Hi

I am installing a Windows XP OS on a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop (on a brand new HDD) and apparently the disk size might be causing problems. The original internal Seagate hard disk of my laptop was a 100GB disk, the one from WD I just bought and tried to instal is a 320Gb disk.

When being asked to create a partition, at OS installation time I had to decide how much space to give to this partition and I gave initially only 55GB, because I thought I could do already many partitions at that stage. This worked fine and I could install the OS, but then I thougth that I should use the full disk space of 320GB so I started reinstalling the OS from scratch again. But after specifying the partition size again to be 320GB (less actually, since the system only accounted for 305GB for some reason) this time when the system restarted I received the following error:

"Disk reading error", press CTRL+ALT+DEL "

So this reboots the system, but after the initial stage it only reproduces the same error.

On the other hand, if I try to restar from the OS installation CD right after the installation starts the laptop remains on a black screen and there it remains for even several hours. Has it gone on and endless loop or is it doing some kind of HD check?

One thing that I noted is that the BIOS only detects 137 GB of the total 320GB declared by the manufacturer, is this just a limitation of the bios itself?

Does it mean that I can only format the HD to 137 GB?

If yes, how can I do it since the the installation program doesn't seem to work any longer because of this "initial reading error" and then the infinite(?) loop.

Any help would be appreciated

Antonio