Inspiron 9300 hard drive upgrade

120 will work, but you're not going to find any 7200 rpm drives in parallel ATA (PATA) format - they're all SATA now.

Other than throwing my laptop out the window... do you have any suggestions for a larger size drive? Do you know if my pc would support a drive larger than 120 gb?  Thanks for your help.

You can use a larger parallel ATA drive - HOWEVER, keep backups -- without BIOS support, if Windows won't load, your data is lost. 

You'll find only 5400 rpm drives though - 7200 rpm drives are made in Serial ATA format now- all the parallel ATA format 7200s are long gone from production.

I'm planning to upgrade to a 160Gb HD on my Dell Inspiron 9300. Is there any way to get around the limitation on the hd size by dowloading some utility from the hd manufacturer's website?

I'm planning to upgrade to a 160Gb HD on my Dell Inspiron 9300. Is there any way to get around the limitation on the hd size by dowloading some utility from the hd manufacturer's website?

Not reliably.  The disk overlay utilities just aren't that reliable.  You can try it, but the chance of data corruption or complete loss of data is increased exponentianally and most people don't find it worth the risk.  If you do try it you'll want to perform DAILY backups of all of the data on the hard drive.  Your best bet is to get a 120 gig drive.  With DVD disks and USB thumb drives as cheap as they are these days (I picked up an new 8gig Sandisk Cruzer for $12.00 on sale this past weekend) use one or more of them for additinal storage.  You'll be much better off.

If you absolutely insist on going with a 160, I would run the boot partition at 137gigs (the largest partition the bios will see) and create a second partition with the rest. 

Thank you for your explanation. I'll go with 120 gig drive then.

If this is the case why does Dell sell this as an upgrade item for my 9300?  see http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/System_Drives/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dfh&cs=22&sku=A1199742&mfgpid=167152&chassisid=8434

Also a review from May 5 says that he had no issues using it with vista.

And Drive Solutions sells an upgrade all the way to 250GB. (see here http://www.drivesolutions.com/cgi-bin/shop/ug2store.cgi?command=listitems&kind=dll&=0&type=itemid&itemid=dll56)

Will this work under vista? if so how.

thanks!

I just installed a 250GB drive and I am running vista on my 9300.  I had no problems installing and I have been able to see the entire drive since the beggining of the installation.  I have not partitioned my drive.

I just wanted to let you know that there appears to be no problem with drive limits on the 9300 if you are running Vista.

Hi Everyone,

My Inspiron has an 80 gb IDE hard drive. I know from reading that the BIOS will only see 137 GB maximum, but if I bought a 250GB hard drive and partitioned it into 2 x 125GB partitions (then install XP on one of the partitions) would that work with XP? Would I see the 2 partitions and therefore be able to use all 250gb?

Thanks in advance.

Thanks Husky,

Forgive my ignorance as Im still trying to get my head round all this, would each partition not have full bios support if it is under the limit? I dont really understand it so please forgive me if I sound thick !!

The answer is yes, though without BIOS support, the data on the drive is completely at the mercy of Windows - if Windows won't load, rescue is difficult or impossible, so keep backups!

I purchased a Western Digital 250 GB 5400 RPM ATA hard drive and caddy on Ebay.  I installed Windows XP with SP3.  Windows XP only detected 130 GB.  I rebooted my machine after installation to see if that helped.  It didn't.  I then booted System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page).  I started the x server using 'startx'.  I launched GParted.  I then was able to create more partitions from the remaining 120 GB.  I created one 26GB partition using ext3 for a future Debian install.  I used the remaining space to create a NTFS partition.  I committed my changes in GParted.  I rebooted the laptop to Windows XP.  XP recognized that the disk changed so it automatically rank chckdsk to verify the integrity of the disk.   If I had to do things all over, I would boot the System Rescue CD first and create my partitions and then install Windows XP and Debian 5. In summary I was able to use the whole 250 GB.

Interested in this because WXP-SP3 didn't automatically recognise that there was a 250GB disk and use all of it. I did something like this (just for fun) with a WXP-SP2-SP3 (both SPs slipstreamed) and it recognised the whole disk on installation (the disk had no partitions to start with). MS actually now say that you shouldn't use SP3 only, it should always be slipstreamed onto an SP1 or SP2 version (both of which you could use alone). Do you think this might be (part of?) the reason for the advice? (For information EaseUs Partition Manager 3.0 is available in a free version and is incredibly useful for all sorts of things to do with partition playing - copy 80GB windows boot partition from 80GB disk to a 160GB USB disk, resize the 80 to 160 in the USB - make it active and pop it into the PC replacing the 80GB; 160GB bootable windows - nice!).

As one of the posts above says (more or less); if your BIOS only supports 137 and your disk is 250GB you had better not try to do any low level stuff to the disk outside of a Windows environment or you will have no data left.

ever get a new drive installed in your insp. 9300.  I am on my third try.