I've been using my Dell Inspiron 5100 fine for the past week.

However, I tried to boot it up today and it gave an error saying that the hard drive could not be found. Additionally, the hard drive is making clicking noises.

I tried removing the hard drive, and spraying compressed air in the slot to clean it, then put it back in. Same error, it still makes the clicking noises.

I have a few questions:
-> Can I fix it and/or recover the data?
-> Do I need a new hard drive?
-> If so, would this one be computable?

Yeah, sorry but seems like your hard drive is toast. The one you linked is perfect, you may have to bite the bullet and go for it.

Stu

Understood. I back up my hard drive every other day, so I fortunately haven't suffered any huge losses.

However, I would really like to know why this happened and how I can prevent it from happening again. Thanks for the assistance.

Why it happenned? Well, could be any number of reasons... but fact of the matter is that hard drives (at least until the widespread affordable implementation of solid state drives) are mechanically based. Therefore, they have moving parts and after prolonged use are prone to failure. You can have drives that last years and years, and some that fail in <12 months.

It happens... there is really not much you can do to prevent it I suppose other than avoiding contantly accessing the HD... but that is rather unfeasible. All you can do is make regular backups (which you have done!) and bite the bullet when the time comes to replace it.

Stu

My 5100 is doing the same thing, but I was able to get it to boot by accessing the setup and changing the boot from minimal to thorough. It has turned off a couple of times since then but I just switch back and forth in the setup and it boots back up. I have no idea why this works. I just got done running a virus scan on the machine to see if it was something like that, but there were no infected files. I wonder if before to long I am going to have to replace the HDD as well. I have a 9300 as well so it is not such a big deal, but I use my 5100 for my home theature and would like to continue to do so. If anyone has any sort of addvice then I would be open for suggestions.
Thanks!!