I had my old drive that was in my original HP Pavilion computer. I was told that the drive had crashed about 2 years after I had gotten the computer. Well I just put the drive aside and forgot about it until recently. I hooked it up to the Sabrent 5 in 1 Cable to Serial ATA transfer thing and hooked everything to the drive and then plugged it in to the USB port on the tower of my home built computer. It was recognized and I was able to reformat it. Now I just need to get a new hard drive enclosure.Thanks to Owbist and Terry I was able to do it without having to call my son and bother him with a lot of questions.

Thank you all for answering. owbist, I downloaded a program called HDD Health (recommended by Kim Komando) and that is what is giving me the Attribute seek error message. It was giving me the message about the Temp Critical and with the dust that was there, I'm sure I was headed for a crash. It said the temp ws 48 degrees celcius, so I feel very lucky that HDD Health caught it. I haven't had that message since I cleaned it out. I will try PC Pitstop when I finish here. I did a Balarc Advisor report and all it says about the hard drive is "160.04 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity",so I have to do a little research to find out what make it is. I do have the case up off the floor sitting on my desk top, but it still was very dusty. It has plenty of free space around it for ventilation. I really don't want to replace the whole set up, because this has every thing I need except smaller size and still feels like a "new" one to me, except I have a bulky 17" CRT monitor. Until now I have had zero problems with it. I think I bought it in 2004, so it isn't that old, at least for me, and it has everything most of the new ones have. I have 135 GB free out of the 160. How do I backup my bookmarks and address book? I use Firefox and Outlook Express. cboy,I think cloning to a new hard drive is what I want to do, so I might be back to ask how to do that. Thanks again

Janette, The default backup location of the 'Windows Backup Utility' is the 'Floppy' drive. Under 'Choose a place to save your backup', click the 'browse' button and select a location on your drive, maybe your documents folder, to save the backup and give it a name. You should then be able to use your recording software to copy this file to CD or DVD. I have an external, Western Digital 120, hard drive that I bought at Best Buy a few years ago. Usually the drives will come with a backup software, mine came with 'Dantz Retrospect', but I haven't used it. I use a couple different options for backup. I use 'Acronis True Image', a drive imaging software, which I can use to restore an exact replica of my drive, operating system, settings, documents, etc., from a partition on my external drive to my internal drive in case of internal drive failure or corruption. I also just use the 'copy and paste' feature to backup 'My Documents' to the external drive even though it is redundant and not necessary because I can also retrieve files from the 'Acronis' image. Just 'putzin'. Witz Here is a link that might be useful: Windows Backup Utility

Acronis is an excellent program, I have it. There are some free imaging programs also. You would be imaging the entire drive including the opearting system so should you have a need to use the image it would put it back exactly the way it was when you did the image, it is just like taking a snapshot of the drive. This site does a good job of explaining how to use it and also you can purchase it from them for a reduced cost. Using Acronis Acronis 8 free software to image/backup/ghost your computer (free alternatives to Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost, etc.). with imaging you can back up to an external hard drive, another internal hard drive, a partition, cd or dvd, flash there are many options depending on the product used. I still also keep a copy on a flash drive and online storage of my most important files and pictures etc just to be extra safe.