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April 25th, 2005 15:00

Dimension 4400 Hard Drive Upgrade

What is the max size I should upgrade the internal primary hard drive up to?
 
The existing one is trashed, what is the best procedure to follow?
 
Thanks.

1.1K Posts

April 25th, 2005 16:00



@jwcrim wrote:
What is the max size I should upgrade the internal primary hard drive up to?
 
The existing one is trashed, what is the best procedure to follow?
 
Thanks.



jwcrim:

Dell has only tested up to a 120GB drive in the D4400.  I recently put a 2nd HDD in my D4400.  It is a 200GB Western Digital (WD) EIDE model, the installation was done without any problems.  I felt that $0.50/GB is a good price for HDDs now.   I used the install software included in the retail package from WD to partition and format the drive.  You might have to update your BIOS, and have WinXP SP-2 installed. 

This topic has been a recent and fairly frequent subject.  You should use the forum search function to check out recent forum postings for more info and particulars.

Good luck,:smileyhappy:

B4runo


DIMM 4400
BIOS – A06, date 6/12/02
Win XP Home Edition, SP2
Pentium-4 2.8 GHz, 400MHz FSB, 512K L2
1 GB DDR SRAM PC2100
80GB WD 7200RPM, 200GB WD 7200RPM EIDE/ATA HDDs
Iomega 80GB USB 2.0 External HDD
Pioneer DVR-109BK, Samsung DVD-ROM SD-616R
XFX GeForce FX 5700LE 128MB DDR 8X AGP w/ TV & DVI
17”, 1702FP Digital Flat Panel Display
PCP&C Turbo-Cool 425 Deluxe Dell PSU
SIIG US2275 USB 2.0 / 1394a / NIC PCI card
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46K Posts

April 25th, 2005 19:00

jwcrim.
 
You will need to have BIOS version A03 or later [latest is A06], plus have Windows XP SP1 or SP2 in order for the D4400 to
recognize a drive larger than 137GB.

34 Posts

April 25th, 2005 23:00

Thanks for the useful responses.

This is a Dell Dimension 4400 owned by a friend of ours. She is dropping it off soon to have me get it back on the air. While I haven't seen it yet, I understand she has been through cycles of telephone technical support.

She says that the unit tries to power up, sometimes flips to a screen to choose an operating system then after a few seconds powers down with the message "No input signal - Power Saving Mode". (That's probably the monitor losing its signal.)  According to her a  variety of explanations have been offered including lapsing into hibernation but most recently they concluded that the hard drive was bad.

So I will have some testing to do before I can agree with that conclusion but I wanted to have a drive selected for her so I could move quickly if we needed one.*

I had her put a bootable CDROM, then power down then up. It apparently did ask on a screen if could boot from the CDROM but then cycled as before.

I notice that some have run into maybe similar problems that were fixed by removing the battery and resetting the BIOS related circuits. Any thoughts would be welcome.

 

*Maybe the 120GB Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB would work for her.

 

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