Hey everyone I have some trouble with my new computer.

HP Pavilion a640n Desktop PC

It has everything in it except a Hard Drive, and I was wondering what could I use?

Specifications

if you need more info just ask

are you asking what hard drive you should use? Why not the one recommended on the page you provided? Although 100gb is probably more than enough.

do you have a link to where I can buy one?

New computer?
Few years old to be considered new, I had an HP for a day and immediately went back to the store to return it, it was a piece of junk.
Yours I hate to say doesn't look very capable either, it doesn't even support SATA harddrives. Hope you got your pennies worth from that computer. :S

Just go to a local store to buy one, no need to spend extra on packaging and shipping and possibility of many problems to come by shipping. Go to a local PC store if you have one nearby.
It's considerably cheaper, and if you're lucky enough they'll help you figure out what you need.

dunno about cheaper, but the ability to return if anything is messed up is always a plus. Go for western digital if you can, rock solid drives.

Quote from XCNuse :

It's considerably cheaper, and if you're lucky enough they'll help you figure out what you need.

Not where I live. The computer stores near me have literally only a few different kinds of hard drives, and they are twice the price as new egg.

Quote from fragile_dog :

dunno about cheaper, but the ability to return if anything is messed up is always a plus. Go for western digital if you can, rock solid drives.

...or Seagate, or in fact anything but a Maxtor!

Seeming that I got this computer free () all i need to do to get it working is have a hard drive. The problem is, Im not sure what kind of make/model it is suppost to be, thats what I was trying to get at. I was asking if you guys knew any kind of HD that I could buy for the HP Pavilion a420n, and if you possibly could tell me what works and doesnt work for that computer.


(BWT when I said new, I meant it is new to my presents, the computer is old)

Regards
-Dustin

Quote from imthebestracerthereis :

I was asking if you guys knew any kind of HD that I could buy for the HP Pavilion a420n, and if you possibly could tell me what works and doesnt work for that computer.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ ... aspx?Item=N82E16822144157

Quote from Jakg :

...or Seagate, or in fact anything but a Maxtor!

I don't know what people have against Maxtor, I have 3 Maxtors currently 2 160Gb (5200&7200) and 20Gb that is already 7 years old and has been lugged around with and without external casing for the most of its life. And I haven't had single problem with them

OK it seems like I found a place that sells HP hard drives

http://www.superwarehouse.com/ ... _Hard_Drives/b/110/c/2481

- Compared to my HP -
160 GB Ultra DMA
7200 rpm
Whats it look like I need? :S

Quote from imthebestracerthereis :

OK it seems like I found a place that sells HP hard drives

Dear lord those are some overpriced drives. Just buy one from NewEgg or similar. You pay through the nose for OEM hardware.

but for my HP what category would I use?

Western Digital
Seagate
Fujitsu

?

The one I linked to works. Any PATA (ATA-33 to ATA-133) drive will work, regardless of brand.

oops failed to look at the thread, ill check it out thx

ok im done looking at internal disk drives. Im now looking at this: http://www.radioshack.com/prod ... ?productId=2542562&cp

is it possible to boot windows xp from an external hard drive?

Hmm.. Depends on your BIOS I guess. My BIOS can't, and I doubt a stock HP one can.

Check what options you have as boot-up device in it. Would probably be listed as USB or something. Never done it, so I'm not sure.

Either way I wouldn't recommend it. Get a small internal drive for the OS and use external drives for data storage if you really want to have an external drive. There's really no reason to boot from an external drive. I think the performance hit would be high.

EDIT: Umm.. Am I crazy, or was there a post here before?

there was a post but it was rubbish... next question. When I boot up my pc it says this and go no farther:

Quote :

Award BotBlock BIOS v1.0
COPYRIGHT(c) 2000, Award Software, Inc

Bios ROM checksome error

Decting floppy drive A media
INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

What should I do?

:/

Huh.. That's a bit weird.

Looks like the BIOS is corrupted though. It usually checks itself against a stored checksum and if it doesn't match something must have changed and that message appears.

Has it always done that, or did it happen after plugging in the new drive? (You bought a new one I assume from the PM?)

EDIT: Or wait... It does actually boot it seems? (Insert systems disk etc.) Have you actually inserted a bootable CD/Floppy so it has something to boot off of? Still a bit weird with that checksum error though.

it started b4 i bought / installed the HD I dont have a floppy for it, have to check by owner :/

Well, you'll need an OS to be able to boot the computer. It won't start all by itself.

The computer probably came with some kind of HP recovery CD which should reset it to the factory install... Drivers, crapware and all. If you can't get a hold of that, just install a plain version of Windows and install drivers for all the hardware manually.

seeming that it doesnt get to the boot screen, I would say trying to install from XP CD wouldnt work so tomorrow im going to get the floppy drive from the owners and hopefully that will fix everything and I will have a good pc (XCNuse no replying)

Quote from imthebestracerthereis :

seeming that it doesnt get to the boot screen, I would say trying to install from XP CD wouldnt work

Well, what you posted above IS the boot screen. It's asking for bootable media since it couldn't find a bootable harddrive, CD or floppy. Just inserting the XP install CD should work. If it doesn't you may have to adjust some settings in the BIOS so it boots from the CD-ROM first instead of the floppy drive.

k so it didnt boot from xp cd first time, now I just have to figure out how to get to bios settings :S

EDIT: it seems like where you can change the bios screen comes AFTER the actual error, thus making it impossible to get it changed :O