What hd should I buy? I want a reliable brand, 7200RPM, 3 year warranty, EIDE/IDE, and anywhere from 160-250gb. Budget-$175.
Another problem. Dad won't let me get one. That could be a problem.
I can't be stuck on this Knoppix thing forever!

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 160GB 8MB Cache 3 years, less than 50 cents a gig. You can save that up quick mowing lawns.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144181

Even better...Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB 16MB Cach 3 years, even cheaper per gig

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144422

I have no $$$ problem, I actually have $220.

I have not had good experience with Maxtor harddrives, and at the time they were going bad there were others who chimed in on problems with their failing drives. Of the units I've built for myself and immediate family I have replaced them all at least once...my father's twice...

I would suggest WD Caviars or Seagates, not based on my own personal exprience, but the raving of others. Well, actually, Seagates do hold a particular fascination because I have a number of them that were taken from servers where they pretty much ran 24/7 and they are still working in my storage tower application...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144392#sctNav

I've had my fair share of bad Maxtor experiences, too, but they're a lot better now. The DiamondMax 9 & 10 series are among the best in the industry now, right up there with the others in terms of reliability and performance and all that good stuff. :cool: In fact, there aren't a lot of bad hard drives anymore...

I;m not trusting the WD Caviar series, I had a Western Digital Caviar WD1600BB and that failed in ONE YEAR. I think I'll go with the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB 16MB Cache, because I see a lot of good reviews about it.

Isn't Seagate offering 5 year warrantees (http://5yrwarranty.seagatestorage.com/) these days? Didn't I already suggest those in one of your other threads?

I too have been using WD Caviars for many years now. I still even have one that is 250 megabytes or so... :eek: But recently I had a 200gig JB series that went bad as I was installing it for the first time. They sent me a new, bigger one no charge, I only needed to pay one-way shipping. And it seems that the 2000JB drives had issues as a Google search revealed. So WD's drives on average are very good though they are warranted only 3yrs.

If I were shopping today, Seagate would get a bit of my business this time around. ;)

There was a really nice Seagate model for only $99 on zipzoomfly. 200gb hard drive, 5 year warranty. I read reviews about it, almost all of them were good. The ones that weren't were like, "OMG, it says 187gb, not 200!!!one..."

Yeah. I'll wait for Dad and see what he thinks

OMG, it says 187gb, not 200!!!one...
that's the difference between what all harddrive manufacturers claim a gig is and what true gig actually is.

The drive manu's use 1000bytes as 1kb where it is truly 1024 in binary so the 187 gigs being reported by Windows is normal when the drive is listed as a 200gig.

Check any pc in your house and you will see the same percentage of error with all your families drives.

I noticed that before, but I always thought Windows was to blame.

Seagate drives are good, they do have 5 years warrantees, they are what I normally recommend and use myself (except for my Raptors). However, there were a couple of small reasons for saying WD Diamonmax10 here. One is price/GB of storage, two is that line has gotten pretty darn good reviews from multiple sources, and three is Newegg lists no Seagate HDD with ATA133 and in fact, Seagate doesn't either.

You can't go to wrong either way. I do have a DiamondMax, an older model, in one of my boxes. It's outlived the warrantee and never gave me a problem.

A comparable Seagate drive would be this ATA100 250GB 8MB cache Baraccuda: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148062

WD Diamond Max 10?
Maxtor.
I would go with the Diamond Max too, but the thing is my da'll appeal to the 5 year warranty and lower price.

Oops. Maxtor.

I will not try to talk you out of a Seagate. They're just too good. As far as price goes, the Maxtors I listed are cheaper...and we're only talking a few cents/GB here, anyway. Seagate warrantee is the best in the business, period.

As far as your dad goes...I'm a pop pop, father knows best ;)

Wow, I am really pissed.
My dad won't let em get a new hard drive. He thinks I "broke it."
First off, we've only had 2 western digitals, both of them formatted at least once.
Second, he doesn't understand hard drives can die anytime. "In the past 15 years of computing, I never had a hard disk fail me."
:rolleyes:
I feel like uninstalling his spyware, virus scanner, and firewall right now.
Then snipping the wires inside his CPU. Just kidding. :D
School starts in one week. He wants my Epson printer, (only good color printer we've got). I refuse.
God, what now?

"In the past 15 years of computing, I never had a hard disk fail me."Ok, how many hard drives has he owned!? I myself have owned dozens of hard drives in just the last decade or so and most of them are still working, but a few have died. I've seen/serviced many many more hard drives than that, and let me tell you, the death rate of HDD's in OEM systems is about 3 times as high as custom-built systems! A lot of it has to do with poor airflow/cooling around the HDD, and the rest is just the fact that OEM's use cheapo HDD's.

If your dad hasn't had a single hard drive die in 15 years, then he must have gotten very lucky with only a handful of HDD's, or he gets rid of them within a few months. Hard drives die, plain and simple. They have high-speed moving parts, and those parts can break just like any other moving parts. Ask him how his car is doing. Has he ever made it 15 years without a car breaking?

MY dad nevener replaced a hard drive, (since 1997, I don't know anything about the olderones, I know wqe had a Gateway 133MHz). All computers purchased since 1997 have their hard disks running fine, never replaced, (Some formattted due to spywae and viruses). Four times we reinstalled XP. Once on the Dell 8200, once on the Dell XPS T5550, once on the Dell XPS T450, and once on the HP a650y. We've purchased 6 desktops and 4 notebooks. All of these PC's, (except my HP desktop and an old micron laptop, [I admit, that one failed. But my uncle gave that to me]), never had to have a hard drive replaced.

My dad says he'll take the drive to his hospital's IT pro's. :)

Lesson learned. Never buy a brand name desktop. BUild one yourself.

Oh, wow. I thre wthe Western Digital hard disk in the Dell XPS t550 and it worked. Must be the Melex cable.

Possibly the ide cable as well.

but we discussed this in your 3 page thread about trying different cables. Obviously you didn't do it then. :rolleyes:

I tried connecting the melex cable to something else. Won't reach that far. I'll try it on the XPS, though.

Whoa, dude! It worked! I connected the hard drive to the Dell, booted Windows, (from the Dell's primary 20gb Maxtor that has NEVER failed since 1999), ran Western Digtal's software, wrote zero's to the disk, formatted it to ntfs, put it in the hp with the correct jumper settings, viola! It detects it and goes past the BIOS screen.

EDIT: Threw in my Windows XP DVD, it rebooted and started everything all over again after saying, "Set up is rebooting your computer."

Threw in the Windows 2000 disk, it said I have 800gb, (random bullcrap, I have a 160gb hard drive).

Throwing in my XP cd...

EDIT 2: Dammi, it did it again. It says, "Set-up is inspecting your hardware config." no matter what cd/dvd I use! :mad:

Sounds to me your harddrive is too big for your BIOS to recognize it properly so it is pumping out those lines. What does your BIOS screen show at first boot? Is the harddrive size reported correctly?

Actually, the bios was never updated. It orignally detected the drive as 160gb.
I went into BIOS Set-up and it says the drive is 160gb.
EDIT: I wrote zero's to the drive.

"Set-up is inspecting your hardware config."
I repeat. I got that line when the HDD was not recognized in full. It lists the label correctly such as 'WD2500JB' but where it mentions the size it sees was wrong. I realize you've had it working before at one time though, I'm just trying to help narrow it down. Check what it (BIOS) sees, not what it labels the drive as.

EDIT: Threw in my Windows XP DVD, it rebooted and started everything all over again after saying, "Set up is rebooting your computer."
Threw in the Windows 2000 disk, it said I have 800gb, (random bullcrap, I have a 160gb hard drive). If this is a repeat occurence that this has happened immediately after trying to install the home-made XP DVD,,, please fling that dvd out through your window but, just wait untill I yell PULL!! (http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze2h5pb/cat-skeet.gif)

Try another install disk. But first after writing zeros again. :rolleyes: Sounds like a corrupted install disk, or how it is being tried like as a dvd instead of a cd.

I have another XP cd. I'll use that, that has been proven to work on many occasions.
BIOS sees the drive as primary master.

Woo. GOt XP installed. Everything's A-Okay, except I need to find a product key within 29 days.

We've purchased 6 desktops and 4 notebooks.Amateurs! :p I'm sitting in a room with 8 hard drives in it (one of which is a broken server drive that died from a surge) with the remaining 7 still working. Various hard drives from IDE to SATA to SATA II to IDE laptop. In the rest of the house, there's about 8 or so more hard drives, mostly IDE. And that's not even counting the other hard drives that my friend and I have owned over the years, nor the dozens more that were in computers that we've serviced/built. And yes, we also have 10+ year-old hard drives that are still working, but we've also seen some that didn't last a year. My point is that hard drives do indeed die, and owning a mere 10 HDD's over the last decade is not enough experience to know this. Give your dad a lesson. Or let him read my rant here.

Everything's A-Okay, except I need to find a product key within 29 days.Actually, you can just call M$ and buy another license from them without buying another whole package. I think it might even be a bit cheaper to just buy a license, but then again a retail license might still be more expensive than an OEM package of WinXP. I could be wrong. Give them a call and see.

Yeah, we're gonna call MS later.
In the mean time, do I have everything? I'll install MS anti spyware and Service Pack 2 later, as they require validation.
http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/4067/addremove1qn.png

Okay, Window's been activated. Installing SP2 and then AntiSPyware. then IE7.