Recently my hard drive seemed to just die. No clicking, nothing before hand. But when i turned on my computer i get an error after the Dell bios splash screen appears telling me that Hard-Disk couldn't be found. After trying a new sata cable and still no good, i bought a new hard drive today. Installed it, and turn it on, installed windows xp sp3 from my Dell recovery disk and windows comes up nice and good now. I tried installing the drivers from the dell recovery disk that has all the drivers, and for what ever reason it can not find the onboard network adapter. It says that it is not installed or on "Deep Sleep". I have an active network cable installed, but i did notice that there was no lights on the plug. So i tried downloading the drivers from the realtek website, and still no good.
So i thought, maybe the nic was no good now as well, so i popped in a PCI nic card, and i do have flashing lights on it, but again, windows says there it is not installed. So i thought maybe i needed to disable the onboard nic in the bios, so i did that, and still no good. SO now im not sure what is up? Maybe my onboard is good and it is something else causing this? Any clues guys?
Here is my system:
Windows XP SP3
Dell Vostro 410
Processor,Q6600,2.4,8MB,Core Duo Kentsfield,G0
onboard nic is a Realtek RTL81XX PCI-E Network Connection according to Dell's website when i put in my service tag
3 gigs ram
Let me know if you need to know anything else?