what type of hard drive do I need?

[craz1]

I was planning on upgrading my compaq's hard drive?I know it is an ide cable connection,but there are a lot of different ide's.Will an ata 66 or 100 work or do I have to buy adapter card?

[Paleo Pete]

First thing you need to do is check the manual, and maybe contact Compaq. Since they use a restore disk that doesn't give you any options but install that puppy, you might end up with the same size partitions you already have, even though you bought a larger drive. Compaq's are not designed with upgrading in mind...I could easily be wrong, you might be able to set it up for a different size drive, but I didn't see any such option when I did the one in the next room...I got an option to do a full restore, and an option to basically overinstall, and that's about it...everything is automatic, including the fdisk procedure, you have no control over it. And fdisk is where you set the partition sizes.

Compaq also stores part of the BIOS in a partition on the hard drive, so before trying it you need to check every resource on Compaq's you can find. You don't want to lose that BIOS info...

If your motherboard has onboard controllers, you won't need a card, but probably will be limited to ATA 33 or 66. If you want to use a card to go to ATA 100, there again, you're dealing with a highly proprietary Compaq...

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