Everyone,

Thanks much for the input.  Only one issue remains for me--partitioning and
formatting the new drive.  This sort of relates back to my bare drive
question ("Is it safe to buy a "bare" hard drive?")  Assuming WinXP home is
going back on the box when done, and assuming I don't want to buy a copy of
Partition Magic (ok, I am trying to save money), this means I have to use
FDISK and FORMAT, I think, if the drive itself comes with no disks.  The
only snag is it has been several millennia since I have used these
utilities.

And it seems like Windows XP lacks facilities for making a restore disk.
How does one handle the partition and format side of this problem?

Mike


"J. Clarke" <jclarke@nospam.invalid> wrote in message
news:cbqiff01rqn@news1.newsguy.com...
> Michael wrote:
> 
>
> It's a religious issue for some.  Like gun control, once the battle is
> joined all signal becomes lost in the noise.
> 
website[vbcol=seagreen] 
Am[vbcol=seagreen] 
>
> Generally speaking a "bare" drive is fine.  I've only bought from
zipzoomfly
> a couple of times--the produce arrived as expected and worked fine--don't
> know how their returns are.  You might want to check their rating at
> <http://www.resellerratings.com>.
> 
due[vbcol=seagreen] 
>
> Depends on the store's policy and on whether the manufactuer guarantees
> compatibility with a particular machine.  <http://www.newegg.com> will
> accept nondefective returns with a 15% restocking fee, and generally has
> pretty good prices as well.
>
> The particular drive you have is a UDMA/100 drive, which is the next to
the
> latest release of parallel ATA, so a current-generation drive should work
> fine--the ATA interface is supposed to be backward-compatible and usually
> is unless you're dealing with a pretty old machine that was built before
> all the bugs in the interface standard got worked out.  You _may_ hit a
> 32-gig BIOS limitation--that shouldn't cause problems, you just won't get
> the full capacity of a drive larger than that size.
>
> Do however check the drive specifications for power consumption--laptops
are
> especially sensitive in that area and you want a drive with about the same
> power consumption as the old one.
>
> According to froogle several vendors have the exact drive in stock,
however
> they're all used.
>
> Also, don't know if anybody has made this clear--a few years ago IBM spun
> off their drive division to Hitachi (the actual deal was more complicated
> than that but that's the gist of it)--that's why your IBM drive is listed
> on the Hitachi site.
>
>
> 
the[vbcol=seagreen] 
>
> --
> --John
> Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
> (was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]