I go with a Maxtor 7200RPM, but I'm not a fan of WD Drives.
Installing isn't hard. But you will need to do a few things.
1. Open your computer up. This can be easy or difficult. That model of HP is vagely familier. Might be plastic sheild on the back that pops of revealing 3 screws that hold the case on. Or it might be some bizarro design, requiring a sledgehammer or some patience. Either way, it's like a puzzle.. and there is a solution.
2. On the motherboard you will see 3 ribbons coming off it. Your interested in the 2 largest of the 3.
*note* you may only have 2 ribbons, one going to the floppy and 1 going to both the CD-ROM and Hard drive. If the hard drive and cd-rom are sharing the same ribbon, you will need to buy a ribbon cable. 40 or 80 pin IDE ribbon cable.
Install the drive. This will depend entirely on the internal design of your case. Ideally, put the new drive somewhere away from the old drive for heat dissapation. If that isn't possible, mount it above the current drive (probably 5400 rpm so heat won't be that big deal.)
Bit of info:
- Two connectors on the motherboard, primary and secondary.
- Two devices allowed per ribbon.
- With two devices on one ribbon, one device must be set to master, and one to slave. This is accomplished with little plastic jumpers on the back of the hard drive (usually at the back), and back of the CD-ROM.
- Typically the hard drive with the operating system on it, is on the primary controller on the motherboard, with the CD-ROM set as slave, on the same ribbon.
You want your new hard drive as the master drive, on the secondary IDE channel. It most likely will be jumpered factory default as master. I'm assuming you currently have one hard drive and one cd-rom.
Ok, so you installed it all have the ribbons hooked up, power hooked up. The red stripe on the ribbon is closest the power connector on the hard drive etc.
Unplug the ribbon from your old hard drive. (in case you screw up in FDISK)
*next bit may not be necessary, if you run fdisk and you don't see any drives, try below*
Boot the machine up and go into BIOS (keep hit the delete key until it lets you in), might be F1 or hold down escape for the HP can never remember. In BIOS you will see something that relates to Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, Secondary Slave. Set them all to AUTO, save and exit BIOS.
Boot with a windows boot disk.
Details on that can be found in the first bits of text here:
www.sigmacomputers.on.ca/dualboot.html
From the a:
type FDISK
Select yes
Select 1, create partition
Yes, you want it the full capacity or whatever the question is.
After fdisk is finished, reboot with the floppy and FORMAT the drive.
From the a:
type FORMAT c: /z:64
Reconnect your old drive, make sure all ribbons are snug.
That should be it. It's not as hard as the above may read, but a little tricky since your unfamiliar with the process.
