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Originally Posted by Daniela
I have Compaq Evo D3m/P1.5 Desktop PC. Hard drive is almost dead (have a lot of bad sectors which can't be repaired). I want to install new hard drive , so I have couple questions about that.
Can somebody tell me what kind of hard drive to buy. I don’t need large capacity, around 20Gb will be enough, but I’m not sure which kind of interface to buy IDE, ATA or SCSI.
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ATA and "EIDE" are the same thing, and the packaging at the Best Buy, CompUSA, Office Depot, etc will show "ATA" on it. That is what you will want.
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Also do I need to setup master / slave switchers or ant jumpers ? Can somebody give me basic steps how to install new drive ?
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Right out of the box, it should already be set to run correctly as a straight replacement drive. You shouldn't have any need to touch the jumper.
The stores that do have smaller (than about 80 GB's) hard drives to sell have them priced pretty high for their relatively smaller sizes, but I have seen 30 GB and 40 GB drives being sold this week at retail stores here in Texas. And the price was in that $70 area (even though right next to them were 80's and 120's being sold with Rebate Offers bringing their prices down to $40 when the rebate is paid).
Unplug the power cable before anything else. You must then remove both side panels from the system to unscrew two screws on each side of the hard drive, and unplug the power cable and the ATA Bus Cable. Then pull it out of the drive bay for disposal. I often run my first tests with the system lying down on its side and the new piece of hardware connected, but only loosely lying atop the chassis, just in case I ended up with one of the rare "DOA" items.
If you follow my personal procedures, it is now time to re-attach the power cable and start the system. I will take you though using a PC BIOS that requires a "manual" choice to run the drive ID function. If that Compaq Evo is more modern, it may be redundant, but I haven't had much experience with any Compaqs in the last 7-8 years or so.
To reach the BIOS, you are supposed to press a particular key during the initial start-up, in between what is called a "POST" and the moment that the system starts trying to load an Operating System from a drive. There is usually a screen of information that describes the system that pops on screen for a few seconds, followed by the line "Press Del to Run Setup" (Or "Press F2 to Run Setup" -- the actual key varies from one make to another).
Most folks don't react fast enough when they see that instruction; and since it's a blank HDD, it's an "Invalid Disk" or some such error message. Just reboot and have your finger tapping repeatedly on the correct key during the start-up, and you'll normally get setup to start for you. Then you have to look up two pages in the setup. One is where you tell the CMOS to look at the new drive and identify it. If you find it's already done when you get there, that Compaq has a fairly modern BIOS.
Press ESC to get back to the contents page. The other page you need to go to is where you choose the boot-up sequence; you need to have the CD be first, and that normally requires a change. Press the ESC key once to get back to the contents page and find the "Save setup and exit" choice, and use that. If you have a bootable Win-OS disk in the CD, the install should start after that.
You can go ahead and run the entire install with the drive just lying on the PC, or after verifying that the install will run, you can abort and finish inserting the drive into place, and screwing it down, before doing so. If you choose to hard-mount first, I would still leave the left side of the case unlatched "just in case". It won't hurt a thing.
