Do I have to replace my hard-drive?

Yes, replacing a hard drive is not that hard. follow these instructions please:

Installing A Hard Drive - Step by Step

Posted Jul 30, 2007 by David Risley

Introduction

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Before Installation

Installing a hard drive is a medium level job. If you are confident in yourself and would like to save the money a computer guy would charge to do it, go ahead and do it yourself. It won’t be that bad. The physical installation is actually pretty easy. Getting it ready for use takes a little longer.

The worst part about installing hard drives is setting the jumpers on the drive so that it works correctly with your current hardware. You only need to worry about jumpers if you are using an IDE hard drive. IDE hard drives have settings for master, slave and cable select. This is because, for an IDE drive, it matters. For Serial ATA drives (SATA), you don’t need to worry about jumpers at all. Now that SATA is becoming much more prevalent than IDE, it is becoming a lot less likely that you will need to worry about jumpers during this process.

Before installation, inspect the inside of the computer’s case and determine where you want the drive to go. If you are using an IDE hard drive, you want to optimally connect the drive on a different IDE channel than your DVD/CD drives. Most motherboards have two IDE channel connectors. So you would put your disc drives on IDE2 and your hard drives on IDE1. For SATA drives, your life, again, got easier. SATA gets it’s own channel and, as of this date, SATA DVD drives are very uncommon.

Materials Required

* Hard drive

* Copy of the hard drive manual (if you need to set jumpers; this can be downloaded if your drive didn’t come with one)

* Controller card (optional; use this if you don’t have a spare connector on the motherboard or space on an existing ribbon cable to connect your drive to. Make sure you get one that matches your drive - Serial ATA for an SATA drive; ATA/100 or ATA/133 for an IDE drive; SCSI for a SCSI drive.)

* Data cable for the drive (if you aren’t installing the drive as a slave on an existing cable)

* Power cable Y-splitter (if you don’t have a spare power connector)

* Ultimate Boot CD (if you want to clone your old hard drive to your new one)

How will you be using your new drive?

If you are replacing your primary hard drive, make sure you back up any data you want to save before you start. If you don’t want to reinstall Windows, you can clone the contents of your old hard drive to your new one using the setup utilities that hard drive manufacturers provide, or you can use a specific cloning program like HDClone or PC Inspector Clone Maxx. All of the above-mentioned utilities are available on the Ultimate Boot CD, so you can download and burn that and then choose the utility that is easiest for you to understand. (If you don’t have access to a high-speed internet connection, you can order a CD for a small fee.)

If you are willing to reinstall Windows, make sure you have discs for Windows and all your programs. This will prevent frustrations about losing programs after you have already formatted your computer.

If you are simply installing a secondary hard drive for storage, you don’t have to make any changes to the configuration of your current hard drive. If, however, you are installing a second IDE drive, it is possible that you will need to alter the jumper configuration of your primary hard drive. If your current hard drive is set as “Cable Select” (meaning it is the only drive on the channel), then you may need to change it to “Master” which will allow you to add the second hard drive as a slave (see below).

Setting Jumpers: IDE Drives

IDE can accommodate two drives per channel, with most computers having two channels built in. The primary drive on a channel is called the Master, and the secondary one is called the Slave. The IDE channels are also labeled as Primary (or IDE1) and Secondary (or IDE2). The hard drive that the system boots from is usually the primary master. Generally, if you’re adding a second hard drive you would set it up as the primary slave. (The secondary master and slave are usually used for optical drives, although they can accommodate hard drives if needed.)

Most drives come set to be used as masters, so if you want to use one as a slave, you’ll have to change the jumpers, which are located between the power connector and the IDE connector. Each manufacturer has different jumper settings, so I can’t give you exact instructions here. However, there is often a diagram on the top of th

Sure, but be aware that you'll have to completely reinstall all of Windows's components. I'd say it sounds like your CPU is still working just fine (it has to be working if you're able to attempt reinstallation of Windows), but you must've accidentally gotten rid of something Windows might try to use during the reinstallation process.

See if you can't put the hard drive as a secondary drive temporarily in another computer and COMPLETELY wipe it of all data. This way, you don't even need to get a new hard drive. If you still can't fix the issue, take your computer to a professional.

definite somebody pronounced right here in the event that they replace your force then your archives are finished for. in spite of the reality that what you ought to do is touch the corporate changing the force and ask in the event that they have a backup provider. i've got faith they'll cost in the event that they do. the different option in case you obtain the understand how is to place the force as a secondary force in some laptop and attempt to get right of entry to your archives there and back them up.

reformat your hard drive before installing a new one it sounds like you have some old files stopping the download of the OS