Newbie Needs Help Installing a new Hard Drive in Dell Inspiron 1720

I want to say thanks to anyone who responds to my plea for help. I have a dell inspiron 1720 operating system Vista. The hard drive crashed and I installed a hitachi 0s00154 Travelstar 2.5 mobile hard drive 320GB, SATA, 7200RPM, 16MB. I tried installing the operating system and I keep getting a message that the hard drive is not found and to try rebooting the hard drive, and there is no hardware to boot the system and to install device drivers or media drivers. Anyway, I have spend the last few days trying to figure this out and I am now at the point of insanity. Can someone please give me some guidance? I really need to fix this today. Thank you, Debie

 

Are you sure the drive works? Does it show up in BIOS? Hit F12, do you see your hard drives?

 

I put my operating system disc back in and I got a different screen:
Media Direct 3 Reinstallation main menu

1. Alloate all available space to the C:\partition.

2.specify the size of the C artition
(all remaining space will be allocated to a D:\partition.)

Q. Quit

**Note*Opions 1 and 2 wll allocate utility and media direct 3 partitions.

Make a selection [1,2,Q]:

 

No. Under device info, the primary hard drive and second hard drive both show none. Did I install the replacement hd wrong or is there more wrong with my laptop than I thought?

I pulled out the hard drive and it isn't even connected because I purchased a Hitachi 2.5 mobile hd and the one in my system is a seagate with some kind of an extender on the end of it. Now, I have to figure out how to remove the extender and place it on my new hard drive. Any ideas?

 

It's really quite simple to add the adapter on. Most pull straight out. There are usually little wings on some that give you a place to grasp it.

 

Ya just gently tug on the adapter off. You'll need them to connect to the SATA connector on the motherboard.