Is it possible to stick a BIG, MODERN hard drive in a stinky old laptop?

The hard drive crashed on my 2003 Dell Inspiron 5100. I get an error message with a blue screen that says, 'Unmountable Boot Volume'. I ran a diagnostics test and the hard drive is bad. So I'd like to stick a 160GB hard drive in it. Three different Dell hardware techs say I cannot use anything bigger than a 40GB hard drive - if I do the laptop won't work, they say. I thought I'd run this past the forum. In general, this is what all three techs had to say:

"If you put a 160gb in there it will get detected by the system however, when you install the operating system (WindowsXP) it will not detect the hard drive. You cannot install an OS on a 160gb hard drive on this system. This system will not support beyond 40gbs. The system is not designed for anything more than 40gbs. To work with the system we need to boot to Windows. So, that only happens when we install Windows on the system. And that basically gets installed on the hard drive. So, how can you work with the system when you cannot install the operating system on the hard drive?"

"The maximum hard drive it will support is 40gb. If you put a 160gb drive, probably the motherboard would not support it, the computer would not detect it. Your computer was manufactured in 2003. At that time there was a different technology. So the technology was not that advanced. It would detect only 40gbs. Every model has a different hard drive. A 120gb, a 160gb... would have different components. So now, if you install this hard drive onto an old computer there is the possibility it would damage the hard drive. Yes, it would damage the hard drive. And the computer would not detect the hard drive. Also, it might freeze up at startup, when the Dell logo appears at startup."

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&category_id=7296&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~ck=anav&p=1
http://search.dell.com/results.aspx...689~0~418114,11976~0~167321&navla=11976~0~167 321&ira=False&~srd=False&ipsys=False&advsrch=False&~ck=anav
http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/notebooks/0,1000000335,10003105,00.htm
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,997075,00.asp

 

HI Cold One, welcome to the forums

Even if you have the latest BIOS, A32, I don't think you can safely use a drive above 137Gb because of the lack of 48-bit support in BIOS/hardware.

Dell sometimes complicates hardware changes because their BIOS's appear to be preset to only recognise certain makes/models of hardware.

There are many reports of people using 60 and 80GB drives and I would be reasonably confident of upgrading to a 120GB; anything above that will ony be seen as a 137GB drive by the BIOS. XP SP1 and later would happily install on a larger drive but the chances of data loss seem to be high, especially as the drive becomes full, ie., data gets stored on the 'unsupported' area of the HDD.

I've used 60GB+ drives in Inspiron 4100 and 8200's (both designed earlier than the 5100, I believe) but not larger than 137GB; I do have a new 160GB here though, I may connect it up to my 8200 later to check what the BIOS reports.

Summary: I would buy a 120GB PATA (NOT SATA, it won't fit).