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

I own a Dell XPS M1210 and the system originally came with a 80GB SATA Toshiba HDD. I naively thought that I could swap in any SATA HDD regardless of capacity, manufacturer, etc. It turns out I was wrong. I bought 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.

Did another experiment where I installed the same Western Digital HDD into a Dell Precision M4300 (used for work). Same thing happened, i.e. BIOS reports a 78GB drive. 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 drive 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 HDD 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.

Any help/insight on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

Post this in the Dell forum sir Much better results

 

i actually did the same thing with the same WD passport drive, albeit with a different notebook and it worked fine. formatted capacity ~298 Gb in NTFS
so its probably not the hard drive. although i did format the drive before i popped it in, so maybe you should try plugging in ur old hdd, and formatting the WD and then replacing the drive.

if it helps... dont forget to give rep (the scale thingy)

 

thank you Jaycee8980. I just reposted in the Dell forum.

 

Good suggestion gaming_zedman. I failed to mention that the new drive was cloned from the old one using Acronis True Image 11.00. The cloning process should have reformatted the drive and created proportionally-sized new NTFS partitions but I was thinking of just reformatting the new drive as NTFS from Windows and test to see what the BIOS says. The whole point is I wanted to avoid reinstalling all my drivers, OS/OS updates, security fixes, and data files from scratch on a bigger drive. Maybe I was aiming too high... I mean the cloning process took 1 hour, reinstalling everything from scratch is probably a whole weekend kind of thing.

 

i did it in an hour or two(reinstalling all drivers and stuff), didnt take much longer than waiting to back up like 100 gb of stuff

 

I installed a Hitachi 7k200 200gb 7200 rpm drive in my XPS 1210 with no problem. But then again I reinstalled the old fashioned way and didn't bother trying to clone.

Works perfectly.

 

The plot thickens: Apparently the reason the BIOS was reporting 78GB was because somehow the whole thing got corrupted and now Windows sees it as a 78GB drive. I distinctly remember that at the end of the cloning process I ran it as an external drive and everything was there. It appears something really bad happened when I popped it out of its case and into my machine. Now the capacity reported is the same as my old drive. Very strange.

Does anyone know how to reformat the drive to its former capacity or is it a lost cause at this point?

 

You can reformat with your OS installation CD.

 

I know this is an old thread but in case anyone else needs help, I swapped out the exact same Hard Drives as OP and this is how I did it: I put OS CD into DVD drive, shut off laptop, took Out Battery (Impt safety tip!), removed old HD (the screwdriver in hubby's leatherman was perfect tool btw), put new HD in, inserted battery, plugged A/C in, turned ON laptop and installed OS. I then copied the Drivers CD. Granted, I didn't have anything of value in old HD as I bought this laptop second-hand. Similar to how the best time to do your floors is before you move in, best time to swap out Hard Drives is BEFORE you load it up with stuff. Worked flawlessly and given that I am not handy, can't believe it worked !

 

Congratz on the install, I am glad that you were able to make the upgrade all by yourself.
I hope you are enjoying the new speed of your drive.

Yes, it is good to remove the battery and ac adaptor before upgrading

Just so you know, your sig states your scorpio is 540,000rpm, I dont think that is right, but if it is, let me know where you got it

K-TRON