Repacing a hard drive

[cozmoss]

I have a decent xp tower and It has a tiny hard drive witch I thought would be easy enough to replace with a 500 gig or higher. I do have my xp op disc but how do I know what the correct hard drive is to purchase ? I actually have two 500gig ones but when I connect one and tried to boot with xp disc in the system, it didn't find a drive ? can anyone advize please. Point of interest "the 500 gig drive has vista op on it at the mo" Actually the two 500 gigs were out of a tower of mine witch were both installed making that one 1 tb 1000gig surley I can use one of them ? Edited October 7, 2013 by cozmoss

[KenB]

Hi and welcome.

 

I replied to this earlier today and my post seems to have gone missing !!

 

You should be able to use your 500GB drive no problem.

If you know it is ok and in good order ......

 

Is it SATA or IDE ?

click here - this should help

 

If it is IDE .....

You need to make sure that the jumper at the back is set to "Master" if it is an IDE drive.

For the time being also make sure that there is nothing else connected to the IDE cable.

 

but when I connect one and tried to boot with xp disc in the system, it didn't find a drive ?

Is the CDROM the first boot device ?

You will need to check in the BIOS.

If it isn't then you will need to make changes so that it is for the XP disk to be recognised from switch on.