Cheapest solution to get an old computer running

K

kaddar

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 4, 2006
Messages
81
Heya, I found what appears to be a perfectly good pavillion, 6746c, except it used to run windows ME and the hard drive failed.

I tried installing ubuntu linux on it with both the bad hard drive and another hard drive I found in my basement, but because they behaved the same, I think that one was bad too.

I am looking to purchase a hard drive that would be compatable with this computer, anyone have any ideas of what the cheapest/fastest hard drive I could get is? It doesn't need to be large, I am looking for something from 5gb-25gb.

I looked online and found the hard drive it came with had an interface of DMA/ATA-33 (Ultra)...
 
Any ide drive will work, the only problem you may run into is lack of LBA support which will limit the size of the drive the system can see. You can pick up a pretty inexpensive 60-80 gig ide drive. DMA33 is just an older ide standard, newer drives should still work on it.
 
The ide controller may be malfunctioning, in which case you could get a PCI controller card or just ditch the machine. But like defakto said, any IDE/40-pin drive and it'll work up to at least 120 GB.

 
If the install failed on both drives, you may want to run memtest first. It may be corrupt memory as well.
 
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