Hi. i just bought a seagate 160gb ata/100 hdd. i have a dimension 4600 from dell. the drive is a 3.5 in drive. i wanna add it as a 2nd hdd and keep the current one as the boot drive and everything. So, i have 2 questions. one is, will this 3.5 in drive fit in my system or will i need extra drive rails or something? second question i have is, what should i set my jumpers to? i dont know what my current hdd's jumpers are set for. the hdd manual says set it to slave, but the dell manual says set it to cable select. Thanks for your help I Don't Check My PM's Pentium 4 @ 2.66 Ghz 533 Mhz FSB 1.25 Gb PC2700 RAM Nvidia Geforce 6600GT 40 Gb hdd DVD Burner CD Burner Windows XP

space? have a look inside the case. Drive rails? have a look to see if it needs them. Sometimes Dells have green plastic drive rails. I once worked on a friends Dell tower and there were some spare drive rails inside the case . I never set drives as cable select. I always set to master / slave depending how i want it to be. This might depend on how drives are connected at present, like which drives are present and whether they have separate cables and whether there is a spare plug on those cables (the 39/40 pin plug)

You can easily answer your own first question about available bays to hold the new drive. Open your case and have a look. According to Cnet's review of your system there should be one spare 3.5in bay. Whether you use Slave or CS setting on the second drive depends on the jumper setting of the current drive. If the original drive is set as CS and is connected to the end IDE connector then you may use CS on the new drive and connect it to the midpoint IDE connector. My personal preference however would be to reset the original drive's jumper to either Master or Master with slave (depending on the make of drive this second option may not be there), and set the new drive jumper to slave position. That way it doesn't matter which IDE connector is used. You may also consider attaching the new harddrive to the secondary IDE instead of as slave on the primary. Presuming you have two optic drives already installed, it is likely the maker put them as secondary master & slave with your HDD alone on the primary IDE. Some would suggest putting one of the optic drives as slave on the primary IDE and the new HDD as slave on the secondary IDE. The advantage to this setup is when transferring data from original HDD to the new one both IDE channels are used and data transfer is faster. Similarly, if using disk copying "on the fly" from one optic drive to burner, having them on separate IDE channels reduces possibilities of buffer underrun. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

And just to add one more thing. Unless you are running at least SP1 your windows won't recognize the full 160gb of the new drive. The 4600 is about 3 yrs old so the motherboard/bios should be 48bitLBA compliant. To check this boot into bios with the new drive connected and see if the drive is recognized at it's full size. Visit http://www.48bitlba.com/ for info on this issue if you have problems in this area I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

Excellent information from Richard59!!! Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

thx for the help I Don't Check My PM's Pentium 4 @ 2.66 Ghz 533 Mhz FSB 1.25 Gb PC2700 RAM Nvidia Geforce 6600GT 40 Gb hdd DVD Burner CD Burner Windows XP