Laptop Frying Hard Drives

[lomapaseo]

I have a Dell 9300 laptop that was working fine until I tried to upgrade the hard drive from the the stock 160 GB to a 250 GB (non sata).

The first attempt cloned the 250 from the 160 and worked fine for a week or two, then suddenly spit out boot errors and quit. Troubleshooting (by somebody else) pointed at the new hard drive being bad (clcking noises).

I went back to the old 160Gb HD for several months and then tried again on another new 250gb HD (under WD warranty) and when trying to clone the old 160 Gb HD stopped working (error message = "no HD"). So I formatted and loaded a new operating system (XP) on the new 250 Gb HD and off we go for about a week. Then the machine stopped booting with the error message = "a disk read error occurred"

BIOS version = A05 (09-19-2005)

System info device shows Primary HD = 137GB even though a 250GB drive is installed.


Any suggestions on where to go from here other than to bin the laptop?

[Bushfiva]

It shipped with a 160GB PATA drive from Dell?? I thought the BIOS only addressed 137GB, which in practice means a 120GB hard drive. You can create partitions larger than 137GB, but once data gets written anywhere past 137GB it all ends in tears.

[green granite]

Wot Bushfiva says, it only see 137 gigs for a HD. Try splitting it into 2 x 125 gig partitions then re-installing the op system.

[lomapaseo]

Thanks for the hints

Any chance that the BIOS has an update to use a bigger HD?

I spoke to Dell about buying a larger hard drive from them using my Service Tag # and they sold me a 320Gb which they said would upgrade this laptop:confused:

[Saab Dastard]

The ATA-6 spec. for 48-bit LBA (allowing 128 PetaBytes!!!) has been around since 2002, so I doubt that the 2005 BIOS is still enforcing a 137GB limit - especially as Dell shipped it with a 160GB disk.

However, Windows XP pre-SP1 did NOT support 48-Bit LBA, so if a re-install of XP was at a pre-SP1 level, that would be problematic.

There are many possible reasons for the problems, ranging from overheating to BIOS corruption or misconfiguration to physical damage or loose connection(s).

SD