Fried Hard Drive

It's not hard, if you know what you are doing. If you don't, and don't have an experienced person to help, I recommend having an expert do it. Remember, when a motherboard is fried, some wiring may also have been compromised. Be sure to weigh the cost/benefit. If it's an older machine, it probably won't pay. If you have files that you do not want to lose, you could try this... Pull the hard drive out, and use a "USB Hard Drive Adapter" (available fairly cheap online) to connect the hard drive to a friend's computer, and save all the personal files (documents, pictures, etc.) you can to a folder on the friend's computer or an external hard drive. That way, at least you may not lose your files.

There is no way of fixing this hard drive, if you need to recover your data, then there are companies that can recover data off faulty hard drives BUT it will cost you an arm and a leg for their services.

I have the same one. The power supply I have says input 100-240V output is 24W 12V 2A.
I'm replacing the power supply but my big problem is not knowing the polarity of the tip There is no sticker on the hard drive itself or on the power supply (that I suspect is fried). Can anyone help?
Lisa

Well, according to http://www.clearanceclub.com/depot/quelle_showroom.cgi?sku=4768 your laptop has a 80GB Enhanced IDE drive, so you'd be looking for any 2.5' IDE laptop drive.
Any computer store will be able to sell you one.

That said, you mention your hard drive is fried, but you also say you want to take the old media files off it? Well, if the hard drive is fried, there is nothing coming off it because..well.. its fried.
But if the drive works you dont need a new one. But sounds like you do need to format and reinstall the Operating System.

Have you installed an operating system on the new drive?

The hard drive in the Archos may have become corrupted. A format will most likely fix the issue but the media on the drive will be erased.

you need a 1.8" zif format hard drive samsung and toshiba both have models that will work for you, but you need to do a downgrade upgrade trip with the firmware in order to get the archos to use the new hard drive! her is the link to how to do the downgrade upgrade to the firmware

http://frenchyaz.com/av500.aspx

Downgrade firmware from 1.5.12 to 1.3.12 and then replace the hard drive, it should work. It does not work with firmware versions superior to 1.3.12. If you have 1.5.13 you can downgrade to 1.5.12 using the normal archos update procedure (yes, from 1.5.13 to 1.5.12 you can freely donwgrade using standard offical method). You can find 1.5.12 firmware on the official archos download page. If you need the 1.3.12 version (not available at archos website) it can be retrieved there: http://www.opendrivers.com/freedownload/232939/archos-av500-portable-dvr-firmware-1.3.12-download.html

AV500 will not install on XP PRO

If possible it may be the hard drive, try changing out the hard drive and see if it continues to reboot. Also try reformating that hard drive. it may be a bad logical sector causing the problem in any event look at the hard drive first and the if it is ok, concentrate on a possible power supply problem. If both of these prove to be not the problem, see if you can do a software reload or upgrade. As this might also be an OS issue.