I ran into something this weekend when working on a friends laptop that resulted from her removing an external hard drive with out properly using the safely remove icon, she told me she only did it 2 or 3 times normally she did use the icon. And once I looked up the error on google I found many many others that had the same thing happen to them and all of them also had an external hard drive they would attach, from all the info and reading I did that was the cause. What happens is you start to get an invalid drive error message, the one she was getting was invalid drive G:\, any time I tried to go to add remove programs I got that error so could not remove out dated programs, any time I tried to install things it gave that same error, so there was no way to try to update or clean out anything. Could not install or remove due to that error. After researching I found a way to go to the command prompt and type in a substitute code and that would let me remove or install programs however upon reboot it was right back, meaning anytime she needs to add or remove she will need to do that command prompt code first, and when I looked in My Computer it showed a G: drive it was an exact copy of the C: drive it was a ghost said it had the exact same volume etc. I tried every thing I found online to try to get it to go away including some registry edits but on hers the registry items were not changed so I could not edit it. So if you do use an external hard drive and you see that you can not safely remove I HIGHLY recommend just wait till you can shut down if that is how you have to do it because you really do not want to have to deal with that ghost drive mess. for those interested the exact error was Error 1327 Invalid Drive G:\ and to make matters worse on her pc everywhere it showed the G: drive it was grayed so there was no way to change that drive letter itself back to C. Really strange but by the google search not very rare.

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.

the thing I am worried about is the fact you said it Sounds old if this sound is coming from the tower it could well be coming from the hard drive and if a hard drive is making sounds it did not make when new it can be an indicator of a drive that is on it's way to failing. I would try running some of the programs that test the health of your hard drive and see what you get. I am sure you did not mean 2Mb of Ram perhaps 2 Gig? Hard drives are not terribly expensive and they are pretty easy to install, just depends really on what you want to put into an older machine. It would be an excellent candidate to load linux on and learn a new OS. But first you need to learn of the health of that drive and definitely do housekeeping on it no matter what you do. When was the last time you opened that case and cleaned out the dust bunnies? Dust bunnies can often be the reason things fail due to the heat caused and them getting stuck in fans which makes new noises too. Cleaning the computer and its components belarc has a hard drive health test Belarc HD Tune look for the free version not the pro

Not up on the easy transfer cable, you might want to investigate the transfer speed... but think you will find it slower than a regular network connection ... Inexpensive network switch and a couple of cat5 patch cables maybe lots quicker. Quick look at newegg I saw a network switch for $9.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833166034 Plain old usb wifi network adapters in ad-hoc mode run 11mbs and newegg and others usually have name brand ones for a wireless connection at $20 each. Sometimes close outs for less.