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New Hard Disk
I have a Dell 9300 bought about 3 years back. My HDD is making some sort of noises , which reminds me that its near the end of its life. I have shortlisted a Seagate 260 gig one.
Q1) can i use the 260 gig , will it be accepted by the BIOS? if not, where do i update it from?
Q2) How do I install my windows onto this new hdd, I had purchased the Windows XP Pro version from Dell. But they did not include the original CD of windows (as is the norm) ; I got the recovery CD of course (the one which we have to create ourselves). Question is, can i use it to install windows onto my new hdd? Where would the license number of windows be found then?
Q3) does anyone know if I should go in for SATA or IDE? Also does the 9300 have 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch - how to find that out if you dont know off the top off your head?
Excuse my ignorance but parallel ATA means IDE right? I think mine should be parallel ATA since when I pulled out dell support center and asked it for help in buying a new hdd, it took me to the dell site and all the options were 'ATA' so I dont think its SATA for sure.
The place that I am looking at for buying the new hdd has options of 'SATA and IDE' so I am on right path with IDE option? or is it completely different from what ATA is?
Look at the back of the drive. If you see a long, narrow black connector covering 40+4 pins, it's parallel ATA.
If there's a pair of narrow connectors, one larger than the other, on the back, it's Serial ATA.
You will need to remove that black strip to re-use on a new parallel ATA drive.
orangespotcat
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Posted September 9th, 2008 21:00
ejn63,
you said you can get new OS install disks at that link but I can't find any link for doing that. Can you be more specific?
I have a 3year old inspirion 6000 w/a failing HD and no install disks.
There are so many errors on the disk that I fear trying to make a recovery disk from it.
ejn63
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Posted June 14th, 2008 09:00
Most 9300s use parallel ATA drives, and are new enough that a 250G should work. You need a 2.5" 9.5 mm drive, but should check to see which drive you have before upgrading - the late 9300s did ship with SATA drives, and the two drive types are not interchangeable.
If you are in the US, you can order an XP CD online. If outside the US, call your local Dell office.
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dellcare/en/backupcd_form?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&redirect=1