Help ! Looking for HDD for Dell Inspiron 1300

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HTSS_TR

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Hard Drive of my 5-6 years old Dell Inspiron 1300 making fairly loud noise once in a while the last week or so, it seems to failing. I think the OE HDD is 40GB. I'm looking for replacement HDD in capacity above 100GB, from Amazon there is only one HDD for Dell Inspiron 1300 with capacity 160GB made by "Brand" for $55. Is there Western Digital drive that fits Dell Inspiron 1300 ? TIA
 
I hate to say it, but for the hassle and price of a new HD I would just watch for a 300 dollar laptop deal on woot or slickdeals to replace it with.
 
Agreed. In addition to purchasing and physically replacing the harddrive, you have to re-install windows. It's probably not worth it, I agree look for a decent laptop in the $3-400 range. You should able to get something with a decent processor, and 4GB of ram. Look for something with a Pentium B940 or a AMD A4 processor. Edit: If you are sure you want to repair it, you are looking for any 2.5" HDD that is IDE/PATA.
 
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After some more research, I think the WD Scorpio is for laptop/notebook, all I need is remove the caddy from existing drive and install it to new drive. The WD 320GB Scorpio Blue is only $48 on Amazon which is very good price. I need to rethink about the hassle of re-install windows and other software.
 
You can use any laptop drive you wish and there's no need to reinstall unless you just want a clean installation. You can use any good cloning software as well but Western digital has a free version of Acronis, (I used the full version for years), available here. Hope this helps! Larry
 
Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
After some more research, I think the WD Scorpio is for laptop/notebook, all I need is remove the caddy from existing drive and install it to new drive. The WD 320GB Scorpio Blue is only $48 on Amazon which is very good price. I need to rethink about the hassle of re-install windows and other software.
Know anyone with an external HDD? If so use one of the many free disk cloning options available to clone your current disk to an external hard drive. Then replace your current drive, boot from the rescue CD (flash drive) created by the program and clone the image of your old drive onto the new one. I did that on an old Inspiron 6000 a few years ago that had a failing hard drive. I used Acronis (a commerical program that I cost me about $25 at the time) but there are many freeware alternatives currently available.
 
Originally Posted By: Brenden
I hate to say it, but for the hassle and price of a new HD I would just watch for a 300 dollar laptop deal on woot or slickdeals to replace it with.
Why would you suggest he spend $300 when $50 and a few minutes of his time would fix his problem? Replacing a hard drive and re-installing Windows is not the project some make it out to be.
 
$50 and 90 minutes of time will get you back to where you were. Unless the computer is dog-slow and unusable, I see no reason to replace it yet.
 
+1 on the WD Scorpio "BEVE" PATA-IDE series for replacement, and +1 for using an external USB hard drive / the WD Acronis software to create an image the existing drive prior to replacement, You will need to create an Acronis DOS boot CD before the swap, and you may need to (partition) the new drive, using either the Acronis software (or a 3rd-party utility) before the image restore.
 
This is what I'm going to get/do to replace failing 40GB Hard Drive in my Dell Inspiron 1300: Buy Western Digital Scorpio Blue SATA 250GB or 320GB ($44 for 250G - $48 for 320GB) Buy External Hard Drive Enclosure with USB cable to install new drive (Kingwin from Amazon for $7) Download Acronis from Western Digital Partition the new drive using Acronis software before cloning Clone the current drive to new drive via USB cable Create an Acronis DOS boot CD before the swap Remove old drive and install new drive Boot with newly created Acronis DOS boot CD Are these steps sound okay ? What else I need to know/do before venture into replacing the current drive ? Also, how do I check for Motherboard controller supports drives > 128GB ?
 
1st, make darn sure you order and receive a PATA hard drive, not SATA. Western Digital has both in their Scorpio Blue line. 2nd, if your laptop isn't running BIOS version A07, go to Dell.com and download the update. You can run it from within Windows. Just make sure it's connected to wall power. 3rd, go to Start -> Run, type in CMD and hit Enter. At the command prompt, type in chkdsk C: /f to repair any corrupted files. You really should run chkdsk C: /r to do the above and also scan the surface area of your current drive. This is just to make sure the data you clone over to your new drive is in the best shape possible, but if your drive is failing, you won't want to strain it that much. Just do the /f at least once. Once you do all that, you should be good to proceed. Looking at the Acronis manual, I don't think there's any reason to create bootable media. It looks like the drive cloning is all done under Windows but I could be wrong.
 
Different angle: If you can find a PATA SSD for not too much $$, buy it, run Linux on it. You'll be amazed at how fast that old Dell 1300 will be. Sure, it won't have the full-out performance of new SATA interfaces, but it's still wayyyyyyy faster than any spinning drive. I tried this on a number of old Dell & HP units, including a Mac G4 laptop. Problem is, PATA-based SSD drives can be quite pricey. And I'd never run Windows XP on any of them since WinXP doesn't support any advanced SSD stuff.
 
Thanks Bottom_Feeder ! Almost made the mistakes of buying a SATA drive and an External SATA Hard Drive Enclosure. I didn't know that the Dell Inspiron 1300 uses PATA-IDE drive. Need to do some searching for PATA drive in the 120-160GB capacity and the Enclosure for it. Nick R did mention IDE/PATA drive, but at that time I did not recognize the importance of the type of IDE/PATA. I need to read this thread again and again to be sure I understand all the steps and do the swap correctly. If anyone has something else to say above what Bottom_Feeder posts above, please add all comments before I commit my $ for the project. TIA
 
You're welcome. Keep in mind, you'll have to carefully pull the drive adapter plug off the old drive's pins and slide it on the new one when its time to do the swap. Go here to see what I mean. http://www.bixnet.com/delahadrcoad.html If you want to keep the old drive in working condition (more or less) make sure you pull the adapter straight off. It's very easy to bend the drive's pins if it comes off crooked. Handling it will also get oil from your skin all over the connectors so you may want to wipe off the contacts with some rubbing alcohol or something and let it dry before you install the new drive into the laptop.
 
Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
This is what I'm going to get/do to replace failing 40GB Hard Drive in my Dell Inspiron 1300: Buy Western Digital Scorpio Blue SATA 250GB or 320GB ($44 for 250G - $48 for 320GB) Buy External Hard Drive Enclosure with USB cable to install new drive (Kingwin from Amazon for $7) Download Acronis from Western Digital Partition the new drive using Acronis software before cloning Clone the current drive to new drive via USB cable Create an Acronis DOS boot CD before the swap Remove old drive and install new drive Boot with newly created Acronis DOS boot CD Are these steps sound okay ? What else I need to know/do before venture into replacing the current drive ? Also, how do I check for Motherboard controller supports drives > 128GB ?
several things.. you can buy a usb to sata/ide adapter.. you dont need an enclosure. basic procedure I would use. install acronis make boot cd shut off computer plug in usb to sata/ide adapter (to computer and new drive) boot off boot cd clone current drive to new hdd plugged into the usb to sata/ide adapter(comes with power supply too if needed) shut down computer remove old hdd reassemble with new hdd. win. Cost should be under 100$ you want something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136129 for the hdd. unless you are running out of space stick with an 80gb drive or you may have bios issues with it not working.(or research this farther) If you can use >128gb drives they have a 160 for 65+5 ship. 320 is about 110$ I'd stick with cheapness and if you need more space a 500gb usb external can be had for under 50$ an adapter would be something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812156017
 
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Originally Posted By: Bottom_Feeder
Once you do all that, you should be good to proceed. Looking at the Acronis manual, I don't think there's any reason to create bootable media. It looks like the drive cloning is all done under Windows but I could be wrong.
From what I remember, creating the cloned image can take place entirely in windows though you might have to boot from CD to after placing the new drive in the machine to set the flags for the bootable partition. The way I did it was I cloned the old drive to an external USB drive (old 80GB laptop HDD I salvaged from a dead Gateway). The original dying drive was partitioned into 3 discs. One partition held the OS, one was about 10GB in size and held the swap file and all temporary files, and the third partition was for data storage. I only cloned the OS and the "swap/temp" portions of the drive. Then I installed the new blank drive, booted from CD, created 3 partitions and let it copy over the cloned images to the new drive. I finally put the old drive in the enclosure and copied my personal data files to the new drive. HTSS might I make a suggestion since you're going to be messing with hard drives and partitions anyway? I've followed the strategy for about a decade now of splitting my disks into the following partitions on laptops (listed in order of their location from the start to end of the disk): D: Swap/Temp (12GB or so), C: OS 50-70GB, and E: Storage. The start of the disk typically has a slightly faster read/write/seek rate than the rest of the drive so putting the swap file at the start of the drive helps to eek out a bit more performance/responsiveness under windows. In advanced system settings (right click my computer -> properties -> advanced system settings) you can make the OS put the swap file on D: drive (performance -> settings -> advanced -> virtual memory -> change). You can also make the system put all temp files on the D: partition. The first step is to create a directory (default names I use) called usertemp and one called wintemp. Under "environmental variables" edit the user variables to TMP and TEMP point to D:/usertemp and scroll down under system variables to the very bottom and edit TMP and TEMP to point to D:/wintemp. I usually go one extra step and create a D:/foxtemp and D:/ietemp directory and then make Firefox and IE point to those directories for holding the browser cache. On desktops, I usually build them with two HDDs. The primary houses the OS and the slave holds the D: partition (swap/temp) and the E: partition (storage). At the bare minimum I suggest at least creating a separate partition for your data files. If you store all your data (docs, MP3s, etc) on a separate partition, you can completely hose your Windows installation and upon reinstall still have all your data intact. I've done the above on clean installs and on existing installations using GParted to move/resize existing partitions and set the proper boot flags.
 
I have 2 80Gb Hard Drives here I was just keeping for spares cause that's what my old XP home desktop has in it. I could let you have one of those for $25 shipped if you like. Just replace and reformat and be like new again. Just a FYI that's up to you. Just thought I would run it by you.
 
Reading new posts makes my head spin, I'm a little more confusing now than before. I think it is an easy job to replace hard drive, but it seems to be more complicates than expected. I think Amazone have good price on Western Digital PATA drives WDxx00BEVE, price includes free shipping: 80GB at $55, 120GB at $60 and 160GB at $65. I bought an enclosure for $5.xx includes USB cable. I need to reread all the posts, write down step by step the procedure of cloning, partitioning, boot CD ... I wish I have a computer nerd neighbor who can do replace/upgrade hard drive, I'm willing to pay $50-100 for his/her labor.
 
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