Hard drive specs for my Inspiron 6000

I've got the same laptop with a Fujitsu drive (MHT2080AT PL).  The specs say it's a 44 Pin PC ATA-6 Interface.

Yes, there is a 120 gigabyte limit on the drive in BIOS, which doesn't support the INT13 48-bit LBA extensions.

Thanks. I didn't think to ask about any hard drive size limitation, which is,  I believe, what you mean when you say "...the BIOS is limited to 120G."  Correct?  In this case 120 G = 120 GB, correct?

Thanks again.

It helps to remember that even Windows uses the BIOS to begin the boot process.  If the system has a glitch in the addressing it is possible to corrupt a drive that is larger than the BIOS was designed to support.  Some folks are fortunate enough to never have a problem, but I would suggest that you partition the drive, making the boot (C:) partition no larger than 120 GB.  Once Windows is installed you can use Disk Management to partition the remainder of the disk into a "D:" drive and put most of your data there.  In that way if you are forced to reinstall the OS your data should still be safe, and if the boot partition is smaller than the limit anyway, perhaps you will never encounter a problem in the first place.

If I may add some more info to muddy the waters regarding the same Inspiron 6000, 80gb system:  I had a hard drive problem in May and, without thinking of size limitations (I have 3 TB on my desktop), I bought and successfully installed a 250gb western digital scorpion.  After 3 months of daily use, we started getting the error message NTLDR missing or corrupt; ctrl-alt-del to restart.  You could not even get it to bring up the F8 safe boot screen.  So, I bought a 350gb drive and cloned the old 80gb (as I had done with the 250gb) and it would go to the safe mode screen directly and even when trying to boot in safe mode, it would load the requisite drivers ending with agp440.sys... and go nowhere.  Thats when I got to thinking about bios and was really suprised to see there were no adjustable settings in bios for the harddrive, as there is in most desktops.  And, the laptop bios reports the 250gb as a 136gb drive.  Am aware of the 24 vs 48 bit issues from reading up on them over the weekend.  Am waiting on the laptop to be mailed back to me by our daughter so I  can deal with it directly rather than just mailing harddrives back and forth. 

BTW, this machine is running WinXP with SP3 and all updates.

In summary, just wanted to make interested people aware that a 250gb worked perfectly for about 3 months until the NTLDR problem.  Who knows, maybe the drive sizing is actually what caused the NTLDR problem.  Ran a thorough scan on the problem drive with Norton and McAfee and neither program found anything.

OK, I'm SOOOOO not techy.  I'm trying to find a HDD enclosure for my old Inspiron 6000 laptop HD.  So, am I correct in thinking that PATA=IDE, which is different from SATA?  In other words, am I looking for a SATA, or a PATA/IDE hard disk drive enclosure for my old 6000 hard drive, as well as for the 2 Western Digital Scorpio, (Scorpion?) HDs that I bought to replace it?  Is it a 2.5" or a 3.5"?  I'm kind of in the middle of moving, so right now I can't find any of these things right now, in order to see if the actual hard drives will have this info written on them.  But I need to order the enclosure(s) now...

Thanks!

Thank you!

Hello

I can't find any HD with 120GB.

I can find one with 160GB.

Will it work?

Tnx

Uri

Provided you are installing Windows XP Service Pack 1 or later, yes, you can use a hard drive larger than 120 GB.  As a precaution to guard against losing data, you should create a partition on the drive that is no larger than 120 GB for your boot partition that will hold your operating system.  Once you have the first partition set up and the operating system installed, you can create a second partition from the remaining space on the disk and use it for data only.

The reasons for making a first partition of less than 120 GB were explained in my earlier post above.

to save yourself hassle, buy www.ebay.com/.../320710410414

i dont understand how the winXP SP1 is connected to the Bios limitation to 120GB at inspiron 6000.

thank u for ur quick ANS

Windows uses its own drivers for the hard drive once it has started.  Beginnng with Windows XP Service Pack 1, the Windows drivers became capable of using hard drives up to 2 TB in size.  All versions of Windows after this are ok, but the original version of Windows XP without a service pack also has a limit of 120 GB, just as the BIOS for the Inspiron 6000.

The BIOS limit is a problem only until Windows is started.  After Windows is running, the BIOS limit is irrelevant because Windows does not use the BIOS drivers to operate.  You can therefore use a Windows XP Service Pack 1 or later (like Service Pack 2 or 3, or Vista/Windows 7) to install Windows on a 160 GB hard drive and it will run fine.  The problems only occur during the time Windows is starting, because Windows start-up uses the routines in the BIOS to load the initial boot code.  If you have a hard drive larger than 120 GB, and some of the start code gets pushed out beyond the 120 GB limit (happens due to housekeeping performed by Windows after it is running), the BIOS cannot load it properly and the data on the hard drive gets scrambled.  So; keep the first partition smaller than 120 GB, Windows housekeeping will never push the start code out beyond 120 GB, and your hard drive should serve you for a long time without scrambling your data and requiring you to reinstall everything.