Ribbon cables responsible for hard drive error?

[Penguin19]

I am relatively inexperienced with the internal stuff inside a computer. I know what most of it is, but cannot identify it when I open the case. So please, be nice to me if my question is obvious.

I own a Dell Dimension 8400 desktop. It's about two years old, and no longer under warranty. It has been turned off for nearly two months. When I turned it on again, I got a frustrasting error that read "A disk error has a occured, please press CoNTRL+ALT+DLT to reboot." If I reboot, I just get the same error, over and over again. I managed to get into the set-up of my computer, and ran the hard drive diagnostics. I got the results that said something like "Drive 0: failed. Return code: 4." Since I have no idea what that means, and as the Dell support was less than helpful, I decided to open my computer and see if anything looked horribly wrong.

Other than being dusty, the inside of my computer seems ok. All the cords are attached. What I noticed, though, is that two of the ribbon cables seem to be splitting. I am not sure if that would affect anything or even if they are supposed to be that way. I don't know what these ribbon cables connect. They are fairly wide, and definitely not the USB ribbon cable.

Any information or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thank you.

 

[Vipernitrox]

what you're looking at is probably your ide cable. It connects your hard drive with your motherboard. But the split in it perfectly normal.

My best guess would be that your hard drive died. If you have any try plugging in a new one. Preferably with the same os on it you had on the broken one. If it doesn't work then or if you don't have another hard disk take it to a repair shop. Or if you want to take the guess that your hard disk is the problem buy a new one and plug it in yourself (much cheaper).