How to replace my hard drive?

Question

I have search for a while and can't seem to find out how to replace my hard drive.

I have a dell computer and the hard drive is toast. I bought a new hard drive but have no idea how to load up xp or any of the programs that came with my dell. I cant clone the drive since its completely toast.

So if anyone can help basicly I am asking how to do this from the start with a blank hard drive out of the box. TIA.

When I said said the hard drive is out of the box. I mean its a new internal hard drive in a retail box.

I do have the disks that came with my computer the operating system and all. How would I load them to my new hard drive though?

Answer 1

If the old drive is completely unreadable, you might be out of luck. even trying to go thru USB won't work.

If you bought the computer they gave you a system restore disk that has all the preloaded OS and apps they put on it at "the factory", that can work. Otherwise you will have to start from scratch and buy an OS and all the apps you want.

Answer 2

first open up the computer and find the toast hard drive. you should find an IDE cord(fat one) and a power cord(little one) remove old hard drive and plug in the new one using the same cords. start your computer. if you want to load win XP on your computer you will need a win Xp disk. go into your computers bios and change the start up order to look at the cd rom drive(most likely drive d:) restart your computer and win XP installation should start. follow the directions from there.

Answer 3

Install the new hard drive.

Insert the XP CD (or the Dell restore CD) in the CD ROM.

Start the PC, at the first screen you see, hit the F1 or Del, whichever takes you into your BIOS, and make sure you're first boot device is the CD ROM that your CD is in.

Now let it finish booting, and follow the instructions from there

Answer 4

don't they have external one' s that pliug into a usb port /