laboye

That's surprising. Dell usually charges for every little thing. For you to understand the slave thing, I'll do a little explaining. On the motherboard of a computer (desktop) are usually 2 "IDE Controllers". They are a set of pins with a surrounding. Basically, a port. You connect IDE cables to them. These are the cables that connect to things like hard drives, CD-Drives and ZIP drives. On each controller, there can be two drives. This makes a total of 4 IDE drives on a system. Each controller, having two drives, has one master drive and one slave drive. You cannot have 2 masters or 2 slaves on one controller.

On most desktop systems, the CD Drive(s) is/are on one controller and the hard drive is alone on another controller. One CD drive is slave and the other is master. The hard drive is master of it's own channel. Since desktop hard drives (3.5") are larger than laptop drives (2.5"), you must use a special adapter to use them in a desktop. This is the adapter that dai is referring to. Here is one:

http://www.buyextras.com/2hadrto3ideh.html

Hook it up to your desktop and you can access the drive through My Computer and backup any data you need. You must do it quickly as the drive usually gets worse as it gets warmer. To that point, you can also put it in the freezer or fridge for about 15 minutes, and you may increase your chances of success. Purchase a hard drive (make sure it's a laptop 2.5 inch drive!) according to OMGmissinglink's specs. Use the link dai has provided to learn how to remove the hard drive of your system.

As for looking for drives, take a look at http://newegg.com and http://pricegrabber.com

I've made a custom search for you with laptop hard drives between 20 and 100GB, only 5400 RPM, IDE; all aranged by popluarity.

http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_a...i_p=0&x=51&y=7

On the right side, click Sort by Price if you want.

I hope all goes well!