48-bit LBA (Dell Inspiron 6000)

I bought a new 160GB hard disk for my laptop and received it this morning. But when I fit it, the BIOS only reports 137GB. This looks like a 28-bit vs 48-bit LBA problem. I would have expected this if the machine was maybe 6 years old, not 6 months old! A call to Dell states that they only officially support up to 100GB in this model.

I'm just not sure what to do with it. I would have ignored it only that when I tried to clone from my original 80GB drive, Ghost reported that the computer may not support large disks.

8T8

Most odd, have you tried a bios update to the laptop the most recent release is A09 might be worth a try. Stay away from third party bios updates too risky for notebooks.

One thing to consider though is that even after formatting that 160GB drive would be actually be around 149 (rough estimate) so even with 137 you have only lost just over 10GB's so it's not a major loss.

I think it unlikely with a notebook HD but check the documentation that came with the hard drive (or the label on it) does it have a jumper switch to limit the capacity to 137GB as some HD's did actually have this.

Thanks but no dice, the laptop shipped with A09 already loaded.

Anti

Okay, alot of laptops dont support 48bit lba. And there is no way on earth of making them support it. So your kinda screwed.

Or are you.......

Since im a kind individual i will link you to a place you can buy a external 2.5" external hdd enclousures.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/HD_Accessories.html

You will not be able to boot from this, But you can use it as a secondary drive.

There are a few there, So pick one you like the style of.


Enjoy

anti

anti wrote:

Okay, alot of laptops dont support 48bit lba. And there is no way on earth of making them support it. So your kinda screwed.

Well I could use a DDO but I wanted to avoid that if at all possible.

I just thought I'd let people know that it's a happy ending. It's not as big a problem as I thought.

I've learned (from the Intel website I'll add) that Windows NT-based operating systems don't use the BIOS to access the disk - their IDE driver accesses it directly. The IDE driver in Windows 2000 SP3 and Windows XP SP1 (and later) natively supports 48-bit LBA so it doesn't matter if your BIOS doesn't support it. I experimented and it's true...

If you boot using a Windows XP RTM CD or a Windows 2000 SP2 CD, when choosing the drive or partition to install Windows to, the drive is displayed as something like 131072 MB (128GB or 137 decimal gigabytes). But if you use an XP SP2 disc or 2000 SP4 CD it shows 152625MB - the correct size. And a surface scan of the disk passed with no errors.

So provided you don't use MS-DOS, Windows 95/98/ME, or a version of Windows earlier than 2000 SP3 then you're fine. And I can't see any reason to do so anyway! MacOS X is fine. Not sure about Linux but I'd assume it's OK too.