replacing a hard drive

J

jay80424

New Member
Hello everyone,

Thanks in advance for the advice and patience.

I have a PII (I know, it's old, but it works fine). Running XP

I have 2 10 Gig drives, and they're both full. So I bought a 120 Gig drive, and was told I need a PCI IDE controller card so the motherboard could see all 120 gigs. (or else it would have to be partitioned in 30 gig sections??)

So heres what I have:
PII, running XP, 3.5" Floppy, CD burner, and a Zip drive. 256 Megs. one PCI slot open. Working fine.

Maxtor 120 GIG Ultra 133, and a Ultra ATA IDE PCI controller card. In a box.

Here's what I want to do:

Install the new 120 gig drive as the master, and use one of the 10 gig's as the slave.

I tried to install the PCI card, and then get the 120 gig drive to work, but I have a feeling I'm not 100% sure wht to do. I think I need to have the computer boot off the BIOS on the PCI card, but it's a little scary in there.

First steps? Thanks.
 
im not sure that a PC that old would support such a thing as booting from PCI, but it might just recognize your controller as another IDE controller, im not sure about that ive never messed with one.

also flashing your BIOS may make it recognize larger HDs, you should get the manufacturer and part # off of your motherboard and visit their website to see what kinds of BIOS flashes are available.

if you can make it to where you dont need the controller card to recognize the large HD, then you could also just put one of your HDs on the same controller as your CD-ROM..you might need a different cable or something like that, but EIDE controllers support up to 2 devices, such as 2 CD-ROMs, 2 HDs, or any combination of those type of things.
 
why would you want to boot off the 120? I would just use which ever HD you were booting off before and use the 120 for extra storage
 
Cromewell said:
why would you want to boot off the 120? I would just use which ever HD you were booting off before and use the 120 for extra storage
Click to expand...

I think that using the 120 GB as the boot drive will improve the speed a lot, as it is probably a 7200 RPM drive, while the other old hard drives are a 5400 RPM drives.
 
I figured it would be better to have everything on the 120, singe the 10 gig is 6 years old.

I need to call to see if I can get a flash bios upgrade, I can't seem to find the exact motherboard model on the manufacturers website. Hopefully they have larger drive support.

So now it seems I'm waiting till Monday.
 
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