Should I buy Refurbished or used hard drive ( Seagate Momentus SATA 160Gb) to save some money? Any experience on that?

REPLACE >ITS BUSTED

You can try to use the free software "recuva"

No just plug it in to the extra plug on the board.

I suggest you check the specification of your Dell laptop to see the maximum size hard drive it can support. The maximum size hard disk you can install in the laptop depends upon the BIOS.
Any major brand of 2 1/2" hard drive will work with the Dell.

EFWEREF:

Ever
Find
Wet
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Expansion
Factor

It came with a 7200RPM 160GB SeaGate Momentus (ST9160823AS) SATA. As long as the hard drive is an SATA drive it will work on your system. The drive has the details on it.

Hello: I see no problem using a bigger harddrive in the unit,the only concern I think you might have is to purchase a hard drive caddy for the interface, Especially if the current hard drive is an IDE Interface, You can purchase a IDE to Sata Interface caddy, to support the drive Interface if it's an IDE format. You might want to check with Dell for compatibility first before purchasing the Sata Drive.

no just as long as its sata

Buy a new drive. The beeps are coming from the hard drive and they say I'm broken. If you need to recover data, and only if you need it like life and death because it will cost a bit, send it to a data recovery company. I would search on line and look for somebody local to you for this if you need it.

As for your old drive, if you like to tinker, you may be able to remove the drive from the case and replace it with a similar sized drive with a matching interface (ide or sata). I personally like to remove the rare earth magnets from bad drives to make refrigerator magnets and toss the aluminum housing into the metal recycling barrel. It also ensure personal data is never coming off those platters.

The IDE version of a 160gb is a:

Seagate Momentus 160GB IDE Laptop Hard Drive
Part Number: 9S1034-506
Model Number: ST9160821A
5400RPM

The SATA version is a:

Seagate Momentus 7200.2 ST9160823AS 2.5-inch 160 GB hard drive