My hard drive has died can i replace it with any hard drive or does it have to b

[marcroft]

Hello,
hi my 80 gig hard drive has packed up can i buy any hard drive as a replacement or do i have to be more specific very new to this any help please

 

[Wamphryi]

That would depend on the age of your system. As your HDD is 80 GB then I will assume that the PC in question is quite old. This makes it likely that you will run into limitations in the BIOS of the Motherboard. The BIOS will likely only recognize a drive up to something like 160 GB. If you try and put a 1 TB drive in place the BIOS will more than likely fail to recognize it. With this in mind:

Make sure you have the latest BIOS update for your motherboard.
Check that the latest BIOS update will support bigger drives once installed.

If the board can only go so far buy a drive that is small enough to be recognized.
Or buy a RAID Controller to support the larger drive and boot off that.
Or Upgrade your motherboard.

Thats is about all you can do.