ATA Hard Drive Replacement

Breezer

I'm trying to upgrade the hard drive in an old Dell Latitude D510. It's an old ATA drive and I've only dealt with SATA before, so I'm a little clueless on the various different types. After doing some reading I settled on this drive.

Problem: it doesn't fit. Sizewise, it seems to be exactly the same as the old one. It will fit in the metal casing no problem, but that then won't slide into the laptop.

The connectors also appear to be the same.

The only difference I can see is that the new drive has a plastic bit on either side positioned over the pins (see photo). I think this is what's stopping it from fitting into the laptop.

Have I bought the wrong type of drive? Is it possible to disassemble the drives and swap over this plastic bit without completely hosing them? And if not, could anyone recommend one that might work? Thanks.


Old Drive


New drive

phill106

Dont worry you do have the right drive. While all laptops use the same ide or ata drives, most manufacturers have plastic adapters on the end to slide into whatever custom slot they have. Simply remove it from the original, Taking note which way it was facing and put it on the new one. Most just pull straight out (aided sometimes by a slim flathead, gently levering it up a bit from one side, then the other if needed). Some other ones have small screws that you would see if you look end on at the pins of the drive, on the edges.

Breezer

Thanks. Unfortunately this thing seems to be fixed on pretty tight and I can't for the life of me figure out how to get it off. Anyone got any experience with Samsung drives?

Voodu Child

Open your laptop screen about an inch, and then see if the drive goes in.

Breezer

Voodu Child wrote: »

Open your laptop screen about an inch, and then see if the drive goes in.

Well now I just feel thick. I actually remember reading this when I read the instructions last week. Problem solved, thank you sir!

Voodu Child

Seen the problem myself when I was upgrading someones laptop for them

I have one of those HM160HCs and they're great drives, about as fast as 2.5" IDE get. I replaced this terrible 4200rpm thing in an old Acer and its miles faster.

The only other thing is you might have an issue with 48-bit LBA. It depends how old your laptop is, but some of those old IDE ones don't actually support drives bigger than 137GB.

Breezer

Yeah the BIOS isn't recognizing it at all. I assume it's either the problem you're referring to, or... the fact that I half disassembled the thing to see if I could take the plastic adapter thing off. D'oh!

I assume if it's unsupported then the BIOS wouldn't be able to see it at all then?

Voodu Child

Breezer wrote: »

I assume if it's unsupported then the BIOS wouldn't be able to see it at all then?

There's some good info about it here:
http://www.48bitlba.com/

Usually there is a workaround. First I would see if there are any BIOS updates for the laptop you have, and check the release notes to see if any of the updated BIOS are relevant for 48-bit LBA. If that was the case, you'd have to put the old drive back in and do the update via Windows.

If youre trying to do a clean install from a Windows CD, sometimes it depends on whether your install CD has been patched for 48-bit LBA support. Like I think Windows XP did not include it until the first service pack.

Sometimes it's just a case of partitioning the drive so that the main partition is smaller than 137GB. You might have to do that from another computer (via a USB enclosure or caddy), depending on whether the laptop will recognize it or not. You might even be able to use a Linux LiveCD to do the repartitioning, im not sure to be honest.

monkeypants

Anytime I've seen this problem, at least part of th drive was recognised, 40Gb or whatever. As said, try a BIOS update first.