IDE and ATA hard drives

[J Thinkpad]

Can I put a 120 GB ATA HD in an older P4 Intel board that is now running a
WD Caviar 40GB IDE drive? When I tried the system will not find the drive in
does running fdisk.
Am I stuck buying a newer / bigger IDE drive?
Thanks in advance.

 

[Michael Hawes]

Can I put a 120 GB ATA HD in an older P4 Intel board that is now running a
WD Caviar 40GB IDE drive? When I tried the system will not find the drive
in does running fdisk.
Am I stuck buying a newer / bigger IDE drive?
Thanks in advance.

Could you try that again in ENGLISH! Some punctuation would help.
Mike.

 

[Boba & Ilinka]

Did you set jumprs properly: master, slave or cable selected.? Did you
partishen HD?

Boba Vankufer

 

[dawg]

IDE and ATA are the same thing. If it's SATA you can't use it in an older
board.

 

[Bob Knowlden]

I don't understand what you've written.

What I guess that you mean is that your old 40 GB HD is not found by fdisk
running from a DOS boot floppy. That would mean that the old drive is dead.

You can still buy 40 GB drives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822140118

but you can buy a 120 GB drive for not much more money:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148104

The current sweet spot in pricing might be 250 GB:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148062

(about $100, or 6X the size of the 40 GB, for a bit over twice the price.)

Some motherboards have trouble with hard drives that need LBA48 addressing.
(Those drives are larger than 137 GB.) Some of those motherboards have BIOS
updates available that will fix that. Older boards have trouble with drives
smaller than that, but I wouldn't expect to see that with any P4 boards.

If you could post what your motherboard is, someone might be able to tell
you what size drives it supports. There are utilities (SiSoft Sandra is one)
that can ID a board, but they require a working PC.

Hope this helps.


Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.

 

[Jonny]

Check with specs on setting the 40GB drive as master with a companion slave.
Different setting than master alone. WD idiosyncracy.
Only the newer fdisk will make the entire new hard drive one partition.
ATA is a specification. IDE is an association. For purposes of
conversation about hard drives, its the same thing.
Can you do any of what you asked? With a little independent research on the
internet, ability to use a search engine and filter the garbage, intuitive
association of terms, average intelligence, no reason why not.