Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
1 Message
0
6456
Hard drive not recognized by BIOS but recognized by WINDOWS Inspiron 9300
I tried replacing the hard drive on my Inspiron 9300 with a 200G drive. The administrative computer tools in Windows XP recognized it, but the BIOS showed it as 130G or so. I finally had to replace the drive with a smaller one. I had the latest BIOS version. Is there a BIOS fix that will allow the larger hard drive to be used?
ejn63
9 Legend
9 Legend
•
87.5K Posts
0
April 21st, 2009 08:00
Not on the 9300s that use EIDE (parallel ATA) drives, no - the limit is 137G in BIOS setup.
mickscot
56 Posts
0
September 22nd, 2009 01:00
Forgive me for my ignorance, but this might be my problem.
I had the BSOD appear on my 9300, and was told that my HDD had failed. Ran the diagnostics myself--the long form--and it failed the DST Short test. I bit the bullet, and went to the Dell site to buy a new drive, and settled on a Western Digital 160GB drive.
Does your post above mean that it's not going to work on my machine? Because the laptop will not recognize the HDD. I followed the only directions I've found, and cannot get the thing to boot up in any way. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong, and I'm way out of warranty on everything but the new drive....
MChiocca
37 Posts
0
March 20th, 2017 13:00
At this very late stage if you're still running an Inspiron 9300 and you'd like to upgrade the hard drive I strongly recommend going with an SSD. I successfully installed a 128 GB Transcend SSD in my 9300 and I've had no issues. When I boot into Setup the BIOS shows the SSD as "128 GB HDD" so it looks like the BIOS recognizes the full size of the SSD.
When I installed Windows 7 Home Premium onto the SSD the install created two partitions, a 100 MB system partition and a 119.xx GB partition totaling 120 GB. I guess partitioning and formatting used up the remaining 8 GB. Regardless, Windows runs fine and I didn't have to do anything special in the BIOS nor did I have to edit the registry to disable anything.
I will say that I did disable everything related to disk defragmentation, including scheduled tasks, services, etc. so there is no "boot optimization" or any other strange "low level" disk operations going on in the background that I'm aware of. And, having moved from a 5400 RPM HDD to an SSD really boosted performance. The WEI subscore for the primary hard drive rose from 4.4 to 5.9.