upgrading harddrive !

Question

hi,     i have an optiplex gx1 400+,i want to get a bigger harddrive and i was wondering what my limitations where if any,and what problems if any i will run into. optiplex gx1 6 gb hardrive 400 mhz 256 sdram

acidshadow · Answer

There shouldn't be a whole lot of limitations. Is a a slimline model or a tower?

You can pretty much go with any size hard drive that you desire. Just be sure to update the bios before instlalling the new dirve to be sure because sometimes older bios versions might not support larger drives, but it shouldn't be a problem.

Are you looking at another drive for extra storage or are you going to replace the old drive entirely?

dib_dab2003 · Answer

thanx for replying,                            im using a slimeline model, at present i have a 6gig drive,which im just going to replace,im using a10 revision bios,do i have to update it ??

dib_dab2003 · Answer

would the bios support any size of drive ??????

acidshadow · Answer

No, you have the latest version you should be fine. Yes you will need to get another drive then and set the new drive as a slave (which might be interesting because I do not think there is room for two hard drives in the system) and copy over what you have to the new drive.

dib_dab2003 · Answer

ok,thankyou.......im just replacing the old 1

acidshadow · Answer

It should. I would stay under 200 GB just because it is an older system but there really should be no size limitation

dib_dab2003 · Answer

ok,thanx alot

peterfelgate_ce40d3 · Answer

Hmmm.  The GX1 in-built IDE controller ONLY support drives to 127 Gbytes at their full capacity, so I would stick with a 120Gbyte drive maximum.  Note that the bios has a display limitation of 65535 Mbytes but drives larger than this work.  There are limitations with pre-XP bioses and FAT 32 formats;  with XP and using NTFS formatting you shouldn't have a problem.  Others will advise you to create multiple partitions and stick with FAT32 so that recovery from a boot floppy can be achieved.

dib_dab2003 · Answer

'Hmmm.  The GX1 in-built IDE controller ONLY support drives to 127 Gbytes at their full capacity, so I would stick with a 120Gbyte drive maximum.  Note that the bios has a display limitation of 65535 Mbytes but drives larger than this work.  There are limitations with pre-XP bioses and FAT 32 formats;  with XP and using NTFS formatting you shouldn't have a problem.  Others will advise you to create multiple partitions and stick with FAT32 so that recovery from a boot floppy can be achieved.'   im going to install a 160gig drive,i`ll be using NTFS file system and im going to install xp on it with a 50 gig partition.                          thanx yet again for your help !:smileyhappy:                                                                                 dib_dab........

peterfelgate_ce40d3 · Answer

Just to say, no matter how you partition the drive, you will only get 127 Gbytes total out of it.......

dib_dab2003 · Answer

that`ll have to do as ive already ordered a 160,lol                                                                                 thanx.........

speedstep · Answer

@peterfelgate wrote:
Just to say, no matter how you partition the drive, you will only get 127 Gbytes total out of it.......

Actually I dont think thats true.

If you have a patched FDISK WIN98 Startup floppy you can split a 160 gig into 2 80 gig FAT32 partitions and it works fine.

Larger than 80 gigs will not be fixable under DOS/WIN scandisk.

WIN2000/XP chkdsk can fix it but not WIN9X/ME.

Storage, Drives & Media

upgrading harddrive !

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