Dell latitude 100L bios doesnt recognize my 320GB HDD

[michaelmishoe]

Hello,
upgrading my laptop. memory, pci wireless internal card and HDD. everything works except HDD. bios sees HDD primary drive as 137GB instead of 320GB. this drive is the compatible upgrade drive for my system according to dell. now my windows vista won't boot from HDD to complete new installation. getting a disk read error occured. Press Ctl,Alt,delete to restart. when I do the installation restarts from beginning. when I take the disk out the error message "disk read error occured" restart

 

[Saga Lout]

This was a problem some years back - maybe using another machine to partition the disk at 137 and the rest then installing on to the 137Gb Partition might work.

 

[michaelmishoe]

This was a problem some years back - maybe using another machine to partition the disk at 137 and the rest then installing on to the 137Gb Partition might work.

when I was reinstalling windows vista and the program asked if this is the drive I wanted to install in, it showed a partition of 298.0 GB. So why do you think the bios is showing the primary HDD drive as being only 137GB. Either way this is the only compatible machine I have for this HDD. I have a inspiron PP07L and when I put the 320GB HDD in there it showed the same thing as primary HDD as 137GB.

 

[aford10]

Look for a BIOS update.

This used to be an issue back in the XP days, and was fixed with SP1, and BIOS updates. Vista shouldn't have the OS issue, but you still might need the BIOS update, especially if it's an older one.

 

[aford10]

This topic has been moved from the section Forum Feedback to section Windows Vista by Aford10