inspiron 1100 latest Bios still not seeing over 137G

calguy · Sun Apr 19, 2009 1:33 am

Hello Bios Gods,

I replaced the original 20G Pata drive in a Dell 1100 Inspirion laptop with Samsung 160G HM160HC drive. I did not update the bios even though I knew it was old and installed XP Home with SP3. The bios would not see over 137 gig and neither did XP with SP3. I then updated to the latest bios A32 from Dell support and it still did nothing. I then used partician software to enlarge the partician to it's full size and now XP sees the full 160 gig size (minus OS).

Am I ok now even though the bios does not recognize the full drive size, but the OS does?. I don't want any problems as the drive starts to fill up. Can someone please provide some feedback?

Thanks

calguy · Wed Apr 22, 2009 2:29 am

Is there someone that can assist me with this issue? Thanks

Wed Apr 22, 2009 9:30 pm

the bios can not see the full capacity of the drive because it doesn't support 48bit LBA. it doesn't matter anyway because Windows XP with SP3 does and luckily the OS doesn't care about the bios anymore when it comes to harddisks.
so install XP on a small partition of the HDD, let's say 10GB. after the installation is done make sure to update Windows with the latest patches.
now use the inbuild partition manager to partition the rest of the drive. you should have ~149GB (minus 10GB or whatever you chose for your boot partition) for your random data :)

calguy · Thu Apr 23, 2009 12:01 am

Thank you for the information. So there will be no problems with the drive data becoming corrupt as it begins to fill up since XP w/SP3 doesn't care about what the bios sees ...correct?

Mon Apr 27, 2009 6:57 pm

correct. Windows XP (since SP2) uses drivers which are 48bit LBA-aware. please note that the installer might not see the full size because it still uses BIOS access to identify the drives (NOT well done Microsoft :( )
anyway, you have to install your operating system in the BIOS-known space because the BIOS starts booting it. but 32GB should be more than enough to install an operating system.

calguy · Mon Apr 27, 2009 7:53 pm

Thank you for clarifying. This is good to know for future upgrades. Will this be case with Vista and any future Windows OS platforms where the OS doesn't care what the bios sees anymore?