Upgrade HDD on XPS Gen 2: 137gig limit issue

Good day,

I am attempting to upgrade the original 60 gig hard drive that came with my XPS Gen2 to a WD 250gig hard drive. The problem I am running into is that the bios is only recognizing 137gigs, and there does not seem to be a newer bios to update to for the gen2.


I have been searching both this site and google in general attempting to find a solution, but have not had any success yet. Would anyone have a suggestion to fix this issue? If I missed an obvious fix in a previous post, a simple slap up-side the head with a pointer would be appreciated (;.

Current BIOS is A05.

 

This problem is due to the fact that you are installing Pre Windows XP SP1 (assuming since this is a limit of Pre SP1). With SP1, the install will recognize more then 137Gb. You can slipstream the SP1 into XP with nLite, or contact dell for an XP with SP1/2/3 install disk.

Microsoft: How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP

 

Ericeod,

Thank you for the response. I ended up using Windows to create a small C: partition on the drive, installed Windows, got all patches and fixes, then used Easus Partition Manager to allocate the remaining space. You are absolutely right, after service pack one, all space is accessible.

Thank you for the response/fix, it is much appreciated.

 

One word of caution - applies to all situations like this. Windows is now the only system talking properly to your hard disk. If you ever do "low level" things to your hard disk which rely on the BIOS talking to the disk directly you will probably end up with a corrupted hard disk. Basically, if you cannot do it from a windows environment (and this excludes things which reboot to a non-windows environment from Windows), then do not do it.

The previous advice to slipstream SP2 (or SP2 and SP3 - you do need both - SP3 alone has some problems) to your current installation disk (which I assume is WXP "SP0") is good advice. You will not need to do any after-installation partition resizing. It will all get recognised during the installation (at least it has everytime I have done this on various machines).

 

yea um this is a dumb question but how do you take out the hdd? i opened up and i didnt see any screw holding it down or anything, but that sucker wont come out.
o and the hdd i want to take out is corrupted can i format it then partition it and but a new os on it?

 

There are two screws holding the hard drive mount in the computer. Are you talking about that or removing the drive from the holder?