Hard Drive Replacement: A Few Questions

Will there be any problems loading the original Windows software that came with my Gateway (new in 2001)onto a new hard drive?

Any suggestions about making sure CMOS (or BIOS?) is set correctly? Someone cautioned me about this several months ago when I first got serious about changing the hard drive.

Have people found they prefer external hard drives? Are they easier to hook up?

I have a Gateway 900c. I have been having myriad problems with it in the last year or so. Recently, I backed up everything, cleaned house, so to speak, reformatted the original hard drive, and re-loaded the software I use. This improved my computer's performance immensely. However, I am getting some peculiar error messages upon startup and at other times. Along with problems earlier this year, these make me think it's time to replace the hard drive. Even if the hard drive is not the cause, I think I've got my money's worth out of the current one. Plus I have the time to learn more. This is a project. I have bookmarked a number of sites on the subject of changing out the hard drive.

I use only about 5 Gbyte of my current, 20 Gbyte hard drive. I figure I'll be happy with an 80 Gbyte drive. Target has a Western Digital one for $70. Wal-mart has a Seagate one for $70, also. IIRC, other than Gbytes of space, brand name, and a few possible peculiarities for fitting it into one's computer case, is there anything else to watch for?

The Seagate's specs:

formatting link
(2 Mb buffer)

The Western Digital's specs: The only things that leap out at me are that is has an 8 Mb buffer and is in the "EIDE family of hard drives."

Should I be concerned about the buffer sizes?

Thanks for your patience in helping with my education. I will be googling as well. I inquired about this earlier this year and am reviewing the discussion from back then as well.

Reply to
Elle
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You definitely want internal, the only reason to get external drives is if you need portability, and for a system that old it probably won't be able to boot off an external drive and may not even have USB 2.0 or Firewire, USB 1.0 is excruciatingly slow for hard drives.

You'll need to find a drive with the correct interface, probably PATA (EIDE) rather than the newer SATA drives which use an entirely different connector. Buffer size is not a huge concern, though more is generally better. The machine is just new enough that virtually any size drive should easily be detected by the BIOS and the BIOS will be updateable so if you check Gateway's site you can grab the newest version but I only recommend mucking with that if you have problems.

Once you have the drive installed, installing the software should be fairly straightforward.

Reply to
James Sweet

Q:Will there be any problems loading the original Windows software that came with my Gateway (new in 2001)onto a new hard drive?

No problems, but sometimes the software can only installed for a specific model. I see it couple of times in PowerDVD that comes with DELL. If it happens, you can edit the file like Custom.ini.

Q.Any suggestions about making sure CMOS (or BIOS?) is set correctly? Someone cautioned me about this several months ago when I first got serious about changing the hard drive.

Just load the default setup in BIOS and that it. I think the risk are in installing HD and connecting the cable, especially the static electricity .Static electricity can kill the HD contoller board instantly. Just do it slowly, and it will be fine. Also old motherboard (like 440Bx-base board) does not support >128 GB hard disk, in this case get a promise ultra 100 or 133 card.

Q.Have people found they prefer external hard drives? Are they easier to hook up? External is more expensive and slower than internal

You can check whether your HD is faulty by using HD manufacturer software. There is a software called smartmontools, which reports the status of HD like spin up time, hour of usage and the staus of relocation sector etc. This software is quite accurate, try it.

I would recommeded Segate since it is quiet and has 3-year warranty, and Western digitial has only 1 year. I dont recommed Maxtor since they fail frequently.

I think gateway 900 motherboard supoort only IDE, not serial ATA. So you can only choose IDE hard drive Also,buy HD in Best buy and circuitcity since they offer rebate, and they may sell it cheap on black Friday next week.

Q. Should I be concerned about the buffer sizes? Yes, more is faster and better. Get a 7200rpm and 8MB buffer HD.

Just curious, what error messages you got upon startup?

Reply to
marslee

Q:Will there be any problems loading the original Windows software that came with my Gateway (new in 2001)onto a new hard drive?

No problems, but sometimes the software can only installed for a specific model. I see it couple of times in PowerDVD that comes with DELL. If it happens, you can edit the file like Custom.ini.

Q.Any suggestions about making sure CMOS (or BIOS?) is set correctly? Someone cautioned me about this several months ago when I first got serious about changing the hard drive.

Just load the default setup in BIOS and that it. I think the risk are in installing HD and connecting the cable, especially the static electricity .Static electricity can kill the HD contoller board instantly. Just do it slowly, and it will be fine. Also old motherboard (like 440Bx-base board) does not support >128 GB hard disk, in this case get a promise ultra 100 or 133 card.

Q.Have people found they prefer external hard drives? Are they easier to hook up? External is more expensive and slower than internal

You can check whether your HD is faulty by using HD manufacturer software. There is a software called smartmontools, which reports the status of HD like spin up time, hour of usage and the staus of relocation sector etc. This software is quite accurate, try it.

I would recommeded Seagate since it is quiet and has 3-year warranty, and Western digitial has only 1 year. I dont recommed Maxtor since they fail frequently.

I think gateway 900 motherboard supoort only IDE, not serial ATA. So you can only choose IDE hard drive Also,buy HD in Best buy or circuitcity since they offer rebate, and they may sell it cheap on black Friday next week.

Q. Should I be concerned about the buffer sizes? Yes, more is faster and better. Get a 7200rpm and 8MB buffer HD.

Just curious, what error messages you got upon startup?

Reply to
marslee

James and Marslee: Thank you very much for your input. I read (and have re-read) all. It seems very helpful.

This week I am going to try to install a new hard drive I purchased yesterday evening. I will update this thread on the outcome.

wrote snip but comments noted

manufacturer

reports the

staus of

try it.

I believe you, but I came across what seems a very good price for a hard drive yesterday. More below.

warranty,

Maxtor since they

serial ATA. So

I thought IDE and ATA were just different names for the same thing.

Regardless, from Gateway's site, the specs on the old hard drive say it is a Seagate with an Ultra ATA/100 interface. These specs say nothing about a hard drive cache.

rebate,

Yesterday from Circuit City I purchased a Seagate 100 Gbyte (2 Mb cache) internal hard drive ("Ultra ATA/100" interface) with a five-year warranty. With the rebates, it will have cost me only $40 + tax. Caveat to newbies: Sometimes getting the rebater to make good on a rebate is like pulling teeth. I've never failed to get a promised rebate, though, in the half-dozen or so instances of major electronic purchases that offered sizable rebates I've had.

My current computer has only 128 Mbyte of SDRAM, so I'm thinking if I want real improvement then I should double the RAM.

Office Depot said that, too. Oh well.

buffer HD.

Most recently, it's said a few times it couldn't even find the hard drive. I turn it off, re-start, and the error goes away.

The error messages have varied a lot. I've become so resigned (or lazy) that it's likely a new hard drive, or at least it wouldn't hurt to replace the old one, that I stopped taking any note of the errors.

If it's not the hard drive, I am prepared to slowly rebuild this computer. I put in a new power supply about a year ago, and I now vacuum out the casing twice a year (I have cats who shed). I realize proper cooling is important to the longevity of the electronics yada. I've studied the internals and removed the floppy drives while cleaning it out, so I am becoming more savvy on maintaining and building my own computer. This after years of cussing computer manufacturers such as HP and Gateway for a variety of ills and/or the poor documentation on their machines. (Though I think Microsoft's chaotic "engineering" is likely at the root of the problem for many computer ills. Pardon my amateur venting, though I do write as a much experienced mechanical engineer. Or pretenses toward same.)

Reformatting and reinstalling all my software went relatively smoothly the other week, and did help performance a lot. So per internet suggestions, I am likely going to do this once a year.

Reply to
Elle

They are, he was referring to *serial* ATA, or 'SATA', a relatively new technology. ATA is the old style IDE connector with the flat ribbon cable the vast majority of PCs still use, which, since serial ATA came out, has increasingly become referred to as PATA or parallel ATA. Confusing, isn't it! SATA is potentially faster than standard ATA, uses much smaller connectors and thinner, easier to route cables. It cannot be daisy chained like parallel ATA, each drive requires its own socket on the motherboard or serial ATA card.

You can add a cheap serial ATA card to a PCI slot on your system if you wantg to use a serial ATA drive, but I wouldn't bother- you probably wouldn't notice any performance gain in an older PC.

ATA100 is fine, your hard drive controller is probably only ATA66 or ATA100 anyway. ATA133 is the common speed now, and while a AT133 drive will work fine in your system, you wouldn't get the extra benefit anyway. Don't worry about the size of the cache. Most people using their PCs for everyday tasks would never know the difference anyway. Put it this way- there's no way the new hard drive will be any slower than what you had!

Dave

Reply to
Dave D

"Dave D" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@pipex.net:

*snip*

I noticed it... But I'm doing video capture. The SATA drive tests out (using Nero) about 2.25 times faster than the IDE drive. (The motherboard probably only supports ATA-33 or -66...)

Puckdropper

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Reply to
Puckdropper

"Dave D" wrote

same

Oh... yes, I noticed from googling that SATA was different from ATA.

Serial. Got it now.

snip but comments noted

for everyday tasks

there's no way the

Yes, the same speed will be fine. Thanks for posting your experience. It helps.

Reply to
Elle

Update: This afternoon I installed the new internal hard drive, and then my old software. All's great. The only thing that was persnickety was the Seagate installation documentation.

Seagate's software had the option to do some sort of diagnosis and check of my old hard drive, along the lines maybe of what Marslee mentioned, I think. The documentation said 40% of hard drives brought to Seagate ostensibly for repair were actually fine. I gave the diagnosis software a shot thrice, but the diskettes it told me to make for this never got to working. It's possible my old hard drive wouldn't cooperate, either. I lost about an hour playing with this.

The Seagate steps for putting in the new hard drive are not presented perfectly straightforwardly. I almost would have been better off winging it, because the old hard drive looks almost exactly the same as the new one, and I'd been in the casing before and, with tips from here, knew what to seek. But there are some startup diskettes that have to be made. They may be vital to getting the new hard drive going, too. So one has to slog through some confusion with the Seagate documentation.

I did not have to mess with BIOS or CMOS. The Seagate documentation did have some cautions and troubleshooting steps for this, were one to have problems.

My computer sounds better. It was making some odd cyclic noises which I thought were either the power supply fan cycling somehow, or maybe the hard drive. Also, installation seemed to go somewhat faster this time than when I did a re-install a few weeks ago. (I timed installation of all the software then and kinda kept watch on it today.) Maybe this new hard drive is giving me a bit more speed compared to my old one?

I'll wait a day or so, and if all remains well, send in my rebate request.

Thanks again James, Marslee, Dave, and Puck. My first efforts at maintaining or repairing my computer a few years ago were excruciatingly laborious and rarely successful. Now, cause folks like you donate some time, I have some hope I can "take command" and keep building on my database, saving my hard-earned money for charities and skiing.

I will try to return your favor to others with the skills I have in other areas.

Reply to
Elle

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