Large Drive Tips: Vaio VGN-S360

Hi all,

One of my "hobbies" is extending the life of older equipment. Especially when it is fairly good stuff, like my trust Vaio VGN-S360.

So I decided to overcome the 80gb limit imposed by the factory installed 2.5 inch IDE drive; a Fujitsu. I purchased a 320gb Western Digital drive.

The new drive works just fine, no bad sectors, etc.
However, somehow I forgot that there might be unanticipated limits to using a four year old machine.

As you might have guessed, the bios limits the machine to seeing only 137gb. The unit has XP SP3; but that is to no avail. I have tried Intel application accelerator; looked at the drive from within windows with a number of utilities, and no matter what I keep bumping up against the 137gb limit.

Are there any tools I can use with the drive still in the machine to overcome the limit? I am tempted to fool with GParted and then would create two new partitions below 137 gb in size; but I am not sure the machine would "see" the new partitions.

It appears that "overlays" are no longer available in the marketplace.

Oh, the bios is at the latest revision provided by Sony. So are the motherboard drivers. Unless I go custom (is custom available??) I think I am at the limit or drivers and bios updates.

By the way, I really don't want to remove the drive as I had it professionally installed and it was not cheap.

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

It's not necessarily an artificial limit of the BIOS. It may be a physical limitation on you HDD controller, and if so, there's nothing you can do about it.

 

Looks like the system is locked down.

I ended up doing what is generally frowned on....and let the WD tools install a dynamic drive overlay. I still formatted the partitions below 137gb....so hopefull there won't be a problem.

As I understand it....the trick is not to let the primary partition get too full. Otherwise, the drive overlays start writing over system software.

I do have the primary partition backed up so I can recover if things blow up.