Is there room internally for the second hdd? I know these system come with a flimsy plastic piece that holds the drives. There should be extra connectors for the hdd cable and power available. With Windows XP there should be no problem using that drive and it can address all of it. If this is used as a secondary storage device all you will need to do is make sure it is enabled in the BIOS. Once Windows recognizes and installs the drive you will need to go to Drive Management to format it and assign a drive letter. You can get there by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Manage.
PS: Make sure you purchase a hdd with an IDE connection since the motherboard has no SATA connections.
That is a really old computer and I doubt that your bios or motherboard will be able to see all or any of a huge hard drive. Try posting in Desktops-Hard Drive forum for help with that. No bios updates are available for old computers. You are stuck with the last one issued years ago. It will be available on your download page at Dell Support, but you probably already have it. IMO you should not waste your money adding a big hard drive. Save it for a new faster computer or buy a used IDE hard drive cheap that's 40GB or so. PS Dell has recycled the old xps name for their new computers, so this is really not the right forum for your Dimension.
Nevermind about the BIOS thing. Looks like it autodetects everything. No need to mess with it. There are a set of jumpers on each hard drive. Make sure they're set to Master for your Primary drive and Slave for your sendary drive. Each drive should have a picture on it for the pin configuration.
With the XPS T500 series, you should be able to install a IDE 60gb hard drive without a problem. For a 60gb to 120gb harddrive, you will need to upgrade the BIOS to version A11. For any drive larger than 137gb you will hit a BIOS limitation and need to use a PCI IDE/ATA Controller Card and use XP SP1, or higher.
Bev.
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stefanrp97
538 Posts
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September 16th, 2008 18:00
Is there room internally for the second hdd? I know these system come with a flimsy plastic piece that holds the drives. There should be extra connectors for the hdd cable and power available. With Windows XP there should be no problem using that drive and it can address all of it. If this is used as a secondary storage device all you will need to do is make sure it is enabled in the BIOS. Once Windows recognizes and installs the drive you will need to go to Drive Management to format it and assign a drive letter. You can get there by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Manage.
PS: Make sure you purchase a hdd with an IDE connection since the motherboard has no SATA connections.
Mary G
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20.1K Posts
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September 16th, 2008 18:00
maskandgun
2 Posts
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September 17th, 2008 02:00
stefanrp97
538 Posts
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September 18th, 2008 15:00
shesagordie
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46K Posts
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September 18th, 2008 21:00
With the XPS T500 series, you should be able to install a IDE 60gb hard drive without a problem. For a 60gb to 120gb harddrive, you will need to upgrade the BIOS to version A11. For any drive larger than 137gb you will hit a BIOS limitation and need to use a PCI IDE/ATA Controller Card and use XP SP1, or higher.
Bev.
===================================================
Please don't send me questions about your system by DCF Messenger.
Post the issue in the appropriate Board, where they will be answered.