that already has Windows XP out of my other computer and put it in the Compaq and it recognized the Seagate drive but then when it tried to boot it said "Disk Read Error" press CTRL ALT DEL

I don't understand this because the hard drive is working fine in the other computer.

 

Windows XP (unlike Win98 or WinMe) will not function when it's on a hard drive in one PC and moved to another PC. WinXP 'bonds' with the hardware and when a boot is attempted w/ different hardware, you get errors. You'll have to reload XP.

 

Thanks for you help. I would have a problem reloading XP because I did not get an XP CD-ROM with this computer. I wonder how much faster a P4 1.5 ghz is than a Celeron 1.1 ghz?

Either way, I would like to get that machine running; I guess if I can find my Windows2000 CD I ordered for it I can just buy another ide drive for it and install Windows2000.

 

A P4 1.5 is quite a bit faster than a Celeron 1.1. The P4 has larger caches and faster bus speeds and, therefore, can process information much faster than the Celeron.