Inspiron 530

ChuckBaggett

You need to a replacement SATA  hard drive and optical drive, a good place to buy these from is www.newegg.com

The procedures for replacing the drives in an Inspiron 530 MT are HERE

After installing the hard drive, you will need to manually install windows, load the drivers and applications.

The procedures for a manual reinstall of windows are HERE

Bev.

Thanks for the help.

Looking at the dvd drives at Newegg, I see an Asus DVD burner that gets a high rating, at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827135204.  I wonder if it will work without needing drivers installed.  Can't install the drivers, if they are needed,  without an operating system,  and don't have a functioning Windows XP operating system, just the Ubuntu Live CD.

Selecting a hard drive produces questions, if one is trying to get not just any hard drive but is trying to get a good one at a low price.  Western Digital alone offers a choce of drives at the same or nearly the same price.

Here's one possibility: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136497, a "Western Digital AV-GP WD5000AVDS 500GB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive "  Does that seem like a reasonable choice?

I see a thread that suggest a possible problem I could run into: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3514/p/19314241/19626122.aspx#19626122 .  That threads reports a problem running the operating system reinstallation DVD disk on an Inspiron 530.

ChuckBaggett

The Asus 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW drive, will be fine, the drivers for the optical drive are included in Windows, but after installing windows you will need to install the appropriate burning software.

The Western Digital AV-GP WD5000AVDS 500GB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive, will work in the Inspiron 53o and WDC a good brand.

Regards to last paragraph about 530 problems with reinstalling Vista, read the last post of the discussion by the OP, it sounds like the DVD drive had problems.

A couple of months ago, after the hard drive failed, I replaced Vista with XP, on my 530 without any problems.

Bev.

When you say " the drivers for the optical drive are included in Windows" does that mean on the version of Windows that is on the Dell operating system DVD?  The system doesn't have a working installation of Windows.  The hard  drive is dead; it won't boot from the hard drive. I think the problem in the thread I mentioned is the problem I am expecting to happen:  the DVD drive will only function as a CD, not a DVD,  until it has the right drivers, and you can't get the drivers installed until you have Windows installed, which you can't do because the Windows installation disk is a DVD. This seems like a Catch-22 situation.  I may just be overly pessimistic. I have been told elsewhere that Lite-On would be a better choice for the optical drive, and that I should get a "retail packaged" hard drive instead of a bare-drive.

ChuckBaggett

Lite-On optical drives is also a good choice, regards to the 'Retail Boxed' version of the hard drive, all you receive extra, is usually a data cable, printed instructions, a disk with utilities, such as diagnostic tools and maybe cloning software, all of which can be downloaded from the manufacturer's website, but the hard drive and warranty are identical to the bare drive, that usually costs less than the boxed version. 

If you have any doubts about replacing the drives, reinstalling windows and loading the software, then maybe you need to take Inspiron 530 to a local computer store/repair shop, to have it done. 

Bev.