closed

ok I investigated a little more and found that the hard drive is a Hitachi 7K500 which is a SATA 2 standard and the motherboard supports SATA 1 standards. So that should be the problem right there,...

http://www.biostar-usa.com/mbdetails.asp?model=k8vga-m

The details to the motherboard are listed in the link above.

ok the issue is that the 500GB SATA hard drive is not listed in the bios.
...

thats right sounds like you got it

that cable will work, just make sure to set the drive to master or cable select and plug the black end into the drive

you should be good to go

check your power settings do you have them set to turn off the hard drive if it has been idle for any period of time.

if this is the case then that could be why you are getting the error and is...

sure no problem just post back if the issue is not resolved

you can change the location of the paging file

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886

sounds like its toast, not sure if there is any software that can help you but there are places that you can send it to that specialize in data recover that can probably help.

its ok to add a new hard drive without the old one present as long as the new one is set to be the master. once the computer is turned on and the new hard drive has not been formatted then the...

I did some digging around on the dell website and found 2 drives larger than 40GB one is 80GB and the othe is 100GB
...

does it look like this
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ST9160821A-R&cat=HDD
or like the one from dell...

did you try dell.com they sell parts for your laptop

thats cool I think Im ganna have to get one

to retrieve data off a hard drive I would install it as a slave drive then copy the data that I needed. when you connect a drive with an OS already on it from one motherboard to another sometimes...

ok I looked it up there are 2 types of external connections for SATA(eSATA, and SATA external)

eSATA is an I type port and SATA is an L type port

http://www.cooldrives.com/essaii3gbexp.html

how new is that connection, cuz I am looking at one right now(eSATA) and it is not the same as the internal SATA connection, I even tried to match the cable from an internal SATA to an eSATA...

no, the connection for an internal SATA drive is not the same as an external SATA drive

also, it is never a good idea to use an internal drive as an external drive, because the drive could be...

yeah 3 is supposed to be department of defense standards.

thats a bit extreme. 1 pass is enough to erase a hard drive, but if you want to wipe it clean with no chance of recovering data then 3 Passes (DOD) should work.

it doesnt matter I buy cd -r and they work fine every where