Dell Inspiron 6000 will not find new hard drive - trying to install new after old one crashed

Be sure you transferred the blade adapter from the original drive to the new one.  Without it, the drive isn't connected to the system.

Also be sure you create a 120G first partition on the drive and install Windows to it.  DO NOT create a single 250G partition - if you do that you WILL lose the data on the drive one day.  Once Windows is installed, create a second partition to use the rest of the drive.

For data integrity, the boot partition cannot cross the 120G barrier.

Thanks for the info - especially about partitioning.

i removed the adapter from  the old hard drive and it does not fit onto the new one - which leads me to believe I have the wrong type of hard drive.  On the dell site, it shows the western digital BEVE is compatible.  This is a BEVT.

You can see a picture of the original hard drive here:

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/19856388/Reply.aspx

Notice all the pins.

The WDBEVT does not match.  So I am guessing I have the wrong hard drive, unless there is some other kind of adapter i can use.

Now that I have this, is it possible to buy an enclosure and just run the computer from the hard drive through USB?  It will be a secondary computer and won't need to travel anymore.

Thanks for any info.

Sorry - the link to the picture didn't work.

Also - the original is EIDE and the one I bought is SATA - even if I can run it through USB in an enclosure, will my computer recognize it even then?

Thanks

BEVT is SATA, which will indeed not work with this model.  Yes, you can use it externally (but you will still need an internal drive to use to boot the system, of course).

Sorry - just to make sure i understand - you say SATA will not work with this model laptop - how could I still use it externally then?  Thanks for any clarification.

SATA won't work internally  but will in a USB 2.0 SATA case, externally.  You will still need an internal parallel ATA drive to boot the system from, though.