Hard drive failed...need some assistance?

All these devices are, related yo your motherboard it has nothing to do with windows or what version you have. Yoou already know which motherboard you have go to this link below and do a good seach. and download all relevant drivers and your bios upgrade.

If your using socket 478 all i could find was P4SDX try them then if not u will find them close to you.


ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Support-

The fact is that your PC is lacking critical drivers for system management bus, USB, Network controller.

I would suggest you to download "Belarc Advisor" tool from internet. By running this tool, it will generate report of the hardwares in your PC and their vendor details. Check for the chipset of the motherbord from that report and (IF you already know chipset:i.e Intel 810E/845G) google to download that chipset drivers. Installing these drivers on your PC will defenately solve your USB issue.

Pretty much all brands are fine, and any hard disk can fail early. Also, great brands can have a horrendous dud, such as the oft recommended Seagate's recent 320GB model and its rather shocking RMA rates. Thus, I'm going to actually suggest a WD. The model's WD 6400AAKS, and it holds 640 gigabytes on just two platters. This means that it both has less heads to crash, and will run much faster because of its bleeding-edge areal density. Luckily, I haven't heard many horrors about them yet despite their popularity, and it has a very good Newegg rating. Better still, the new technology makes it cheaper to build. Thus it has a near-unrivaled penny per GB ratio at 640GB for 95$

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives

On another note, SATA I is just fine, as motherboards will throttle down to 150MBps for that standard. That might sound bad, but very few drives have peaks over 150MBps.

Go and kick your "friend" in the balls as it seems that their "upgrade" was actually a downgrade.

They have an incomplete installation of a pirated, uncontrolled, unsupported piece of software and called it an upgrade because it is called "Pro" now, not "Home".

They certainly are not a pro and certainly do not know what the difference between xp pro and xp home editions. If they did they would know that you do not need the features in the pro edition.

The drivers that you require should be available from the manufacturers website. It should take about 10 minutes to fix.

It will however leave you with the same issues of running a pirated operating system.

You didn't mention the age of the computer. If it is out of warranty, your options for help from Dell may be limited, but start there. Hard drives usually have a warranty of about 3 years, but an installed drive in a system is subject to the SYSTEM manufacturers warranty. If you need to replace the drive yourself, try the weekly ads for BestBuy or CircuitCity, depending on your location. All the specs you mention (size, SATA, rpm) are usually listed in the ads. A 300 GB SATA drive like you mention is easily available for under $100. Internet vendors are good, too, but stick to someone you know- you don't want to trade one bad drive for another. You should have operating system discs from Dell for re-loading. If you decide to upgrade to a newer operating system, Dell may still be able to help you.

All these devices are, related yo your motherboard it has nothing to do with windows or what version you have. Yoou already know which motherboard you have go to this link below and do a good seach. and download all relevant drivers and your bios upgrade.

If your using socket 478 all i could find was P4SDX try them then if not u will find them close to you.


ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Support-

Go To Tiger Direct's Website And Get A 250g Western Digital Sata Harddrive At A Really Low Price.sata And Eide Are Two Different Cable Interface.your Pc Is Set Up With The Sata Configuration So You Will Need To Stay With That.you Will Need To Reinstall Your Operating System With The New Harddrive Though.thats Why Wd Harddrives Always Come With The Data Lifeguard Tools Cd To Make Formatting A Breeze.once You Format The Drive For The O.s System You Are Going To Install With The Software,you Just Insert The Windows Install Disk Afterwards And Let It Do All The Work.if You Have Vista,did You Create Your Restore Cd's When You First Hooked Up Your Pc?.you Will Need Those To Re-install The Operating System.

Where do you live? If you live in Canada, the cheapest would be here: Canada Computers - Hard Drives > Desktop Drives > 3.5" SATA Drives : Seagate Barracuda (ST3250410AS) 7200.10 250GB SATA2 8.5MS 7200RPM 16MB Cache Hard Drive.

If you live in the U.S. I dunno if this is the cheapest but: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive ST3250410AS 7200RPM 16MB Cache RoHS Compliant SATA Hard Disk Drive SATAII HDD HD-Best Computer Online Store Houston Buy Discount Prices Texas-Directron.com has the same hdd as the one above for $10 more. As for installation of drivers and whatnot, the hard drive doesn't require drivers, but you will have to install an operating system and you'll need to pay money for vista (unless you already own it, or if you have recovery disks). Drivers you can pull off the web with model numbers. and you're really not getting into that big of a project. I can install a hard drive and get everything I want on my computer in 2 hours or less, and I'm only 14 so it shouldn't be that hard.

Canada Computers is probably the cheapest I know in Canada, but I dunno about the U.S.

The "SATA" part does matter a fair bit because if you choose a different hard drive your motherboard might not have the right (what's the word I'm looking for..) "controller" for it. I'm not sure if your motherboard supports any other type (although it likely supports IDE) as Dell doesn't seem to know about it lol.. They only show the 530 on their website. But if you have a manual or some form of documentation, it should tell you in there.

Also, SATAII runs HDD's faster than any other "bus type" ( I really need to study up on my computer lingo lol).

But.. your current hard drive might have a simple easily fixable problem. It could just be a loose cable, or an incorrect BIOS setting (like boot load priority or something) and if it's a big hard drive no point in wasting money..