Not too long ago, after pulling my old computer out of retirement, I got a slew of hard drive errors and finally a hard drive failure. It's an ATA hard drive.The machine is a Dell XPS T500 with the processor upgraded to a Tualatin 1.2 (Celeron) and 384 megs of ram; I'd just put a BFG GeForce 6200 OC into it (256 megs, AGP) which ROCKED!I had USA Roads installed and just tried running RWY 12 for some scenery design.. and BAM... until then, it was running really well, considering the age of the system.Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and someone sent me a 40gb ATA/IDE drive... but I can't seem to get the computer to recognize it, if it's even compatible!Any help greatly appreciated... I wanna fly...[edit] Oh... I should mention - the same kind gentleman also happened to have sent an Athlon 800 computer with Windows XP Pro and a bit more ram; I put the video card in there, and while it works, FS runs like a dog - it's full of stutters and seems to have a much lower continuous frame rate... hmmm....thxAndrew

Hey Andrew,In general you should be able to use any PATA drive. Im assuming this new 40GB is going to be your master drive. Have you checked the jumper settings on it? in order for the bios to reconize it. Some older drives when used as primary require to be jumperless. What brand of drive is that 40GB?

Hi Davis!It's an IBM "Deskstar" - I'm not sure what the jumper setting should be; I tried the same settings as the drive I'm replacing and it didn't seem to work.thxAndrew

Hey Andrew,righty, well the IBM's have a dual jumper setting, instead of the more common one jumper on newer drives like WD etc... I think this pic should help you on your way.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/151286.jpg

Thanks!Oddly enough, the original setting on the original drive (Cable Select) didn't work, but the Device 0 setting did!Now installing XP..Ok.... let's see what happens...cheersAndrew

It worked!I added a little RAM from the Athlon machine (only 448 now, but it's more than 384) and FS is running better than it ever has.Thanks again,Andrew

Glad its working for ya Andrew, happy flying ;)