Life isn't worth living without Civ 4...I'm gonna jump...

[Philips]

well, i'm pretty sure the hard disk is gonna die. Presumably all I have to do is buy a new hard drive. I figure it would be best to buy an external one, so i can transfer everything from the old one to the new one easily. I checked on ebay and they seem to cost roughly £70. Any advice on what i should get?

Get an internal drive. I don't think ANY USB drive is bootable unless your BIOS supports that. It isn't hard to replace an IDE drive.

http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~shaher/Bootable_USB.html
http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesArticle/id-1392.html

 

[pixiejmcc]

Yup that's right Phillips. Unfortunately I only found that out after I bought an external one. Anyways, I'm gonna buy a maxtor diamond max 10 160GB tomorrow and return the other one. I've got a decentish idea of how to install it (it doesn't seem too difficult like you say). I'm just not sure whether to get a SATA or an IDE. The difficult part is transferrring everything from my old drive to my new one. I found a few links on the internet that explain the process, but none a dummy could understand. I might check out dummies.com.

edit: On looking at dummies.com, it would appear mine is an IDE, because it has a ribbon cable coming out of it.

Isn't this such interesting stuff?