[Pat B.]

Hi,

I had a Western Digital 250 Gb Caviar Blue SATA 3 Gb/s 7,200 rpm 8Mb Cache bulk OEM desktop hard drive fail on a 6 year old Dell XPS 400. This machine runs on Windows XP with a Pentium D of 2.8 GHz.

Wonder if the WD 500 Gb SATA of 16 Mb Cache with all other parameters the same, would be fully compatible and work the same (aside from higher performance)? Trying to avoid any conflicts or problems I won't recognize or know how to deal with...

And please feel free to critique my posting as this is my first time here, so don't know what I am doing!

Thanks very much,

Pat

 

[Fjandr]

You shouldn't have any problems swapping the failed drive out for that one. Do you have the necessary recovery or install disks available? Since you're swapping drives, you won't have the recovery partition on the old drive to re-install the system, if that's how it was set up.

 

[Pat B.]

I do have installation discs, however I forget what drivers I will need to re-establish my system - such as a modem and 5 or 6 others?

 

[Fjandr]

You should be able to use your system tag to find the appropriate drivers from the Dell website.