Hello all, I hope I can make this problem clear. It's not my computer so hear goes: The computer in question is a Gateway 300SE- unknown hard drive- 1.3-GHz Celeron CPU and 128MB of PC133 RAM. When I turned it on there was crunch/grinding noise coming from the computer....best guess--it was the hard drive failing, especially when I went into Bios and there was no Master drive recognized. And boot shows the following error: pxe-e61 media test failure, check cable. Computer is in good condition, but I checked the cables anyway, and they are in the right slots with pin 1 in right postion. After taking the power cables off floppy and cdrom to rule them out, noise persisted--I just assumed it will have to be a new hard drive install. Problem---I can't seem to find any info on this computer inorder to get the right hard drive size!...Checked the gateway site--nothing...it dosen't even show the 300se...had to find the specs from PCworld...so I am thinking to get a 40GB to be on the safe side--no more than a 80GB without causing too much heartache on the pocket. The only thing is will getting a seagate, or other hard drive be compatiable with Gateway? Do I need to upgrade memory also? Any assistance in this matter is greatly appreciated In times of trouble...punt

Try the drive in another PC. Try running checkdisk. Try formatting the drive. Try reinstalling Windows. (cleans all the crap out). Try buying a new ide ribbon (cable). Try upgrading the BIOS. Click Start/Run & type "dxdiag" (without quotes). Is Ye Alreet

Try here http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/cs-002871.htm A Google search suggests a number of other sites for possible corrections. True hard disk noise, especially clicking, does suggest possible disk failure. Any luck??

they have you set as far as that drive ^^^. but if you want another, any drive 10gb to 50gb should be recognized, especially with a bios update Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours. R. Bach

Thank you for thje responses. As far as the originial hard drive, I cannot reinstall the windows because the bios or the windows disk does not 'see' the drive at all. There is boot failure on start up, it won't go past the black screen, all of the cables look good, I did think about another hard drive to insure it worked--just didn't have a spare one off the top. dragon360--The client will pick up a 60GB hard drive on Monday, I will try to do a bios update, will the 60 be too much or am I stretching the limit? Again thanks for the feed back--- In times of trouble...punt