Wermas wrote:
Went to oslo today on a job interwiev and left my computer running at home. When I came back the thing had restarted but wouldnt load windows. I restarted the thing but it didnt work.
The comp registers my cpu and my harddrive, but after that I get a black/grayish screen. Sometimes with a white bar at the bottom.
I checked to see if every wire was properly connected and tried again. Same thing happened.
I figured that I had to format the harddrive so I loaded the xp cd. After a while an error message came up. Something about a crittical harddrive error.
Does this mean that the harddrive is broke? Do I have to buy a new one?
I have a western digital 120 gb drive atm. 8mb.
If I have to buy a new drive, does it matter which brand I buy? Whats the difference between IDE 2.5`` and IDE 3.5``?
Would appreciate any help on this. Going to buy a new one tomorrow. Any suggestions?
You want a 3.5" (2.5" is for laptops and waay more expensive due to the smaller size, they also have smaller storage capacities)
Make of disc is really irrelevant unless you want some particular feature, like large cache, silent drives etc. ( have a look at
http://www.storagereview.com for more detailed comparisons. (seagate discs tend to have very low idle noise levels

)
I would advise a SATA disc if your motherboard supports that.
Check out
http://www.komplett.no for good disc prices, they ship all over norway.
If you want to check your disc first, before spending cash look for "the ultimate boot disc" online, its a bootable compilation cd of hardware tools for memory, disc, etc. Run a few of the disc diagnostics first to see if you can salvage your current disc.