adding a new hard drive

If you have two optical drives, you cannot simply add an EIDE drive. The board supports only two EIDE drives.

If you have one optical drive, you'll need a dual drive EIDE (80 wire, 40-pin) cable and to jumper the new drive as cable select.

If you have not yet purchased the drive, a SATA drive is a better choice - you'll need the drive and a SATA cable.

If you have two optical drives, you'll need an EIDE to SATA converter, or a PCI IDE controller to run the drive - you can't run three EIDE devices on a 4700 board.

Will this cable work?

I'm glad this thread is here.  I'm having some issues myself in adding a new hard drive.  Just purchased a new western digital 200 gig HD so I can start transfer some old video tape to DVD.  I generally keep the system up to date with the latest MS patches and I have just updated the BIOS from A02 to A04.  The original hard drive is set to master and the new drive to slave.  I have switched the postition of the hard drives on the IDE cable but I can't get my system to recognise the new hard drive.  I'm running a 4500 dimension with w2k pro w/ sp4.  Do I need to go cable select for both drives?  Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance....

Yes, you should use cable select for both drives.

As it turns out, my choice of master/slave was correct.  Just an over site on my part, but all I needed to do was go into computer management and write the signature file to the new disk 1.  My question now is, why did my 4500 Dell only recognize 128gig out of a 200gig drive?  Am I technology bound?  Again, I have the latest BIOS and MS patches.  If you can advise, please do!!

Thanks to all that respond,

Bev,

Thanks so much for posting the reply.  I see that both links you have posted refer back to XP.  I'm currently running W2K w/ service pack 4.  If you have any info for my OS, please post.  I'll take your lead as well and google for some additional information on my problem.  Really would like for the OS to see as much of the drive as it can.

Thanks again,

Rodney

olds350.

Check out this Windows 2000 article about 48-Bit LBA Support.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;305098

Bev.

Bamalamadingdong!!!!

A little EnableBigLba action reg hack and we have 186 gig of hard drive space.....just what I expect for some over head.  Thanks to all that replied!

Happy camper is now going to play with some video tape to DVD conversion.

Thanks for answering.  What do I need to do?  I am running out of space quickly.  I am down to 4% free