I have a Compaq Deskpro 4000 with a hard drive whose capacity is about 1 gigabyte. My brother, who rebuilt the hardware and gave it to me, suggested I might consider getting what amounts to an “external” hard drive, which sounds easier, anyway, than trying to take the old hard drive out and put another one in with a capacity of 8gb or more. I’ve asked various technicians about this: One said perhaps the other innards of the console might not support an upgraded HD (perhaps like putting a Trans-Am engine into a Model T); others want me to bring the console in for them to assess the matter. The console does not have USB ports, but does have two serial ports…
Comments, please? 
Most Deskpros had enough room inside to add another hard disk, and in any event, why not just get a bigger one and use that.
You could add an external parallell port hard drive, but they’re slow.
If the machine is worth upgrading, it’s worth rebuilding so if you can’t get someone to piggyback or copy the data to another, bigger hard disk, just save the dtat you have on the 1Gb one and rebuild the system on a new disk.
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- Where do you find new 8Gb hard drives anymore? All I can seem to find are some tens, but mostly 20’s… -Anyway, if you are facing the Win95 2Gb limit, you can run a partition program to chop up a big drive into a bunch of 2-gig virtual drives. -The info I found on your PC says 233Mhz PII; I don’t know that I’d spend much on upgrading it. Note that any external drive will cost more than a comparable-capacity internal drive. Ordinarily I’d say look for used parts, but HD’s are a special problem because used ones are old, and nearer to the end of their lifetimes.
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- I scrounged abandoned 386’s looking for parts (for my 586!) at one point, and the HD’s are cross-functional, except for the early partition size limits. I even kept somebody’s old Win95 HD because it’s got a full install with their stuff on it (some stuff looks X-rated!!! the curiosity was to much to resist) but when I place it in my PC as a slave (it hooks right up, by the by) it reboots after about 45 seconds and then continuously reboots… <:/
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Arg, Mateys!
-If anybody knows how I can get the stuff off this HD [for free!], it’d be a real hoot.
It has the same problem in three different computers, if it’s hooked up as a master or slave: after a long boot of about 45 seconds, it tries to reboot every 15 seconds or so…?
"Where do you find new 8Gb hard drives anymore? "
In the Xbox. People are, umm, ‘updating’ their xboxes & sell their old 8gig HDs on ebay.com
An external firewire HD box from computergeeks (also check for old parts) where you can
put in any size HD you want is another idea. you need a firewire card though.
Update the BIOS to the latest flash from Compaq’s website.
You system BIOS and OS should handle up to about an 8 gig drive unless it’s running WIN 95 verison A or earlier in which 2 gigs might be your max. You can put in and use a bigger drive than 8 gigs, but it will probably only format to 8 gigs unless you use an IDE card with it’s own onboard BIOS to control the drive. 8 gig drives are only a few bucks each (literally) on Ebay. It’s pretty much a incipient doorstop at this point anyway. You might want to think hard about investing a lot of time in it.
If it really is only a 233 MHz PII, as long as you have lots of RAM (256 Mb or more) you can use it for websurfing. Office 97 should run just fine, but very few new titles you might see in a store today, even the kiddie stuff, will run on that platform. However, games and other programs of that vintage (1998?), difficult as they may be to find, should run on your machine.
I guess it depends on what you want to do with it, but I agree with everyone else who recommends against investing lots of time and/or dollars on this machine.
If you have an at all normal HD already, a new one will fit into the same place in your PC.
Forget the external HD idea. They are much slower (unless you want to pay more $ than a new PC). They are meant for backup and portability purposes, not for primary storage.
So, replace the HD. Just take note of the OS and BIOS support points that have been made.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by DougC *
**- - - Where do you find new 8Gb hard drives anymore? All I can seem to find are some tens, but mostly 20’s… -Anyway, if you are facing the Win95 2Gb limit, you can run a partition program to chop up a big drive into a bunch of 2-gig virtual drives. **
All we had to do was make the primary partition 2 GB, then it worked fine…
My brother opriginally had Windows 95 in the console, as a Compaq person said it’s supposed to be when I called their 800 number: They said the Deskpro 4000 was not supposed to be used with anything more advanced. But my brother had rebuilt it, so much so that he installed Windows 98 Plus! in it and that’s what I have used as the operating system since he sent it to me in February.
I personally have no expertise in tinkering with computer hardware and would leave it to a professional, as at Fry’s or CompUSA or wherever. (In the southern part of Los Angeles County, CA.)
I picked the 8 gigabyte figure out of thin air. OK, so state-of-the-art PCs may have a capacity of 20 gb or more. Fine and dandy, but I figure 8 gigabytes is probably all I’ll need. If I get 20 gb I get 20 gb. Whatever.
I have a Packard Bell Pentium 120 running Windows 95, the upgraded version. It came with a 1.2 gig HD. A couple of years ago, I installed a Western Digital 15 gig drive using the software which WD provided. No problems. I can have one 15 gig drive if I want, but I partitioned it with the same software. I still have my old drive installed. I keep a clean copy of my OS on it.
Yeah, the install disk for new HDs should be able to overcome most Bios limitations for the size. Of course,
read the docs that come with it first.