cnice

Dell shipped the Dimension 8400 with only SATA hard drives, so you should have no problems.  It does have one IDE controller, but this is for the optical drives.

If you are not using RAID, or do not have an internal floppy drive, enter the system setup, scroll down to drives, press Enter or + to expand the drive menu then down to "SATA Operation", press Enter.

Change the SATA operation mode to "RAID Autodetect/ATA" press ESC to save and exit the BIOS, then XP should install without a problem.

Bev.

Bev,

Thanks for the reply.  I opened the system to clean it today and realized that it already had a SATA drive and cable.  You are 100% correct. Do I even have to go into setup if the previous drive was already SATA?  I am replacing the previous drive drive because it is starting to go.

Thanks again.:emotion-1:

cnice

You are welcome.

If this is the factory installed HD being replaced, you may have to change the settings in the setup, as per my previous post.

Bev.

No, I am just using XP Pro.  I was going to add the SP-1, 2, and 3 after I installed...How can I create a raid driver disk if I do not have an A drive on this Dimension 8400???

Bev,

Did you get my message? I changed those setting and it only recognizes the part of the new drive.  It is a 250G and it only recognizes 130G when I try to partition and do a clean install of XP Pro

cnice

Are you using an XP Professional SP-1 [or higher] disc, to install XP?

Bev.

cnice

As you have a hard drive larger than 137gb, you need to use an XP SP-1, or higher disc, to install XP.

Windows XP discs have a native limitation of 137GB supporting ATA interface disc drives, XP SP-1 or higher discs incorporate 48-bit Addressing for
large ATA interface disc drives.

See HERE

If you wish to use RAID, then an internal floppy disc drive is required to load the driver. 

No Raid, then use the hack I already posted.

Bev.

Thanks.  I utilized a usb floppy drive and was able to install the hard drive.  Thanks for that link, very interesting.  Will look into slipstreaming since Microsoft is not going to send me XP Pro with SP1 or above even though I bought that legit.

cnice

Happy to hear everything went well.

Bev.