hdrive wont reformatte

[suenbob2]

Hi I have a dell 5100 I got a blue screen saying that windows was shutting down due to new hardware being installed and may damage windows. I attempted to reformatte and got to 69% and it stopped. came up with it could not continue contact service provider. this laptop is several years old appro 7 not sure if its worth messing with. can i get another h drive for it and will it except a larger drive. it has a 40g i believe the largest dell offered was 60. the Apricorn website only offers 160g will this work? running win xp

[glc]

You can use any IDE/ATA hard drive in there - you just have to remove the old drive from the caddy and put the new one in. I doubt that it will handle one larger than 120gb.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148128

What you need to do is run manufacturer's diagnostics on the old drive from a bootdisk - either floppy or CD. Do you know what brand the old drive is?

[suenbob2]

this is what dell has listed under congif or my laptop
1 M1948 Hard Drive, 40GB, I, 9.5MM, 5.4K, SGT, NEPT

D1522 Processor, 80532, 2.66GHz, 512 533, SOCKET N..., DECISION ONE...
it has been upgraded to 1 gb of memory and bios flashed for this
with out taken in it out i dont know what it is for harddrive

[glc]

That appears to be a Seagate, and here is a direct replacement:

http://www.impactcomputers.com/m1948.html

The diags you need are SeaTools for DOS.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD

[suenbob2]

ok going to try and burn an image of the download just not real sure about this because it doesn't give exact instructions on how to do this with a harddrive that will not boot

[glc]

You will be making a BOOTABLE CD.