Hi,
I have a very old laptop running slackware and I need to replace the 720 Mb (!) IDE hard drive. So my question is: are all IDE drives backwards compatible? I guess my old BIOS won't be able to address the entire drive but will it work at all?

All the best

It should. ATA/IDE has been standardized for a long time. I don't think there've been any backward-incompatibile changes since it was formalized.

The only problem you might run across is form factor. I recently pulled the ancient hard drive out of my old Amiga computer (vintage 1994! 250MB!) in order to access some old files and back it up. It's standard ATA, but I had some trouble because the positioning of the interface plug and power jack were a little off compared to modern drives and it wouldn't fit into my external drive case. But when I finally jury-rigged a connection I could access it just fine.

will give it a try. thanx

On some Dell Computers, they did something to make the connections incompatible without an adaptor (boo, hiss) but the clue here would be that you can't connect them without an adaptor.

Since the SATA generation there has been a bit of a mix and match affair with power conections, but I don't know of a drive that has a parallel ATA data connector and a SATA-style power connector (although I do know of the other way around).

Otherwise (and barring a bit of bios fiddling, which may or may not be fully succesful), you should be ok.

You will probably run into BIOS limitations that will affect how much of the drive the system will be able to recognize..

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_d...e_barriers.htm

Might want to look at the system specs to see what they might say about Hard drive size.. I would buy the smallest, least expensive drive you can find.

Hi,
If your laptop supports USB boots then a external drive maybe another way to consider.