Hard Drive Problem

I just put in a new hard drive. I had 120gb, but wanted more space, so put in a 320. I also was recently getting some strange error messages upon bootup that was causing me to think there might be a problem with the 120, since it was a refurbished, not new, drive. Sometimes, it wouldn't allow me to get to the log in screen, sometimes it would...in a word, very 'inconsistent'.
I don't have the wording of the error message right now....if it comes up again(I hope it doesn't), I will include it in a subsequent posting as it may give more information as to what may be wrong.
I've had the 320 in for about 5 days and haven't gotten the error message I was getting with the 120, making me think it was the old hard drive. I did do a chkdsk /f and a chkdsk /r and both came up no problems, so I wasn't sure.
But, unfortunately, when I booted up today, those same strange messages came up with the 320. I decided to take a look inside my machine to see if I could 'see anything' out of the ordinary. Well, all the wires looked okay, but I DID notice a 'tear' in part of the ribbon(I have a desktop IDE hard drive, about 5 year old Dell computer). This may be the cause of my problem. What do you think? If there is a 'tear' in that 'ribbon' what might happen? I have no idea how it tore. It's not a real bad tear, but noticeable.
So I reconnected my hard drive to the other place inside you can connect a drive. This ribbon looks intact. So far no problem, or error messages. Was this a wise, logical thing to do? What diagnostics should I run? I already ran the chkdsks, I don't know what else to do, other than hope by connecting my hard drive to the other place for an internal drive, that it may bypass the ribbon that is 'torn'. I would tend to think it would.
Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

Hi JEK,

If you are refering to a "tear" between two wires in the ribbon cable, that is a separation between two wires, then there is no problem. A broken wire would be.

Luck, Jim

 

It is hard to tell if any wires in the ribbon have been damaged. I can just see a small tear. I have had the hard drive connected to the other ribbon and connector for several days now with no problems or error messages, so I assume I am OK for now, but will of course repair/replace that other ribbon at some point in the future. Thanks for your help.