Bought Wrong Hard Drive - Will it Work? (Inspiron 1200)

It'll work as long as it's EIDE (parallel ATA), but not if it's a SATA drive.  That said, exceeding the BIOS capacity puts the data on the drive at the mercy of the OS - if Windows won't load, rescuing data from a drive in a system without full BIOS support is very difficult - so keep backups.

I recently purchased a Western Digital EIDE 160 GB hard drive through Dell (recommended for my computer through their upgrade site -system was analyzed) and this is the list of hard drives recommended by Dell - http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&category_id=6990&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&mfgpid=167159&chassisid=8431).  I cloned the disk using Acronis (you have to purchase Acronis as the free version through WD's website only supports desktop hard drives).  The disk is a replica of my 40GB hard drive except all the partitions were expanded (Fat 16, Fat 32, and NTFS) and I have 119 GB left in the NTFS partition.  Obviously, despite the motherboard supposedly not being able to support any hard drive larger than 120 GBs, my computer is working fine and I have lots of space now.  I'm curious to know why Dell would recommend a hard drive for my laptop that was larger than what the motherboard can handle?  As a matter of fact if you look at the Dell link above, they had listed recommendations for my computer that were even larger than that right up to 320 GBs.  What's the deal with that? 

The drive will work - the thing you must make sure of is that the Windows partition resides BELOW 120G.  If it crosses that barrier, you will one day turn on the system to a "disc read error".

Is that the NTFS partition?  I have no idea what Fat16 and Fat32 are for even though I looked all over the internet to find out.  Is Windows on the Fat32 partition? How do you find out what's on each partition anyway?  Thanks for any info.

Just wanted to add something.  Since I added this new hard drive my computer runs much cooler.  Before I had to turn it off after about an hour because the area where the hard drive was would get red hot and the programs I was running would start freezing up.  I no longer have that problem.  I hope it last.

Hmmm...............so what is on the Fat16 and Fat32 partitions?  I suspect DOS is on one of them-Fat16 maybe? 

Windows should be on an NTFS partition by default.