Hard Drive Difficulty GX110

I got a used GX110 about a year ago,  and can very honistly say that it has never given me a problem.

 

After reading through some of the posts it seems that the hard drive that came with the machine was not stock.

 

When I received it it had an 80 Gig Hdd (Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 ATA/133), and I added a second drive (40 Gigs).  About two days ago, I got an error message that said the primary hard drive was behaving outside the normal paramaters and I should replace the drive or contact Dell tech support.  ->  As unhappy as I was to see the message I was glad to get a warning.

 

No problem - No need to bother the guys at Dell. I went out and got a 160 Gig Maxtor. The install and setup went great, and it worked great until I shut down.  All the data copied over was said (by Win XP-Pro) that all the non-os files were corrupted, and the partitions were gone (reading 0/0 in size) OMG!!! I shut down, and restarted Then Nothing - ZIP - Nada - the OS was unbootable.

 

Since then I have reinstalled the OS, and reduced the number of partitions from 5 (5GB ->OS, 2 GB -> net junk, 50 GB programs, 50 GB data, 50+GB archives) to 2 (80 ->OS, 80-> files) it has been ok since then (so far) however I want to check and findout if the HDD is too large for the Computer, before I have a real problem.

 

Do I need to do anything special? - Had one of our gurus tell me that the bios needs to be updated, and other advice.

 

Thanks...