Acer 5310 hard drive PLEASE HELP

HI im new to this forum so hope all you clued up people can help me if you dont mind.

I have an Acer 5310 that the hard drive blew up can any of you recommend a new one at a decent price and that will just slide straight in i also would like to run linux on it. Any help would be appriciated. I did buy a:

Item: Western Digital WD3200BEVT 320GB 2.5" Hard Drive SATAII 5400rpm 8MB Cache - OEM Scorpio Blue

But it looks as thought it needs a power lead to connect to it as it has an extra connection by the sata11 connection.

Cheers in advance for help

Rob

 

That drive should be fine. Ignore the additional 4 connections that look like a desktop power socket . . they are actually for other uses. Power will be supplied through the other pins (the two L shape connector sets)

There is a live thread on the thrills and spills of linux in this very forum so I am not going to start another

 

They are hard disk jumpers for mode setting.

 

Ok thank you for your help.

Just a few more questions if you dont mind. When we tried to install xp to get it started it came up with an error saying something about could not find hard drive/ no hard drive installed in this laptop.

Any suggestions on this. Do i need to change settings or something. Sorry im not very good at all this computer stuff.
just checked and it comes up 'media failure check cable or similar'

Cheers

 

You need to Google XP AHCI F6 drivers. XP was built before AHCI HDD's were common. it has no driver on-disk for a HDD running in AHCI mode so it says it cannot find it. Manufacturer XP install disks tend to have the right drivers added while a retail XP disk will not. It is a bit of a complex process to add tem but often if you get the right ones you can provide them at the start of the Windows install (the Press F6 with drivers prompt) on a USB stick


or if you prefer set the BIOS to use IDE mode not AHCI for the HDD

 

Ok bruboo thank you just need to know why it say 'media failure check cable or similar'

Again cheers

 

Ok initially you said can't find the disk was the problem
Now
Media Failure check cable is different and not typical of a AHCI driver problem, more likely to be the HDD connector /cable not seated correctly.
Alternatively the issue may be that when you say your "old Hard Drive blew up" it actually was the HDD controller or the connecting cable that failed.

What is showing for drives in the Bios if you can get there
Does it boot if the HDD is removed and a bootable (e.g. windows) DVD is in the Optical drive?