Dropped Hard Drive

Yesterday, I dropped a Western Digital 320GB hard drive that I had purchased. It dropped from about 3 feet, but didn't seem to make the harshest of landings - in fact, part of it landed on an article of clothing. So I put it in my Dell Dimension 8400 and it reads the disk but says its incompatible...It says that it's 298GB and under this it says "No boot device available, strike F1 to retry boot...blah blah" I'm hoping that it might just not be able to boot without an OS..? :confused

 

thats about right I have a wd 320 internal and when formatted it reports 298g and yes it's not bootable without an os. sounds like its fine

 

And that whole thing about being incompatible...?

 

Where does it say 'incompatible'? You may want to post the EXACT error messages along with where they came from.

 

Under Type/Status it says Incompatible. Also, when I went to the boot sequence in the BIOS, it said that there was no on-board SATA hard drive.

 

sounds like a sata2 drive on a sata 1 controller. there should be a jumper to limit drive to sata 1 .put jumper on then look in bios again.