| I finally bit the bullet and updated my Gateway GT5040 hard drive. The original drive is a Seagate ST3250823AS 250GB hard drive with a SATA Generation 1 (1.5 GB/s) interface with an 8MB cache. The drive seemed slow from day one, two and a half years ago. I finally got up the nerve to spend a $100 on myself. So I gathered up my nerve and asked my wife if I could go buy the drive. She said yes, which really, really surprised me. (I don't usually spend money on myself. Plus it seems like every time I'd like to spend some money, an emergency happens which wipes out any spare cash.) | |
| The new drive is SATA Generation 2 (3 GB/s) with 32 MB of cache, P/N ST310005N1A1AS-RK. It is simply much faster and quieter than the original drive. |
| I comparison shopped between the Best Buy and newegg.com web sites. Best Buy had the same price, plus they were selling the retail kit, which comes with all the cables you need. It was a big mistake. Amazon.com had the best price, undercutting both newegg.com and Best Buy. (I didn't find out until several days later.) I paid $109 + sales tax, and on amazon.com I could have purchased the drive for $90 + shipping from an Amazon associate vendor. |
| I powered on the computer and all came up properly. The drive was recognized and Windows XP wanted to start its own disk wizard. I canceled the XP wizard and installed Disk Wizard. The software installed flawless and executed flawlessly. Then I started having trouble. It was no fault of the software or the hardware, it was me causing the problem. I started up DiskWizard and immediately went to the clone program. Unfortunately, it did not work. After a couple of tries, I decided to allow the software to install a partition and format the drive - which is what it tried to do every time, but I clicked the Cancel button, thinking we did not need to create a new partition, only to have the clone software delete it. (Wrong again. It's what I get for thinking.) |
| As it turns out, the correct procedure with DiskWizard is to let it recognize and create a partition. XP is then happy and the clone program will work flawlessly. The good news on cloning is that the software will allow resizing of the original XP boot partition. This is a real plus for the software. The other thing you want to look out for is cloning of the recovery partition that many modern systems have installed. DiskWizard does not copy the MBR properly, you'll probably lose access to the partition. Make sure you burn your OS DVD's before you delete your original disk drive partitions. There is probably no reason to clone the recovery partition, as it will probably not work anyway. |
After cloning the drive, I changed the BIOS boot up order to boot from the new Seagate drive.
Voila! It booted up like a champ, sans the initial message to press F11 to reset/recover the system.