Convert internal hard drive to external back-up drive

If both your Dell and the hard drive have USB ports you may be able to download directly. Other wise you may purchase an external drive and load the data to that. The external drive almost certainly will connect by USB.

You should be able to tak the hard drive out of the old one and put it in the new one as a secondary drive. There is a good chance, though, that the drive won't fit. If it doesn't, you'll need something like this.

Your old computer had IDE interface, the new computer has SATA interface.. There is a thin connector power cord and interface cords with tge same width connectors.The existing hard drive has thes cables connected to it. Connect one power cord and one data interface cable to the cd drive. Connect the audio cable to the cd drive and the Audio IN connector on the motherboard.
Unless the motherboard has a ide connector. you can not use your old hard drive or cd. You can get a external drive encloser that can convert IDE to USB

Ah! That sounds like the problem! The cd is quite old and it would not have been compatible with windows vista. This has affected the boot up of the computer. I have checked your model number and visited the Hewlett Packard site and I enclose the link for you to check out. http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=2093&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=uk&lang=en&product=3644689 You should try to contact them as you need the original disks for the computer, they won't be expensive. One is the recovery disk. It's likely that you may have to do a clean install of windows vista. *********** in law doesn't have any original disks that came with the computer does she? Anyway, visit the site and your model is listed there. If I can be of any futher assistance, please let me know. I hope this helps. Andrew

Man you need an english class lol
Ok thats a good one i like your thinking smart and planty of room. Ok this allmost reminds me of the raid tech savy system, Ok i want to say yes but i cant back it cause you made me all fuzzy dude lol
Hote sync type technology you might want to convert to 64bit OS it'll work faster and recovery will be easier may stress your processor
Answer yes but i would hunt down a jump drive type program so they can link instantly and save you the hastle of constant prompts and search's

The motherboard of your computer has two IDE and two SATA connections.
There is no upper limit of the drive size (at least nothing you have to worry about if you have WInXP, Vista or Linux installed)

Attention!!! - I heard from many people that HP (Compaq) has disabled the SATA connectors on your motherboard (ASUS A7V8X-LA)!!!
If you want to be on the safe side (and I would definitely recommend that) go and get an IDE drive. There are many good drives around with 500GB of storage.

If you have any more questions, just come back here and leave a comment - I'm happy to help.

If this is a usb external drive then it will be shown as a removable drive in My Computer. Just right click on the icon>Explore and you should be able to view the files on that drive. If you do not see a removable drive then please post back and I will help you determine the problem. Steve Medley

try to plug it to another computer...

I recenctly bought a my book 500 gig drive and it is usb.
the firsttime I plugged the usb cable in it worksed. I had only a 40 gig ide harddrive and so I ordered an internal 500 wd hard drive to replace it. The internal 500 gig is a sata drive. first I cloned the 40 to the sata 500 and then copied the external 500 to the internal. I mover the cables to then make the internal 500 sata my boot drive. The computer would no longer show the external e\when i used the windows explorer. the device manager said it was there and working with no problem but windows did not see it.
After several experiments with diferent configurations I have concluded my motherboard wasauto configuring the external and internal 500 drives as drive 0. Since the usb was detected first and was notthe boot drive then windows assigned the internal drive as drive 0 and since the usb drive was drive 0 also it would not work. windows ignored it. my solution was to return the ide as the boot drive and plug the sata into a slave port. with that configuration both drive are seen and work normally. It took me several days to find this arrangement. so since my sata ports are auto configure and the external has a sata connection i will install an esata port adapter and try to hook it up as a slave sata drive so i cab\n use my internal 500 sata drive as my boot drive.
sorry this was so long but it is my solution to what others may be facing.

if the hard disk fails better to buy new hard disk.