replacing hard drive painlessly

I've got a Dell Dimension 2350 with a 40 GB hard drive; just bought a 250 GB hard drive I'd like to use on this computer, which only seems to allow a single HD.

So do I have to start from scratch, reinstalling Windows and all my applications and data from backup? Or is there another way?

Marty

 

Your first problem may be that your computer won’t be able to use such a large hard drive. Looking on the Dell site the largest hard drive that was shipped with the 2350 was a 120gig, which probably means that was the largest supported at the time. Future bios upgrades can add support for larger hard drives, but neither of the two upgrades there have been for this model mention anything about it. Support for 48bit LBA would have needed to be added to exceed the 137gig limitation that was the norm when the 2350 was produced. A search on the Dell forum seems to indicate Dell have never said that such support was added.

An option would be to make sure you have the latest bios update and try it and see. 48bit support may have been added, but Dell might just not be advertising it if it was patchy. There is always the possibility of adding a PCI expansion card, or even using a Dynamic Drive Overlay if you had no other alternative. Scroll half way down this page to Software Translation (Dynamic Drive Overly) to read about some of the disadvantages of DDO’s

 

Ok then. My situation is that since installing a video capture card on my PC found needed more hd space for the mpeg's. Just home movies but still.

So I bought a 0.25TB Maxtor (refurbished) and then found when inside my Dell 2350 that it was only designed for a single hd. Put the Maxtor in my lan's gateway machine, a P233 running Redhat 9.

Then wrote video files over a 100T ethernet connection to the Maxtor which has a Samba share set up for the maxtor. Works fine, but editing operations are slow and I figured it might be the LAN transfer which is slowing things down.

Looks like my best bet then would be to do single operations on my own workstation, then move the new files over to the Maxtor.

Marty

 

Don’t give up so easily. I was only trying to prepare you for possible issues - not put you off. There is always a solution. If you are aware of the possible downside of a DDO but don’t see it being an issue for you in the near future, then the manufacture of your new hard drive will likely have some free apps you can download, (or you might have got them on a CD with the hard drive). These apps can copy your old drive to the new and set up the DDO for you.

Just because there is no bay to mount a second hard drive in the case does not mean it can’t be bolted in some how. A few home made or modified brackets could do the trick, done this myself on a few occasions. I’ve also just had a hard drive sitting in the bottom of the case on part of an egg carton – on the pointy side so there was space for airflow under the drive. If neither of the current drive cables have a second plug for another drive then a new double cable is not expensive.

Personally I would try the latest bios update just in case, but failing that have a look on the new hard drive and see if there is a jumper on it to limit it to137gig. Even if it does not have a jumper the drive may still work ok with just the first 137gig partitioned and used.

 

Maybe another suggestion or two.

Hook the 250 up as secondary master or slave. Use the HDD manufacturer's utilities to copy the current data from the 40Gb to the 250GB. Swap the 250 for the 40 as primary master. Use the 40Gb as data drive in the Gateway for smaller files like pictures and documents.

If you could do without one of the optical drives (get a DVD-RW?) or put one in an external USB case, you could get a 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 drive bay adapter to hold the new HDD.

Matt