Hard Drive Failure

[raul]

Hi all hows things??

I bought a Sony Vaio PCG-FX503 4 years ago... and my hard drive seems to have died just yesterday. When I start it up a clicking sound in the hard drive eventually comes up and crashes, and you always get that sound before complete windows startup so I believe it is a mechanical or electrical failure...

I am thinking of getting a new hard drive. The thing is that as far as I know, the hard drive bus is an ULTRA ATA-66. My questions are:

1.- In case of getting another hard drive, should it be an ULTRA ATA-66 or could it also be an ATA-100. I havent seen ULTRA ATA-66 hard drives in the market but ATA-100. Would the later be compatible with my IDE ULTRA DATA-66 ???

2.- The original hard drive in my laptop was this hard drive of 20 Gb... If I installed another with higher capacity... would I have any problems when reinstalling the original software supplied by sony?? What about the two partitions this software makes automatically ??

Thanks you very much for you attnetion.

Best Regards

Ra�

[robpaxton]

Ultra-ATA 100 isn't necessarily backward compatible. Some drives can suppot u-ata 66 but you'll have to check the drive makers website.

You should find this site useful.

[raul]

Thanks man for your repy.

I have seen that the IDE for the hard drive is, on the motherboard specs, ULTRA ATA-66/100, I believe it should include any ATA-100 hard drive, what do you think??

Thanks a lot !!!

Raul

[robpaxton]

If the motherboard spec is u-ata 100 then you shouldn't have a problem.

[raul]

Thanks a lot Rob, I went yesteray to order a hard drive, it is a Seaagate ATA100, 80 GB, the guy told me to hold back until I ensured my motherboard ando/or BIOS could bear a 80 GB harddrive so long as sometimes the motherboard could have a limit in cylinders and/or sectors or something.

Best Regards

[kee-lo_]

Isn't that usually repairable with a BIOS update?

[robpaxton]

It's difficult to guarantee that the BIOS will support a drive larger than about 32GB for older computers. In general, if the BIOS date is after around year 2000 then you're fine up to about 130GB.

Ideally we need someone who has tried the upgrade . . .

[kee-lo_]

Yeah that's a good point

[raul]

Thank you all for your responses.

I tried the seagate but they had to order so I tried a toshiba, equivalent (ATA-100, 80 GB, 5400 rpm) and on top I saved 20 % in price. I installed and thank god everything went smoothly. Sony made me a system partition of 10 Gb and the rest, 30 Gb, the remaining capacity was unallocated. So after installing windows and using this utility for drives in Windows XP I formatted the 30 Gb + the unallocated space and I got the hard drive working properly at full capacity and performance...

So the motherboard seems to accept my hard drive. Happy end then...

Best Regards

Raul