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    Help needed with 320GB notebook HDD installation in a Dell XPS M1210

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by dimace, Mar 10, 2008.

  1. dimace

    dimace Newbie

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    I own a Dell XPS M1210 and the system originally came with a 80GB SATA Toshiba HDD. I wanted to upgrade to a 320GB and I naively thought that I could swap in any SATA HDD regardless of capacity, manufacturer, etc. It turns out I was wrong. I used Acronis True Image 11.0 to clone my 80 GB drive to the Western Digital WDXMS3200TN 320GB SATA external Passport drive, took the HDD out of the enclosure, and popped it into the Dell. Fired up the machine, go into the BIOS to make sure everything is ok and the BIOS (latest version available: A08) reports 78GB, i.e. it still thinks I have the old drive in. More to the point Windows goes into a blue screen immediately after the BIOS screen and reports that the drive is not properly configured and that I should run chkdsk /f to fix any errors.

    Now, I did check that the drive is seen by Windows as a healthy 320GB partition when I ran it as an external HDD via USB 2.0 and all the cloned data is there.

    Did another experiment where I installed the same cloned HDD into a Dell Precision M4300 (used for work). Same thing happened, i.e. BIOS reports a 78GB drive and Windows blue-screens immediately. Mind you this system came with a Seagate 120GB SATA drive so it seems two Dell machines report the same erroneous capacity for the same HDD. Is there something special about SATA drives from Western Digital? Is there something I'm missing? I did call XPS support and they mentioned that I'm out of luck, i.e. their BIOS will support approved HDDs listed on their website only. However, I have seen people posting in forums and in their signatures they report XPS M1210 configurations with either a 160GB or even a 250GB HDD installed, which are definitely NOT available from Dell so there's got to be a workaround for this. Does this have something to do with the cloning procedure that did not format the HDD to the BIOS's liking or is this BIOS-related and BIOS will not support such a high capacity drive?

    Any help/insight on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
     
    dimace, Mar 10, 2008
    #1