Adding HD to Dell 8300

[paJAMbla]

I want to add a second internal Seagate SATA HD to my old Dell 8300. I know it is recommended to go for the 16mb on a new build but will it matter in this situation whether its 8 or 16? Its a 478 board and I believe the chipset is an 875P if that matters.

I'd appreciate any advice.

[EzyStvy]

The 16mg drive is a little bit better but other then that, it doesn't matter.

[paJAMbla]

Thanks ezy. I guess I wanted to know if it would even function as a 16mb with an old chipset/motherboard. Its sounds like its irrelevant.

I've been reading OLD posts on Dell's forum and some of them say that I will have to use the SATA drive as my boot drive. I wonder if anybody knows if there's a way around that. I don't want to, nor do I know how, to move the operating system (XP) over to another drive. I also don't understand the issue discussed regarding "partitions" and what I do with that when I add a new drive.

thanks

[glc]

You can clone the old drive to the new one with Seagate Disk Wizard if you buy a Seagate drive. Just install the SATA drivers first if they aren't already installed.

I don't see why you can't just add the drive, then boot up, go into Disk Management, and partition/format the drive. A drive must be partitioned even if it's just one partition occupying the whole drive.

[paJAMbla]

Thanks GLC. One would think if a motherboard is SATA capable it would have the necessary drives. Perhaps an update will be needed?

I'm going to go ahead and stick a new HD in and just see what happens. The bios are so basic and there isn't a lot of room for modifications. Hopefully its a matter of just enabling the SATA capability and formatting it. Hoping not to even mess with cloning but there are several posts, as I mentioned, indicating that the SATA takes over as the bootable drive. I just want to leave that original drive alone and have the new one just to create more room for more stuff.

I might be checking in again on this thread if I run into problems.

thanks

[glc]

Is the factory drive IDE or SATA?

[paJAMbla]

I meant to say the "necessary drivers." Anyway, the original HD is IDE.

[glc]

I don't see why it wouldn't still boot from it as long as the SATA drive is not bootable.