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Upgrade Inspiron 1300 Hard Drive
I recently upgraded my hard drive in my laptop (inspiron 1300) from the 80 GB it came with to a 320 GB Western Digital.
I used Acronis True Image to clone my old drive to a USB connected drive, and then to clone the USB drive back to my new drive. I wasn't able to load Windows upon start up, I got the message "Loading PBR for descriptor 3...done.", and wasn't able to do anything from there. I can see the three partitions were properly created by booting Acronis from the CD, however it appears that one of the utility partitions is the C drive and my C drive is the D drive. Has anybody come across this, and how did you fix it?
In the meantime, I have done two things. I ordered a rescue CD today from Dell (my laptop didn't come with one. I also borrowed a Windows XP CD from a friend and started from scratch. Of course I have to activate XP, so a) does the rescue CD come with a registration key? or b) am I able to obtain the key from my old drive somehow? I took a print screen on the code prior to removing the old drive, however XP says it isn't valid.
ejn63
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March 27th, 2011 05:00
If you use a drive larger than 120G in this system, you must install XP to a partition below that limit - you CANNOT install XP to a 320G partition, because the BIOS doesn't support that size drive.
If you use a Dell OEM CD, you will not need a license key (or if you must use one, it's on a sticker at the bottom of the system).
Goaltender
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March 27th, 2011 12:00
So, I was able to figure out the cloning part. I had to set only one of the partitions as primary. (When I did it the first time, I think I had two primary partitions). I was not, however, able to boot from the recovery partition, only the diagnostics worked.
The Bios seems to recognize the entire size of the drive, so I must have updated it sometime.
As for the license key, I had the thing upside down a few times (replacing the drive), and never noticed it. Thanks for the answer.