Critical - System Down - Hard Drive - No place to install

I have a Pavilion 630n with Seagate drive.

I am trying to add another Seagate (300GB) drive but when I opened the PC the drive was mounted vertically and was attached to the front panel. Existing drive is serial ATA and I am adding an Ultra ATA/100.

No rack or cage available for another drive.

Called HP (3 times) , Best Buys, CompUSA, MicroCenter and Seagate
and they all do not have anything I can use.

Someone must have solved this problem. If you go to HP's site and look at the specifications, upgrades, install disk drive you will find an internal picture of what some Pavilion's look like. HP states that not all PC look like the picture.

One vendor told me to let the disk hang. Good circulation I was told.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

.

Do you have any 5 1/4 bays free? If so, you just need one of these - http://keenzo.com/showproduct.asp?ref=FROOGLE&ID=111588

In the mean time, it won't hurt anything to just leave the drive sitting in the bottom of the case.

Thanks -

I will hunt around for something to secure the drive. In the meantime, I will
install the drive and let it sit on the bottom or hang from some type of suspension system I can rig up.

omg lol.... do me a favor and don't ever buy anything from the vendor that told you that. You just gave me the laugh of the day!

Perhaps a good thing.

Pavilion 630N with 160GB drive (Serial ATA). Trying to install 300GB ultra
ATA/100 but no room.

Also missing connection on motherboard to attached cable. Socket is
next to cable used to connect DVD /cd-r and CD. Socket is a light shorter
and will not take cable. What is this?

Appears I should be installing another Serial ATA drive or I might get forced to
mount 300 GB drive in an external case and connect via USB.

Need to find a hardware wizard (person) that has access to the specifications
and diagram of my system.. Worse case I may need to take some pictures.

Will keep the group updated.

The shorter connector is most likely the floppy disk controller

Here is the motherboard layout for your machine.

Looks like you have one IDE connector and one Floppy connector with two SATA connectors.

If you have 2 IDE optical drives then you are screwed and will not be able to hook up your new hard drive. If you only have one IDE Optical drive then you could hook your hard drive up to that IDE cable if it has an extra port to plug into. But that raises an issue in mounting.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

I'll confirm my layout against these specs.

What is the shorter connector used for?

It does not support cable/IDE.

The short one is for a floppy drive. Should be the black connector next to the blue IDE connector.

Re-Installed SP2, did a major house cleaning and iexplore.exe is back running.

Conflict was caused by Jan 2006 initial download of 7.0 Beta ie Browser which was never completely removed.

Since Beta software caused part of the problem Microsoft provided some free
technical support.

Lesson learned. - Install Beta software not on a primary PC.

Disk installation is on hold. Trying to see if drive can be returned for a serial ATA drive.

Options are to remove CD optical drive to make room, install as an external
(purchase external case/power) drive or upgrade to serial ATA. Housing issue
still not resolved for later solution.

If you want to try IE7 try doing it this way

http://www.ozzu.com/mswindows-forum/run-ie7-and-ie6-the-same-box-t62965.html

why not get a bigger case for your board, everything else will fit