New drives on old-ish PC's

[Glasgow]

Excuse my ignorance but we have two oldish PC's:

1. Dell XPS R400, purchased 1998, Phoenix BIOS 4 release 6.0 running Windows NT, SP6, 10Gb IDE disk
2. Dell XPS T700, purchased 2000, BIOS currently unknown, running Windows 2000 SP1, 14Gb IDE disk

and we want to upgrade the disks to larger ones.

Is it likely that these machines will support the UDMA drives that seem to be the most widely available - what would I need to check to confirm?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Glasgow]

I have just made some headway as documentation for older machine suggests support of ATA 33 Ultra DMA drives - how does this equate with drives on the market that suggest UDMA 100 or UDMA 133?

 

[Jontmke]

There are two considerations.
1. Will the chipset support the faster drive speeds? The chipset determines whether it will support 66 or 100 or 133 MHZ speeds. This will not make the drive unusable, it will only run slower.
2. Will the BIOS recognise the larger drives? Older BIOS'es have restrictions on the size of drive they can see. There was an 8gb limit, and (I think) a 48gb limit. Some manufacturers, like Maxtor have programs that will circumvent some of these limitations, but they do need to be taken under consideration.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[Glasgow]

Thanks for the input, Jon.

Given the size of the disks these machines currently support (10Gb & 14Gb), I guess the suggestion is that anything under 40gb should be safe but will just run slower.

I also found some useful info at Seagate site:

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/ultra_ata100.html

including:

"All Seagate Ultra ATA/100 drives are backward compatible with Ultra ATA/33, Ultra ATA/66, and legacy ATA interfaces. However, due to the inability of some ATA host controllers and motherboards to properly interface with Ultra ATA drives, Seagate suggests using the "toggle" utility to set the Ultra ATA/100 drives to Ultra ATA/33 or Ultra ATA/66 mode for better compatibility with a non-ATA/100 host controller or motherboard."

 

[jjfederer]

Did you get a larger HDD to work in the R400?

I also have an R400 without a HDD. I pulled a 40GB from another computer but the R400 wouldn't recognize it. I updated the BIOS from A03 to A13 with the flashBIOS from Dell.

Josh

 

[Glasgow]

I ordered a Seagate 40Gb disk which I aim to try in the T700 first. I bought Seagate disk as their site (see URL in earlier post) refers to utility that can be used to toggle to ATA/33 mode - I will aim to post details of success or failure.

 

[Jontmke]

Most manufacturers have a tool that will allow you to format the drive even though the bios does not recognise it properly. Maxtor has one for sure. They usually only work on there own drives though.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[Glasgow]

Understood, Jon thanks. I decided to give Seagate the business as not much price difference and they were the first site I came across that offered me any confidence!

 

[jjfederer]

Jumper setting was my issue. The drive was a slave in the machine I took it out of. I found a spare jumper and set it as master and I'm good to go.

 

[VPA]

I have a Compaq Presario Desktop 3599 which I have upgraded to WinXP Pro. The original 20GB HDD is full and I have been trying to install a 80GB but it won't recognise any HDD greater than 20GB. It certainly won't boot off the larger HDD.

I've looked on the Compaq site without any success since I can'y even find the original ROMPaq (BIOS in Compaq speak) let alone any updated versions.

Any ideas, please?