Corrupt Hard Drive -- A few questions.

[arice89]

Alright guys, I decided to join the boards after reading for a while. My hard drive started having problems about a week ago, and I knew it was on its way out. It kept clicking and spinning and the comp would lock and unlock.. it was bad. Anyway, it finally bit the dust two days ago. I tried doing everything, but I came to the conclusion its done. Its corrupt. I have three hard drives, this was my primary. They are each Western Digital, IDE. I have a few questions. I have already ordered a new HD (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=1265028&sku=THD-250A ), and did something pretty stupid. I ordered without reading all about it and I noticed it was EIDE. Will this work with my current system even though the other two drives are IDE? Also, I am probably going to change the positions of the hard drives when I install the new one (Plug different IDE cables into IDE ports), will this do anything to the data on the drives? Also, when I install the new drive I will have to install the O/S (XP Home) as well as the BIOS. I dont think I have the BIOS CD anymore, so how should I go about doing this? The MB I have is the Lan Party Pro 875. Also, will installing a new drive and O/S do anything to the data on the other drives? Thanks.

 

[SNGX1275]

yes it will work
yes you will have to plug it into your normal ide cable
no its not going to mess up your old data
no you won't have to do anything wierd in the bios
yes you will have to install XP to it if you don't have it installed on one of your other 2 drives
yes you posted this in the wrong forum and I'm moving it
yes you should read the link in my signature

 

[arice89]

Thanks for the quick response, sorry for posting in the wrong forum.

no you won't have to do anything wierd in the bios

This didnt quite answer my question. Will I have to install the bios on the new drive or will it already be functional?

 

[urbandragon]

your BIOS is on your motherboard. it is hard coded into a EEPROM chip. Yes your hard drive has a bios (not actually, its called FIRMWARE) it is what tells the motherboard the specs on the hard drive so you do not have to manually have to configure the heads/cylinders/sectors manually.

All you will have to do is install hard drive. (if you want to install your o/s on it make sure it is set to Primary Master, which would be done if you remove the defective hard drive and simply put this one in the exact same place.) then boot to you window xp cd and follow the prompts.

that should be all you have to do.