One thing you might want to check before you do anything is what Windows thinks the partition is. Right-click My Computer and select Manage. Select Disk Management from the Computer Management window...

Is this a new drive that you've added or is it a drive that previously had a working partition and no longer appears as a drive in Windows?

Just to back up nizzy, I recommend doing as he suggests. That clicking sound is referred to as the "click of death" for drives and almost always is a clear symtom of a pending or current drive...

What do you mean by "can't open the HD"? Do you mean that it shows up as unformatted? Does it give you an error when trying to access the data?

I've never known RAM to be a limiting factor with how much harddrive space can be addressed. In a broad sense, motherboards can be a limiting factor. In reality, it is the BIOS that limits the space...

It's easy to make a standard internal drive and external drive. Check out the enclosure options offered at Newegg (http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=92). If you have any...

All drives wear down over time. Sometimes it just happens faster than normal. There are a slew of potential causes, but it seems to usually happen because of a manufacturing defect of some kind.

Sounds like your drive has the "click of death" syndrome, which means that drive is most likely going out. Call Dell tech support and see if they can offer you any warrenty service. If they can't,...

It sounds like you aren't sure what made the sound. It's very hard to say if there is a problem or not if it could have been one thing or another. I have never heard a harddrive make a sound like you...

When you look at the properties of the drive, what does it say the total capacity is? If it says the total capacity is approximately 40gigs, it's most likely that your partition is only 40gigs in...

Heh... You found the easy way. Another way to do it is to hook it up to a Linux machine or to boot your system up using a Live CD bootable distro of Linux. I love how the super-secure Windows file...

Follow Coconut Monkey's instructions. You have to disable Simple File Sharing first.

Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, and select Disk Management. You will most likely see your secondary disk listed as Disk 1. You should also see two different partitions...

I recently had a brief back and forth with nizzy1115 about IDE channel sharing and how to set up drives on the channels for maximum performance. Since there isn't a "right answer", I was curious what...

You can manage partitions before the installation. Once the partitions are setup and one of them is selected to use for the OS, that partition will be formatted to NTFS but the remaining ones will be...

That really isn't necessary Lightninghawk. The Windows XP setup makes it very easy to partition the drives without the use of special bootdisks. I guess I have to give credit to Microsoft for finally...

The technical specs for SATA shows that it has a speed advantage over IDE, but the speed advantage for standard SATA vs ATA133 (the connection speed used by the fastest IDE drives) is very slight and...

In order to ensure that you don't run into problems by hitting the 32GB barrier, make all your secondary storage locations 32GB or smaller. So you could have a total of three partitions: a 30GB NTFS...

When you install XP, you can setup the partitions at that time. One of the first screens that you'll come to will have you select the partition you wish to install Windows to. If the drive currently...

Sorry nizzy1115, I disagree with you. To get maximum performance out of your harddrives, put your harddrives on different channels. When drives share a channel and both are being accessed at the same...

There isn't a problem in mixing SATA and IDE drives. You just need to configure your BIOS settings correctly so it boots from the drive you wish to use as the boot drive.

If you want to have access to files in case you change to a different operating system or if you want to add another OS in order to dual boot later, partition your drive into different partitions....

Have you tried burning a CD using Windows built-in burner?

FYI, you don't have to uninstall and reinstall Nero when changing drives.

You need to format it for it to show up.

Right-click "My Computer", select "Manage", and select "Disk Management" under "Storage" on the left pane. You should see an unformatted disk (it will be...

What program are you trying to use?

Have you tried reading the My PC won't start - Read this first! (http://daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread27079.html) thread? In that thread, Catweazle gives a very detailed sequence of steps to take...

Why are you doing the copying and pasting method?

Have you tried moving the files without using that method, such as dragging the files to a new destination with the right mouse button held down,...

Have you repeated this process with files of a different kind, such as image files or standard text documents?

If so, does the same thing happen (file can't be read, etc)?
If not, try it and see...

Once you dropped it, you sent the drive on a death spiral. It just took a few days to have the drive destroy itself.

Seagate drives have awesome 5 year warrenties and will replace almost any...

A quick way to format the drive is to right-click My Computer and select Manage. Select Disk Management under the Storage section on the left of the Computer Management console. Find the new drive on...

What J is saying is that you will be able to get access to those "private" folders as well. The notion that you won't be able to is bogus. Running the program won't damage anything. Give it a try and...

Have you tried turning down the burning speed and seeing if that improves anything?

It sounds like you are sold on SATA. I'm not trying to tell you not to get SATA; however, I am saying that SATA isn't going to give you huge benefits.

Here is a nice bulleted list for you:
If...

A SATA drive is no different from an IDE drive except for the interface. So, if you are thinking that a SATA drive will avoid problems like your current IDE drive has, you are mistaken.
...

The speed differences between SATA and IDE, in my opinion, are negligible. While many people say that SATA gave them huge performance leaps, I just don't see how that is possible. The likelihood that...

The PCI bus has a maximum data speed of 133MBps, which, on paper, is slightly slower than the max data speed of the IDE bus.

The SATA PCI expansion card probably specifies 150MBps since it is able...

Live and learn Veritas. It's exactly because of situations like your's that causes me to build each machine I use.

I doubt that you only have one IDE channel though, most boards have two IDE...

In order to do RAID through SATA, the interface bus must support RAID. This means that you need to get a SATA PCMCIA card that has a RAID chip. I was unable to find any that met this criteria.

As...

sunando, the problem is that you have asked way too many questions at once. You just post a bunch of information and then expect that we are going to interpret all your actual questions and answer...

If he bought the harddrive retail, it would have come with a disk that can mirror the information from the old drive to the new drive. If his didn't come with a disk, he may be able to get the same...