Posted: 2/2/2004 3:39:22 PM EDT
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OK, got a Dell 8100 P4. I want to add another hard drive and install a DVD burner. How tough are we talking here? I have swapped video cards and ram chips. I have two bays that are still open. |
| It's actualy quite simple. Install your extra harddrive on the same IDE cable as your original harddrive. Make sure the jumper on your extra harddrive is set to slave and you might have to check the original harddrive jumpers to see if it is on master. Install your dvdr to the same IDE cable as your other optical drive. Check their jumpers too. One must be master and the other slave. good luck. |
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This will be an easy upgrade as long as you first determine what your current drives are set to. On your current drives, you will have jumpers that are either set to "Master" or to "Cable Select" (likely the latter on a Dell). Cable Select, if supported, allows you to set all drives on that ribbon to Cable Select and never again worry about how they are set. If Cable Select is not supported by your system or by both drives, you may have to set them to Master and Slave manually. If there's only one drive on the ribbon, it is the Master, and must be set that way. If there are two, one must be Master and the other the Slave. The Master must be connected to the end connector on the cable, and if a Slave is present, it is connected to the middle connector on the cable (assuming the cable has three connectors; the other end connector obviously gets connection to the motherboard). -Troy |
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How do I know what kind of Hard Drive I need. I know I don't have SCSI, but do I need Serial ATA or EIDE? Will the extra hard drive show up as a new drive or simply add storage to my current C drive? Same question of the DVD player, if on the same cable, are they both the D drive or does the software compensate? Thanks again. i can design an offshore oil platform, but I can't upgrade my home computer. Pitiful. |
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Quoted: How do I know what kind of Hard Drive I need. I know I don't have SCSI, but do I need Serial ATA or EIDE? Will the extra hard drive show up as a new drive or simply add storage to my current C drive? First off, I highly doubt you have Serial ATA. It's fairly new. However, here's an easy check. Open up your computer. If you have a big ass (2" wide) ribbon cable coming from your C: drive, you've got EIDE. The extra HDD will likely become your D: drive. It will definitely be a new drive letter. |
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Quoted: OK, got a Dell 8100 P4. I want to add another hard drive and install a DVD burner. How tough are we talking here? I have swapped video cards and ram chips. I have two bays that are still open. If you change your own oil & the like, yes you can do it... No more difficult than that... If you're the type who takes their car to Jiffy Lube just to get the air filter & oil changed... Forget it... |
| Do it one step at a time. Make sure everything is working right. Makes troubleshooting much easier. I recently had a power supply blow, cost me the memory, and a floppy drive Itseemed to work OK when I replaced and upgraded the memory and replaced floppy and power supply. So I added a new and much larger hard drive. I now show a 2F8 conflict on boot up and no conflicts on any System or Norton Diagnostic and it seems to work fine except that Netscape doesn't clear from the memory as it should. I eventually run out of system resources and need to close and restart Netscape. I can live with it, I'm not putting anymore time or effort into a 6 year old machine. |