Upgrading Inspiron 5150 Hard Drive

It will probably work fine.  Your computer doesn't care what the drive uses to write data to the platters.  I would be more concerned about the bios; all the Dell versions should support 48 bit LBA which allows the computer to support drives larger than 137 GB in size.  If you are still using the Phoenix bios, however, I don't know.  If your bios is A22 or later, you should be fine.  This was the first Dell issue for the 5150.  Just don't forget to transfer the blade adapter from your old drive to the new one.  I see a lot of posts where people forgot this simple item.

 

I have the inspiron 5150 and am trying to install the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB drive as the internal drive.  I'm having trouble getting the laptop to boot off of this drive when it is installed internally.

 

Here are the steps I took:

 

1. attached the 160gb drive as an usb external drive.

2. Used Windows  "Computer Management" - "Disk Management" utility to initialize the drive. 

3. Used the software "DiscWizard" from Seagate ( http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/) to create an image copy of the C drive (current, old drive) to the external USB attached new drive.  This software was executed in Windows. 

4. Verified that I can read and write to files to the external drive.

5. Removed the internal drive and replaced it with new drive.

6. Got boot message "Windows could not start because of computer disk hardwre configuration problem...."

7.  I checked the BIOS (A38) and it recognizes the new internal hard drive but shows 137GB for the disk size instead of 160GB.

8. Any clues as to what is wrong.

Romans8, if your bios shows 137 GB it likely does not have 48 bit LBA.  This should not be a problem if you are also using Windows XP with at least Service Pack 1, or Windows 2000 with at least Service Pack 3 on your system.  These operating systems access the drive directly with their own drivers so the bios readout is an inconvenience rather than a real problem.

 

So far as your access problem, you might be able to fix it using a repair install from the Windows XP CD.  When Windows XP is installed it takes a readout of certain components in your computer to include the hard drive.  Your new drive doesn't match the old one and this can cause difficulty.  The repair install using the Windows CD booted on the machine can allow this to be fixed.  It is also possible that the disk wizard transfer didn't get everything quite right.  I have seen other posts that complained that such a transfer seemed to yield problems with booting.  The repair install should be able to fix that as well.  Just one caution; the Windows CD itself must have at least Service Pack 1 on it.  If you have the original CD without the service packs the os loaded from it will not have the ability to use drives larger than 137 GB and you can't use it to repair your installation.  Instead you will need to learn how to slipstream Service Pack 1 or 2 into your copy of Windows and install this on a new CD.

 

<< >>.  I think this was the case. 

 

I booted the laptop using the Windows XP CD and chose the recovery option.  At the command prompt, I used the command "bootcfg /add" and it found my installed windows software on the hard drive and added it to the list (previously empty) of operating systems to launch.  After a reboot, windows came up normally using the hard drive and Seagate disk wizard finished doing whatever it had to do.

 

Prior to all this, I put my old hard drive back inside the laptop and wanted to create a CD ROM bootable version of the disk wizard.  (Previously, I used the windows base version of the disk wizard -- I 'm now leery about any Windows based wizard making an image copy of a hard drive while Windows is running on that drive!!!).  Anyway, I was looking for a 3rd party tool to create the bootable CD ROM.  Seagate website mentioned a few such tools so I look at my Nero software and clicked on something that I thought would be a tool to create a bootable CD ROM.  Turns out that the click apparently wiped out my MBR (master boot record) on my hard drive.  Upon rebooting, I couldn't even see the C drive, even with the Windows recovery software.    Commands like "FixBoot" didn't work because it couldn't see the C drive.  The BIOS showed it as the primary drive so I don't know what happened. 

 

So I internally installed my new drive and got that to work (see above notes) and attached the old drive externally off the USB.  The old drive was ok (data was still there) as far as I can tell.  What could I have done to make it bootable when it was installed internally?

 

Anyway my new drive is in place, all data and programs are there and I'm a happy camper for that.