120gb is the biggest officially supported by the 6000 although Dell sold 160gb that were supposed to work. Keep your 100gb drive and don't buy a new one. The hard drive shortage is so severe now and it has driven up prices. Also such small hard drives are extremely hard to find with today's huge drives prevelant. It's not worth spending so much for an extra 20gb. Read: news.cnet.com/.../how-bad-is-the-hard-disk-shortage

Thanks for the info. I have already done some hard drive shopping and was aware of the recent price increases due to shortages. Unfortunately, my hard drive may be in the process of failing (SeaTools found a couple of bad sectors) so I don't have the luxury of waiting for prices to return to normal. I have found both of the above referenced Western Digital drives for $100 at Amazon so it seemed to make sense to get the 250 GB vs the 160 GB if my laptop would support the full size. Amazon also carries the 120 GB version of the same Western Digital Scorpio drive but it is more expensive than the 160 and 250 GB versions.

Does anyone know if there are any BIOS or Windows updates I can perform in order to get my Inspiron 6000 to support either 160 or 250 GB?

There isn't, but the drive will work fine as long as y;ou create a 120G partition as the first one on the drive, and install Windows to it.  As long as Windows doesn't boot past the 120G barrier, the system will run just fine.

You can then create a new partition to use the rest of the drive once Windows is up and running.

@ejn63 Thanks for the additional info. I am planning to clone my current 100 GB hard drive to the new one using a USB enclosure. So here is what I am thinking I should do based on your reply. Please correct me if anything below is wrong.

Using 250 GB hard drive as example

1. Partition new 250 GB hard drive into 3 partitions; 120 GB, 120 GB, 10 GB

2. Clone current 100 GB hard drive to one of the 120 GB partitions

Using 160 GB hard drive as example

1. Partition new 160 GB hard drive into 2 partitions; 120 GB, 40 GB

2. Clone current 100 GB hard drive to the 120 GB partition

Am I correct in assuming that I can create the partitions on the new drive using whatever cloning software I decide to use before I actually clone the old drive to the new one? I haven't ever cloned a hard drive so I don't know exactly what the process entails.

Thanks again for the advice.

I'd go for setting a second partition and use 120GB or less for Windows partition

Inspiron 6000 only has a maximum hard drive storage of 100GB. You can still try going higher but there is a possibility that more 100Gb will not be detected

Thanks to everyone who contributed information. I don't know exactly what to think since I read a number of reviews at Amazon from Inspiron 6000 users who say they installed 250 or even 320 GB Western Digital drives and had no problems with their laptops recognizing all of the space with no special steps needed. Others said they had to partition the drive to get all space recognized. So I guess it is safe to assume that my Inspiron 6000 will be able to accept larger drives and utilize all of the space, but I will probably have to partition the drive in order to do so.

Any other thoughts from someone who has actually installed a large hard drive in their Inspiron 6000?

You may not yet have had a problem, but you will eventually.