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hope I am posting in right forum - hard drive went bad, was told to purchase new one at least 40gb, IDE compatible...installed today, CD that came with it (Western Digital) reads fine, don't understand the options it wants me to make. was also told to put in dell cd that came with computer - nothing happens when I did. also tried xp reinstallation disk - nothing happened. any ideas what I've done wrong?
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"any ideas what I've done wrong?"
As stated above, you have to go into the BIOS to confirm that your HDD is being recognized correctly. If that checks out, boot off the CD that came with the HDD, partition the drive, then format it using either the FAT32 or NTFS file system. The WD CD will walk right thru the process, it's fairly simple.
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will try these and let you know if I have any luck. not sure I understand some of the terms (BIOS - is that the first screen that comes up giving me the system time, etc... as the top line?) I know we haven't formatted it - the CD gives me the directions on how to do? sorry for the ignorance - just need someone to "walk me through it" :)
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Use your google button. All the info you need is right there:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how+to+install+hard+drive&btnG=Google+Search
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okay, when I go to F2 for BIOS, and look at Boot Sequence, it says:
1. Diskette drive
2. HDD (not installed) - what will it take for it to recognize it?
3. CD-Rom device (not installed)why is my cd-rom not being recognized? it did read the western digital cd yesterday and now its not reading anything. does the cd-rom software have to be installed again since this is a new hard drive?
thanks for any ideas...
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took the computer to my mom's school (a vo-tech school) and a graduate of the computer program who owns his own business told me - he retrieved all my data from my old hard drive for me and told me what to get for the new one...he's tried to talk us through this new installation via phone (in the past hour) but now it seems my cd-rom decided to quit working - won't read the dell boot cd (or any cd for that matter) right now...but it did yesterday. we checked all the cables, etc and they all seem to be tight - don't know what else to try on that end.
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we also changed the boot sequence to boot from cd first, hdd 2nd and diskette 3rd...that didn't help either.
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How is the hard drive jumpered? A lot of Dells like cable select (CS). Look at the old one to see how it was jumpered and match that.
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When you added the new HD, is is possible that you added it on the same cable as the cdrom drive? If so, your new HD standard is set to Cable Select (CS), and your CDrom is set to Slave. That is probably why the CDROM won't work.
I would isolate the CDROM without the hard drive, and see where it comes up in the bios. (Primary/Secondary IDE:Master/Slave)
Ideally you want the cdrom to come up as either secondary master (if it has it's own ribbon cable) or primary slave (if it's on the same cable as the HD.) Once you get the CDROM established in the bios, then add the HD. You will HAVE to have the drive set to MASTER (with a jumper cable) if it is on the same ribbon as the CDROM is slave. If the HD is on its own ribbon cable, make sure the HD is on Primary IDE and the CDROM is secondary IDE.
Once you have that established, enter your Bios, and set both IDE channels to "Auto detect." Restart and verify that both drives come up. Then enter the bios, and set the boot order to CDROM first.
From there, you shouldn't need the WD CD or the Dell CD (unless you want to restore it like when you got it). You should be able to boot from the Windows XP disc. It should say "press any key to boot from CD" Later, you'll probably have to partition and format the drive with NTFS.
Go from there and see what happens.
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the computer tech guy who told me to buy a new one ended up coming over and we decided the dell I have (2000 or so) is most likely too old to handle the 250gb hard drive I bought. will return to store and try a smaller one - will let you know if thats not the problem. anyone know definitively if my motherboard from 6 years ago would have that problem?
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 External hard drive?
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Motherboard does detect K...
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