Community

nac007

I have suffered a HD failure on this PC and I want to replace the HD. What standard of connector do I need? I know it is IDE but I see there are different IDE's available. I am aiming for a 300GB internal drive.

Blencogo

Hi nac007 and welcome to Club Vaio.

They should all use the standard parallel ATA connector.

There are several different types of ATA interfaces (IDE, EIDE, ATA x, UATA) but I think you will find that your Vaio will be OK with all currently manufactured ATA drives. The main difference is in transfer rates.

Just don't buy a SATA drive!

EDIT: You may find the LABS Tests of the seven market leading Hard Drives HERE of interest. All these drives are available with a Ultra ATA interface that will be compatible with your Vaio.

nac007

Thanks, Blencogo, I appreciate the swift and helpful response. Maybe you could recommend the best way to deal with the HD failure I have. Error message is "boot disk error, insert system disk". I have mounted it in another PC but it cannot be seen so far, so I am about to build XP system disks from MS website. I want to preserve data as I have not tested a restore from my last backup so that rules out a recovery. I'm a :smileychicken:. Thanks for the review site as well.

Blencogo

Hi nac007,

Probably the best first course of action is to buy an external Caddy which you can connect to any PC via USB and explore the drive for useful data.

You can find several HERE at about £15.

You may be able to fix the boot sector or at least retrieve some of your data.