I have started to get into metal detecting, but the people who do it have all these phrases that they are familiar with and they can be hard to understand. Can anyone help me?

Even experienced hunters sometimes leave their settings at all-metal. It really depends what your goals are. If you want to find valuable things, you often have to sift through mostly trash to actually get to something of value particularly as gold has the same discrimination level as foil and pull-tabs.

So it really depends how patient you are and how hard you are willing to work to find things of real value.

If you installed Linux successfully on your hard disk then the hard disk is OK.
If you are installing Windows Xp and it does not detect the hard disk but the BIOS detects the hard disk then -
The problem is that XPinstallation CD does not have a SATA driver, unless you have a SATA drive on adisk etc. and can install the driver when XP asks for a hard drive driver then,XP cannot detect the hard disk and therefore won't install XP.The FIX.Go into the BIOS anddisable the SATA drive (enable IDE emulation), this will make XP think it is aIDE/PATA hard disk. Then you can install XP normally. When Windows hasbeen installed then install all the device drivers (including the SATA driver),then shut down and boot up and got into the BIOS and enable the SATA drive.

If both drives are SATA (not "parallel-ATA") drives, then "swap" the physical location of the two drives, to see if only the "top" (or the "bottom") drive is NEVER detected. Or, if the "detected" drive moves after the drives are swapped, then the non-detected drive has a problem. In that case, remove the "good" drive, to see if the "bad" drive can be detected when it is the only active drive.

the weird cheap power supply they used has failed. I will never buy another galaxy product. This whole time I thought the hard drive crashed, but it was the enclosure all along that died at about a year.

try a different data cable for it or a different port to connect it to. also try to connect the drive to a different computer to isolate what exactly is causing the problem.

I'm not familiar with that specific model, but if you install from cd and get blue screens and the hard drive is not always detected, this means the hard drive is failing. You will have the same problem if you do manage to get the external cd/dvd drive to detect.

If the A40 is new enough to use a SATA hard drive (I do not think it is) then you need an XP cd with SP2 or 3 included or you will get bluescreens. But the fact that you can't get other OS to install make this an unlikely suspect.

The cd drive could be bad and not copying all the files correctly, but since you say the hard drive sometimes will not detect makes it almost certain that the hdd is the main issue.

no!

Any hard disk that makes clicking or metallic noises is faulty, especially when POST error message no bootable devices detected.
To confirm go into the BIOS setting and see if the hard drive is detected, if it cannot detect the hard drive then it is definitely faulty.
Replace the hard drive and install Windows on the new hard drive to get the computer working again.

Any hard disk that makes clicking or metallic noises is faulty, especially when POST error message no bootable devices detected.
To confirm go into the BIOS setting and see if the hard drive is detected, if it cannot detect the hard drive then it is definitely faulty.
Replace the hard drive and install Windows on the new hard drive to get the computer working again.

http://intel-driver.driveray.com/intel-brand/r_13_1.shtml