BA210 upgrades

[joe wander]

HP's Brio Guide is a bit too concise. I'd like to add an internal 20G Maxtor hard drive and replace the CD drive with a Philips R/W unit, but the documentation implies that neither will be a straightforward task. Am I reading too much into this?

joe wander

[Tim Malnati]

Things to check for first: Will the machine bios handle a 20 gig drive or is there a bios upgrade available that will allow it? My guess is that the existing cdrom is ide and connected as a slave device. Is there an additional ide channel on the motherboard? If the answer to both of these questions is yes and you have the physical room in the box to handle your plans, I can't see any other reason why things can't work out.

[joe wander]

Well, I charged on into the cabinet, and there is clearly provision to accommodate only one hard drive so I swapped the original out for the 20-gig unit. The spare slot took the second cd unit, and the hardest part was reconnecting cables. HP's explanation was a bit cryptic but their instructions are easy to follow. I didn't start with the BIOS setup [which I expected to be reset by the restart software--not mentioned in the manual], and it may explain why a few things [like remembering passwords] are acting strangely after the swap. Thanks for that lead.