Hard drives for a laptop built in 2003 are super hard to find! (might have to toss a good lappie in the trash)

I 100% agree with Dell! listen to every thing they say! There knowledge is far better than ours. Your doing well just keep on going! Paying the 100$/year is totally worth it to have access to unlimited Tec support!

 

Maybe I’m just bored, but I am waiting to here back from the OP on his decision
I’m curious, and the suspense is killing me

And I have subscribed to the thread in hopes that after he does whatever he decides to do that he posts back to confirm that its working fine

Alex

 

I wish you and him were local to me and still had the laptop & drive. I'd have had you bring it over and I'd take a look at it. There has to be a logical reason for it not seeing the drive. It could very well be that the laptop just didn't like the firmware on the drive. It's rare, but not out of the question.

For example, I used to have a Gateway M6750 laptop. The stock 250GB WD HD worked ok with it by itself. I added a 1GB Turboram module to the system and all of a sudden the system was flakier than a box of corn flakes left out to dry in the Sahara desert for a year. If Windows crashed it would take almost 5 minutes to get back into the OS on reboot (you'd get that "Unexpected shutdown" message where it checks the integrity of the module's data). I removed the module because it was causing more harm than good. Sometime afterwards I upgraded the drive to a 320GB WD Black HD. On a whim I reinstalled the card. Every single bug and flake went away. The integrity check that used to take 5 minutes now took only a few seconds to complete. The only thing that changed was the hard drive (I imaged over the OS so that was still the same). The only thing I could think of was that the module just didn't like something about the older hard drive.

Oh well... is the OP even still alive at this point?

 

Even longer post. Gotta laugh at some of the ASSUMPTIONS a couple people made in this thread. Some were funny. That's what happens when the computer is your primary go-to source for companionship, love, camraderie and sexual gratification. As a sociologist I know these things. Gave myself a vacation. I walked away from this issue for a few weeks, tended to other matters. During that time every time I looked over at my busted laptop I cringed. All the cringin' gave me a headache. There was too much ambiguity and that summoned all the cringin'. About a week ago I went ahead and decided to put the 120gig in. First time I ever installed an HD in a computer before. It was super easy. A Dell tech walked me thru it over the phone. I used the laptop for a couple of days and the unit runs fine. It's a Western Digital HD. Comes with a 3 year warranty I believe. Gotta wonder if Western Digital will be making HD's like this in 2013 since solid state drives are gonna take over. Maybe I should buy another 120 gig as a backup before they stop making them all together???? Most Dell techs are good. As are the ones at HP. They just dropped the ball on this issue which kinda surprised me since not one but all Dell techs were on the same page. And it was the wrong page. Generalizations are inherently flawed unless you're Gods gift to mankind so don't knock people/things/pc techs with an across the board broadsweeping all-in-one generalization. There are American/Filipino/Mexican/Russian techs who make mistakes. $125 a year for unlimited phone support is money well spent if you use your computer like you do your body: for work, school, pleasure. If my body is my temple - and it is - my computer is akin. I can fix some computer things on my own (just like I sometimes can fix things on my body with chicken soup, lifting weights, excorcism, or pills) but sometimes it's outta my hands and I gotta call in a 'doctor' in order to root out the devil. Well worth the annual 125 fee especially since only Dell and HP are sharp enuff to provide their techs/customer base with the worlds greatest stethoscope: remote access (and note that Apple, Acer, Toshiba, or Lenovo do not utilize remote access.) Luv RA!! Luv RA even when troubleshooting ain't called for. Fantastic tool. Cannot live without it, will not live without it, even if we use it only once every 18 months. Which means I'll never buy a computer from the 4 computer makers too cheap to provide their techs with remote access (Apple has a 2-300% markup on the retail price of their computer yet they don't furnish their techs with remote access: SO STUPID on Apple's part - called them just the other day - there was a 15 minute wait to get to talk to an Apple tech - so you know their customers have an Apple/MacBook that needs service with a wait that long). Think about it. A technician can't work on a computers registry without remote access. My computers never been in the shop thanks to RA (I would NEVER hand my hard drive over to a stranger and then walk away while that stranger probes my temple). A Geek Squad tech has never knocked on my door thanks to RA. Remote access is like health insurance: it provides total peace of mind. The person who invented remote access should be given the Nobel Peace Prize or something. Thanks for the help in clearing up the confusion on the 2003 Dell Inspiron 5100 hard drive matter that was throwing me for one serious loop.

the hard drive i bought and installed last week: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/...oductdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&cs=19&sku=A1325142

 

Nice rant praising Dell's excellent tech support which consistently gave you misinformation, while tons of people here gave you the right answer from the get go. I don't even know what the point of that wall of text is up there.

Your welcome.

 

Long post, but I made it through. Just a quick question, what happens if your network card dies?

And to everyone else, if the OP chooses to pay per year for tech support, then that's his prerogative.

 

He obviously got better support here, for free.

 

Warranties and paid tech support are very lucrative, and make up for the (relative) lack of profit from selling laptops. The more the OP pays for tech support, the cheaper it is for you and I to buy computers. I don't see anything wrong with this scenario.

 

Agreed.. Hp also has crap tech support... the guy said i couldn't upgrade from vista 32bit to Windows 7 64bit lol... but i could.. these tech guys don't know what they're talking about..

 

technically not an upgrade. since you have to do a clean install.