hard drive noise - ide cable or faulty?

[chriso]

My machine is quite old and recently had my hard drive crash, making loads of noise. Turned off the machine and went to get it fixed but the hard drive was screwed and they couldn't recover any data. Lesson learnt, do backups.

So they installed a new hard drive which didn't work first of all, seemed to be incompatible with my machine, couldn't find the operating system. They put a different one in and that worked.

I now have a 'Hitachi 41.1GB UDMA/100 7200RPM 2MB IDE'
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=07N9218&cat=HDD

I am running Win XP Pro on an Intel P3 666mhz, with 266MB ram. Motherboard is a QDI Advance 9. I have the hard drive on primary master and an internal zip on primary slave. on secondary master i have my cdrom drive and secondary slave my cd-rw.

My problem, the hard drive is making some odd noises. Nothing loud like when it crashed, more of a small whining sound every so often.

My question really is, is it that the hard drive is faulty or that my machine isn't compatible with this hard drive?

When I am booting up, I see this error:

"Primary IDE Channel no 80 conductor cable installed"

A bit of google searching and I've found that my hard drive is udma and that i am using a 40-conductor cable.

Do you think that the noise could be to do with using an older ide cable?

Do you think if I get a 80-conductor ide able it might solve the problem?

Will my motherboard allow me to use an 80-conductor cable?


Any advice you can give me would be great as if its faulty it needs to go back before the warranty is up or before it crashes.


Thanks

 

[beedubaya]

26MB is just not enough RAM to run Windows XP. In fact I've never heard of a computer having that amount..hehe. No wonder your HD is grinding away..lol.

 

[jolancer]

wat thy mean is... win xp pro should have at lease 128mbs of ram... if you only have 24mb's then windows is probably using a lot of 'paging files'.... paging files are a part of your harddrive that windows usess like ram, with only 24mbs i imajine its constantly accessing and writing or rewriting paging files

 

[mrzeeedler]

yup^

 

[didi]

At least 256MB ram if u want to run Window XP properly

 

[welsh]

my friend is usin an old pentium II, with 16 mb ram and running windows xp...a bit slow but still works descently.

 

[mrzeeedler]

whatever floats your boat i guess not something i would do.

 

[beedubaya]

I wouldn't even run Windows 98 in 26MB, it needs at least 32. Windows 95 is cheap these days, why don't you put that sucker on your system.

 

[koldapu]

ummm . . . could it be that its a typo . . . and that it really mean 256?

he could be just missing the five . . .

i mean . . . how do you get 26mb? 2+8+16?

 

[welsh]

dunno my friend has 3 ram chips in and its only givin him 16mb