I bought a new 250GB HD because of the problems I was having, and now there's more. I installed it (but it only says like 125GB??) and then tried the DVD-RW drive.

It didn't detect at first, only the primary CD-RW drive. Then I went back and plugged in the second IDE plug (didn't see it earlier).

It still wouldn't detect, and now when the windows loading screen comes up, it's frozen from the start and it's very faded. (earlier it would start like that and then fade in and load after a few seconds)

I have no idea what I'm doing. Dell support does not help much, and they are really annoying.

So now I have to somehow get this drive detected.
I also have to get my cable modem detected again.
Then I have to put in the old hard drive as secondary (this is going to be fun, I know it)
Then I am going to burn all of my files to DVDs.

After this is all done I'm going to try to fix the driver file in the old HD that was messed up (I think it was agpCPQ.sys) and maybe switch the old to primary so I can get my old settings back.

Someone help please! I will be back later. I'm going to try more things.

Could you post the specs of your PC, i.e the Motherboard model number / processor speed e.t.c

You may need to update you BIOS so that it will see the 250GB drive.

No idea about the motherboard...
The processer is a Pentium 4 2.53Ghz.

Use the link in my signature to find out what your motherboard is.

I installed the 250GB HD and got the DVD-RW drive working. The problem was that the jumper is set on master and I don't have little pliers with me to change that. (I put it as slave first) My computer works but there is still more stuff that has to be done.

These are the problems that are remaining:

Installed the 250GB HD - only shows up as 125GB
Ethernet card and cable modem not detected (cable driver disc not helping, no Ethernet disc with me)
Can access old HD but not the main folder (Documents and Settings/My Name)

Also when I accessed my old hard drive, I did a search for recently updated files around the time my computer got messed up. Why are some file and folder names colored blue? If I do something to these files will I be able to get my old HD working as a master again?

ANOTHER UPDATE:
I can access the files from my old HD now, and I am backing the whole thing up on DVDs.
A friend is going to bring a driver for my ethernet card, then i can update my cable modem.
Then I can download service pack 1 and security updates, and get the other half of my partition.

After everything is done I will be able to make my computer's programs, folders, and settings basically identical to the way they used to be. This is if everything goes as planned of course...

Good luck with this

Try get your service pack 2 installed as soon as you can(as well as an Anti-Virus software).
There are a number of lovely little viruses that are trying to attack Windows OS systems and SP2 definatley helps.