I'm hoping someone out there can give me a little advice on how to move forward:

I have an Inspiron 8500 Laptop - rock-solid and has been a really great computer for me.  I've maxed out the RAM to 2GB, and I'm wanting to upgrade my hard drive from the stock 60GB to a Western Digital 250GB EIDE.

Using Windows XP, I have created two even Primary partitions on the new hard drive (creating 2 116.45GB NTFS drives).

I swapped out the drives and put in my OS diskthat came with the computer and the boot up locks up consistantly (starts to say something like "Scanning your Hardware Configuration" before going blank and becoming unresponsive).  I purchased an external case, and I cannot boot from the old drive in that configuration (get a BSOD).

I reviewed the BIOS Setup, to see if there was anything I might have missed (Bios Revision A08) and there isn't much I can configure there as far as drives go, but I did notice the BIOS reports my 250GB drive as a 137GB drive (?!?).

I've also noticed on the 60GB drive that came in the laptop there is a 31MB FAT partition.

So, I guess here's my question...

Is there a HD size limitation for the Inspiron 8500?  If not, is there anything special I need to do to prep a larger drive for use?

Many thanks, and any suggestions you can offer would be great (being the W drive was a birthday gift from my father, and he's having similar upgrade issues with another brand laptop).

 

Eric "GuitarEC"