Is it ok to stick a very old hard drive in a new PC?

dingbat

Am sending a new hard drive back to Komplett - they say it will take about 2 weeks to test and decide whether to send it back to me or offer me a replacement. I think it would be a lot less time and effort for all concerned if they'd just send me a bloody replacement rather than messing about. Anyway, that's beside the point. Ultimately I'm without a computer for the next 2 weeks.

But, I've got an old pc (at least 5 years old) that's been sitting around doing nothing for about 2 years. The hard drive from it is about a 4 Gb model. Could I stick that drive into the new pc (it's a cube), wipe the drive, install Windows XP and use that for a couple of weeks?

Gosh

You won't get a lot on a 4GB drive these days

On my Win XP the Windows folder is 3.4GB - so doubt if you'll be able to install on a HDD that small

sceptre

Yup.

That's assuming you haven't got some wacky desktop machine that uses a laptop hard drive instead.

Gosh

dingbat wrote:

Am sending a new hard drive back to Komplett - they say it will take about 2 weeks to test and decide whether to send it back to me or offer me a replacement. I think it would be a lot less time and effort for all concerned if they'd just send me a bloody replacement rather than messing about. Anyway, that's beside the point. Ultimately I'm without a computer for the next 2 weeks.

Have you raised this on the Komplett forum?

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=242

ressem

A 6 yr old drive, yes you can. Provided that the disk isn't loaded with bad sectors, should be no problem, with enough room to install a few apps. Don't count on too many modern games fitting though.

Some drive manufacturers (maxtor especially for me in the past) will take the drive direct, if you've got a hardware error from their low level testing utilities. They then bill you for a new drive at mfg price, ship immediately and refund the cost when they get the drive.

tonky

No reason why u can't try it. Win98 or 2k afaik will fit if u have them. Maybe xp has a compact/minimum/laptop install that may do, not too sure offhand.

dingbat

Wow. Thanks for all the quick replies.

So I guess the only thing to do is just give it a go?

dingbat

Gosh wrote:

Have you raised this on the Komplett forum?

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=242

I never knew about that forum. Thanks a lot!

Capt'n Midnight

If the computer recognises IDE drives then you can stick anything bigger than 40MB into it happily - though you might have to set master/slave/standalone on drives that don't have a cable select setting.
Drives smaller than 40MB should also work but a very few were for XT's only and half of them had an AT/XT jumper setting.

conversally while the BIOS on older machines won't recognise large drivers, with the right software / OS driver loaded you should be able to see most new IDE drives in an older machine

Archytas

tonky wrote:

No reason why u can't try it. Win98 or 2k afaik will fit if u have them. Maybe xp has a compact/minimum/laptop install that may do, not too sure offhand.

Slap a small distro of linux on for a while. It'll do everything windows can and wont take long to get used to. But if your not a convert its only temporary until you get a new hard disk.

You can get a small distro of linux called Damn Small Linux which is 50mb...
Or you can get a live version of Linux... handy if you have two disk drives. So you can still play dvds, cds etc.

pickarooney

You could probably run knoppix, it won't need much (any?) hard drive space and presumably you have a decent amount of RAM. Then again, you won't be able to do much with it.

Capt'n Midnight

Archytas wrote:

Slap a small distro of linux on for a while. It'll do everything windows can and wont take long to get used to. But if your not a convert its only temporary until you get a new hard disk.

You can get a small distro of linux called Damn Small Linux which is 50mb...
Or you can get a live version of Linux... handy if you have two disk drives. So you can still play dvds, cds etc.

It's possible to get windows 95 onto a 40MB hard drive !!

Capt'n Midnight

pickarooney wrote:

You could probably run knoppix, it won't need much (any?) hard drive space and presumably you have a decent amount of RAM. Then again, you won't be able to do much with it.

Pop knoppix into another PC and PXE boot means you don't need any drives - no FDD/HDD/CD/USB

or if you have a 1GB drive you can copy the image over and still have swap file space or if you have 2.5 GB you can do a HDD install.

Actually since it has openoffice installed you could edit word/excel/powerpoint docs and there are loads of other apps there too...

lots of options on - http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Hd_Based_HowTo

Felstorm

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

It's possible to get windows 95 onto a 40MB hard drive !!

I have a computer with win95 on a 650mb hard drive. Its a glorified cd player

petes

Isnt the min space required 1.5 gig for xp both home and pro?

Archytas

pickarooney wrote:

Then again, you won't be able to do much with it.

Wha....... :eek:

pickarooney

Archytas wrote:

Wha....... :eek:

I'm guessing games, downloading and all that malarkey that requires HD space.

Archytas

He only needs it for two weeks....... And he's talkin about putting in a tiny hard-drive. So games (and maybe downloading) are out!

Archytas

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

It's possible to get windows 95 onto a 40MB hard drive !!

But linux is better and more up to date....

Winters

I would go with the Knoppix option. It should keep you going for a couple of weeks and you should be able to edit files and browse the net without having to install extra software.

Capt'n Midnight

Archytas wrote:

But linux is better and more up to date....

maybe you didn't see this 0 byte solution

Pop knoppix into another PC and PXE boot means you don't need any drives - no FDD/HDD/CD/USB

Archytas

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

maybe you didn't see this 0 byte solution

I don't get it?? What does this^ mean?

Capt'n Midnight

Archytas wrote:

I don't get it?? What does this^ mean?

It means you don't need any drives to run Linux. Once you have a PXE network card (or one of about 50 other types with a boot prom) and a fair bit of memory you can reverse boot from another machine - make a very quiet machine and gigabit NIC's might be faster than some very old HDD's

Archytas

ha ha ha I know what that meant(but good explanation). I didn't get why u quoted me and then said "maybe u didn't see this 0 byte solution"? How did I not see it? What is going on? I didn't say anything about that solution..... Ted I'm confused.....