thricipio said:
This question is more about DELL and HDD's, than WinXP, but it does relate to
the latter, especially since I think there are some XP-related considerations
for making this work... that is, IF it WILL work.
Rather retype everything, I'll refer readers to this post:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage/browse_frm/thread/5204b0ef1b5e00ab#
Hopefully, the above link will work. If anyone can help me with this
question, I'll be most obliged. Thanks. --Thri
I tried looking for examples, with a search engine, of a
Dimension 3000 with a >137GB disk, and I can't find anything
to confirm it works. So, all I can do for you at the moment,
is offer some date-of-introduction information.
*******
Asus has their web page on support for this issue, here.
http://support.asus.com/technicaldocuments/technicaldocuments_content.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&NO=501
Basically, what they say, is products designed after 1st January, 2003
would support >137GB drives. I would expect other companies in the
industry, to follow the same time line, as a lot of the BIOSes used
come from common sources -- Award, AMI, Phoenix.
This Pcmag article announcing the Dimension 3000, is from
09.01.04, which is more than a year after that.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1641589,00.asp
So my guess would be, it should work fine.
Also, based on the chipset 865GV, that is likely an ICH5
chipset, and relatively new.
*******
There are other options for making it work. Say a person
owns a computer which is not compatible. You can add a
bootable PCI IDE card, to take the place of the motherboard
interface. As long as the card support ATA/ATAPI 6 standard
(which was the spec that also introduced Ultra133 interface
rate), then that card can be used. This would be an example
of a card that looks modern enough. This card uses a
VIA VT6421 family chip. It has one IDE connector (for two drives),
and also two SATA connectors. [ The only tricky bit, is
getting a VT6421 driver into the OS. ]
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815283030
You can have a look at this document for more information. Since
the document has been removed from the Seagate site, this is an
archived copy.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070121085230/http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/tp/137gb.pdf
The info in the Seagate document is a little bit out of date, in the
sense that people are more likely to be using SP2 or SP3 Service
Pack. So those people aren't likely to be worried about EnableBigLBA
registry settings. SP2 or SP3 Service Packs, should support
a large drive, without any further work. But I don't know what
version of OS is on your recovery partition.
So there is a lot more to say, about how best to transfer
your setup to the new drive. Normally, you'd use an IDE cable
with the two connectors on it for two drives, and you'd have two
drive bays to sit the drives in, while you worked. I don't know
if the Dimension 3000 has room to hold the second drive, while
you're copying stuff or whatever. (You can always use a USB2 to IDE
adapter or external enclosure, to connect the drive while you
prepare it. If you don't have one of those, that would be another
purchase for you.)
And if you were to use the PCI IDE card approach (which I don't think
is necessary), a problem would be how to make the recovery partition
work in the future. I can see a road to success, if the old drive is
still available and running. But if you had nothing but the new drive,
with the old recovery partition, then right after the recovery, it
wouldn't support >137GB if it wasn't SP2 or SP3. So there are some
messy issues to contend with, thanks to the recovery partition
concept. If you owned a real WinXP installer CD, you could
"slipstream" it and burn a new installer CD at the SP2 or SP3
Service Pack level. The recovery partition, doesn't make this
possible.
In conclusion, based on product dates, I think it will work.
But there is also the software side to consider, and I don't
know what Service Pack level is included as part of your
recovery partition version of OS. If it was SP2 or SP3,
I wouldn't be worried in that case. (This is more of an issue,
if you ever need to use the recovery partition, to put WinXP
back as a fresh clean C: drive. I'm not worried about immediately
making the setup work, but more worried about you getting into
a jam in the future, when you no longer have the old smaller
drive to work with.)
How exactly do you plan to get the contents of the old disk
transferred to the new one (software wise) ? The original
disk would have had several partitions on it, and you would
want to copy things like the recovery partition, as well as the
C: partition. So the fun is just beginning.
*******
I would still prefer to see at least one example in a search
engine, of a working Dimension 3000 with large disk. While you
could try contacting Dell Tech Support, I don't know if
they would have a ready answer for this question or not.
I don't really know if they keep upgrade info around for
customers or not, on their Tech Support scripts they read from.
Paul
