Connecting a hard drive

AC is the power adapter that hooks your computer to the wall outlet.

The battery usually has a sliding clip on the bottom of the laptop that releases it.

Hi,

Initially, the cable from the HDD would be an IDE flat cable where one side has a red marking. Additionally, in most motherboard and hard drive, there is no way that the IDE cable could be inserted wrongly. There is a tab at the center of one side of the connector. Even if the IDE for some reason was connected wrongly, the system will hang but not shut down. What I suspect is the power cable. This would be the red, black, black, yellow that goes to one side of the 40Gb HD. Remember the red mark on the IDE cable, the red wire should be close to it also. If there are other devices installed on the same IDE cable, one has to be the master, the other slave. In between the HD power connector and the IDE flat cable would be several jumpers. If the HD is a Seagate, the last two pins closer to the IDE flat cable has to be shorted to be the primary. If there is a CD/DVD drive attached along the same IDE cable, it should be made a slave by putting a jumper on the pins marked SL. therafter, reboot and allow the BIOS to auto detect these devices.

Just a start, do postback how things turned up or should you need additional information. Good luck and Thank you for using FixYa.

Can you detect the 40GB hard drive when you are on the POST of your computer? Do get to the POST, restart your computer then click on F1 or the Del key. Make sure to press the key before the Windows Logo screen appears. If you can't detect it, there might be problem with the jumper settings or Cable settings from your Motherboard to the HD.

You always need to turn the computer off before swaping components. Remove the battery and AC, try to start up after 5 minutes of no power on the laptop with only the ac connected does it start up or what is the problem? the hard drive is no longer working?