dimension 2400 hard drive upgrade

The Dimension 2400 will support any size hard drive ( that is PATA, also called ATA, ATA-6, IDE ) that you can find to put into it.  The only limitation is that it must be a parallel interface drive, not SATA.  The bios has the 48 bit LBA algorithm, and if you are using an installation CD with Windows XP Service Pack 1 or later, so does your operating system.

It should; I have two D2400's in the house and installed a 320 GB drive in one of them about a month ago.  The installation CD I use is also Win XP with SP-1a.  I have a CD with the SP-2 update on it so I can get back to what I have.

 

Thanks for this info guys.Just got myself a 200 gig for my 2400. And then found I may only get 137 gigs.

A comfort to find that everything will be ok. :smileyhappy:

I also have a Dell dimension 2400 from 2005, and am trying to upgrade from 40Gb Western Digital IDE to Seagate Barracuda SATA 250GB, and connected to SATA Hard Drive to IDE (ATA-133/100) UDMA PATA Adapter--Windows XP Home with re-installation disk--

 

I cloned the hard drive using Apricot Drive Wire - Tried to boot up system with new hard drive but system would not recognize - Any ideas would be more than welcome--Am I trying to do the impossible? 

Manny;

 

Any of those approaches are possible.  The way I handled it on mine was to install a three connector, 80 conductor, IDE cable, and then install the old drive as a slave.  In that position I could use Windows Explorer to perform a normal copy of the "My Documents" folder.  Bear in mind that when you do it that way the two drives must share the available bandwidth on the IDE controller so it drops the speed a bit.  I didn't find this a problem, however, as I could start the copy and forget about it until done.  It was necessary to install a three connector cable as Dell normally ships the D2400 with a two connector cable that will support only one drive.

 

You can get a drive with any size buffer that you wish.

 

Superbrb;

 

If you were able to successfully clone the drive I would believe your PATA to SATA adapter must work.  Those things still make me a bit nervous as not all of them work well.  With regard to booting the drive I hope that you tried the first time with only that drive connected.  Windows XP puts an ID on the drive and is liable to try booting from the original drive if you connect it to a slave connector while you try booting from the clone.  Beyond that I would need some additional information with regard to any errors that show up.  Are you sure you cloned the drive rather than simply imaging the partition?  There may be another procedure you need to do that since you need to copy the master boot record along with the data contained in the partition.

 

Thanks for your reply Jack.  Per the instruction on the Drivewire software, I cloned the hard drive.  It is possible it did do something with the partitioning.   Despite this the BIOS did not recognize the new hard-drive.  I am not able to look at it right now, but the BIOS error came up with something like "cannot find Primary Drive 0" f1 to continue, (which did nothing) or f@ to enter setup--but it did not work.  Then  I did was re-plug in the old hard drive and it booted up.  Then I tried other ways to get it to recognize, including trying to start the computer with the Re-installation disc in the cd.  The last time I tried it the old hard drive would not recognize either.  I am not sure what to do now.  I will not be able to work on it until 1st week of january, but any clues you can give would be appreciated.  Now I also need help getting it back to recognizing the old hard drive! 

With regard to your original drive, you may be able to get it going again by resetting the NVRAM so that the system will redetect its devices.

 

With regard to the SATA drive with the PATA adapter, while TR4 has a point this should not apply to a PATA adapted SATA drive as the adapter is supposed to make it look like PATA to the system.  The installed OS on the drive must have the PATA drivers as otherwise it could not communicate with the drive controller on your motherboard.

 

The problem could be in the way the adapter is communicating with the motherboard controller.  Dells are set to use Cable Select on the IDE drives.  If your adapter has a jumper to set whether it is Master, Slave, or Cable Select, you should try the Cable Select.