Oh Linux Heads..

okay found what I was looking for....

" Drive bays Bay type Quantity 5.25-inch, external Two (one available) 3.5-inch, external Two (one available) 3.5-inch, internal One (occupied)"

Does this mean I may not be able to add a second internal HD?

LiamShed wrote: okay found thid about my hard drives

"Storage controller

Type: 1 x Serial ATA - integrated

Controller Interface Type: Serial ATA-150 Storage controller (2nd)

Type: IDE - integrated

Controller Interface Type: IDE/ATA"

so okay first drive bay is SATA (plus)

the second bay is IDE, I assume? or if it is ATA compatible, can I use a SATA drive in bay #2?

IDE is also called "Paralell ATA" to destinquish it from SATA, because despite their differencees, they are both subsets of the ATA standard, so let's just leave things to IDE and SATA then for clarity.

Your IDE controller can handle two or four drives.....two per cable, a master and a slave (ahhhhh whole new worlds of jumper-joy about to open up to you.....lock the prozac in a safe place)....you need to check how many sockets you have.....1 socket, 2 drives, 2 sockets, 4 drives. Your CD drive is probably IDE, so unless you have two sockets.....you may be all IDE'd-out. Sata is better anyway, quicker and there are no jumpers involved (yeah they're a doddle, jumpers, right up until the first time you move some drives around and nothing boots because you forgot and put two masters on one IDE line and two slaves on the other and your BIOS has run away and hid from you).

Linux enumerates IDE devices as HDA HDB HDC and HDD, and SATA drives (as well as USB externals) as SDA SDB SDC etc etc etc.

With IDE the A B C etc is worked out by whichever order it finds the drives in while LOOKING in a certain order.....ie it looks for a primary (the two IDE sockets if you have two, are named primary and secondary cos people don't call things 0 and 1 like the BIOS does LOL ) master drive first, which would be the drive inflicted with windows in 99.999999% of such machines, this gets called HDA....then it looks for a primary slave, then a secondary master and a secondary slave (it'll also go on to others if you have an IDE control card or a freak motherboard with more than two IDE sockets (welllll, busses to be precise)), the next drive it finds in that sequence gets HDB and so on. SATA and USB are enumerated in the order they are found or connected....your SATA sockets are numbered and looked at in that order, again SDA is the first found (note: it doesn't have to be in the first socket, you can have two drives, one in socket 2 and the other in socket 5, they will still be SDA and SDB ( wellll /dev/sda etc).

The way el pingu uses discs and partitions freaks the balls out of a lot of people who are used to C:\ D:\ etc.......but it takes no time to wrap your head around the naming, and mounting....and then you see all the thngs you can do, and why it all works more sanely....I mean you NEVER need to reinstall linux cos you ran out of disc space.....shove another disc in, copy a huge directory worth of shit onto it, delete the original and then mount the new drive AS that directory.....as if changing from C: to C:\Program Files took you to what you now know as D: seamlessly without you or the system really noticing the change.

That stuff is telling you about the disc controllers not the discs.....the controller being the chip which controls....yeah you get it. Drives should be in the device manager in the system control panel (hey, instead of mousing it....open your windows run prompt and type "control sysdm.cpl" sans quotes. You should probably still stick your head inside the machine and look at how may sockets there are and where the existing discs are plugged in. Sata=small, IDE=big plugs and probably ribbon cables.

LiamShed wrote: okay found what I was looking for....

" Drive bays Bay type Quantity 5.25-inch, external Two (one available) 3.5-inch, external Two (one available) 3.5-inch, internal One (occupied)"

Does this mean I may not be able to add a second internal HD?

Not sure actually....... I think so, unless the machine has two floppy bays and 1 HD bay, in which case someone needs to die. You can wedge another HD into the 5.25" bay anyway with a little bracket that costs about $5-10, so you wont be left holding a useless drive.

I keep forgetting you've not got this thing yet and can't stick your head inside it.

True. I work with a few kids who make their own computers. They could always help me out. They'd know what they are looking for.

and with my shaky hands, any small screwdriver is a pain for me. That is why I never I did that. Well that and I always lose those tiny screws!

the hood is held on by four tiny phillips heads screws and one twist off knob.

There's nothing a normal sized Phillips can't handle. You can even use magnetic ones, even on hard discs....just don't keep the screw on the driver all day, and never bring the driver near the top or bottom of the drive, only the sides, which are 1/4" mild steel......more than effective at dissapating magnetism.