Trouble installing Seagate 250 gig hard drive on my d600

After toying with i, i finally got it to atleast fit into my laptop and it does recognize 137gigs of the 250gig hard drive. But i ran into another problem. I need to partition that drive and i dont have the original software for my computer and i found the complete restore cds for a dell lattitude latop but its for the d430,d530, d830 and the d831 i think. I found the cds on ebay and i was wondering if i can use this set of cds to restore everything to my D600? (im guessing no but i just want to make sure) I was going to get the actual restore cd from Dell but i was given the run around about my computer since it was an Off-Lease computer and they said it would take up to 10-15 days just to transfer the ownership of my computer.....cant wait that long lol

 

Any one got any ideas?

 

So you don't have XP on a CD?
For the drivers go to dell.com/support and download them.

 

Well I have XP on a cd, I just need to know if the recovery cds from a d530 would work on a d600? I found a guy on ebay selling the recovery cds from a d530 and he was not sure if it would work or not.

 

If you have an XP installation CD you don't need to worry about any "Recovery Disk". Dell doesn't make "Recovery Disks" in the sense that HP, Lenovo, etc make Recovery Disks which just contain a drive image. Dell provides a genuine OEM installation CD and a driver CD specific to your machine.

Chances are the eBay seller is trying to sell you a driver CD. You do not want this driver CD. This driver CD will not contain drivers for your computer. You can install XP from your installation CD and download the drivers from Dell's site.

 

Ok i tried that but everytime i do that it says "no boot sector on hard disk No bootable devices." and it wont let me do anything else.

 

You need to boot off a Windows installation / recovery CD which will then put the boot information onto the HDD as part of the installation process.

John

 

Well is there more then one cd then? All I could find was my XP install cd from my desktop.

 

That XP installation CD should be OK. Is it actually seeing the HDD? If so, perhaps you need to let it format the HDD. If not, what version XP is on the installation disc? SP2 or later should be OK, but an early XP may not recognise the hardware properly. You can use nLite to create you own XP installation including SP3 and the Dell drivers. That's the route I have used on the few occasions when I have started off with an empty HDD and want to do a clean installation. Most times I clone the existing HDD onto the new one.

John

 

Well just to let everyone know whats going on. I finally got my laptop up and running. I finally found a recovery cd from my desktop and used that to set up my HDD. The only problem im having now is that every time i restart my computer Internet Explorer usually runs into some sort of error and then i just reopen it and its fine. Also its only seeing 127gigs of my HDD. But right now im just spending time updating everything which is a real pain.