• There has been a recent cluster of spammers accessing BARFer accounts and posting spam. To safeguard your account, please consider changing your password. It would be even better to take the additional step of enabling 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) on your BARF account. Read more here.

Is it possible to stick a BIGGER hard drive in a 2003 laptop?

Tooner

Tooner

New member
Joined
Jul 13, 2008
Location
California
Moto(s)
HD & Suzuki
Name
Lavaman
RE: Dell Inspiron 5100

I wanta stick a 160GB hard drive in it. The hard drive on my Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop crashed. Dell says I cannot use anything bigger than a 40GB HD - if I do it won't work out, so they say. I had not one but 4 or 5 Dell techs say something like this:

"If you put a 160gb in there it will get detected by the system however, when you install the operating system 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 WindowsXP. So, that only happens when we install WindowsXP 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?"

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...~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
 
Last edited:
I don't know about all that faggotry.. but couldn't you just partition your 160 into a 40gb / 120gb combo and install the os on the 40gb side?

And what os are you trying to install? Windows 1957?

I have XP Pro currently installed on a 140gb NTFS partition...
 
LOL its a stupid joke. Put It In The Hard Drive ala per BARF protocol when larger object are inserted to smaller receptacles.
 
Don't waste your time. That laptop will be dying soon enough...just buy a new one
 
Yep. You can pretty much Get a new hard drive with a new laptop installed around it for cheap.
 
The short answer is yes, you can use a 160GB HD in that laptop.

The long answer is that due to problems with "big" hard drives (137GB+) in older laptops, it might take some tweaking to get the HD working correctly. This tweaking might include having to install XP from a regular install disc instead of the Dell restore CD and partitioning the drive correctly such that your BIOS can boot it (i.e. make a small ~40GB boot partition at the beginning of the drive and a large ~120GB files partition at the end.)

To be perfectly honest I can't imagine you really needing/wanting so much local storage on a laptop that old. If it were me I'd look at getting an external HD or a big USB thumbdrive - you could get 1TB/320GB/32GB (3.5"/2.5"/thumbdrive) for about the same price as a new 160GB for your laptop. :2cents
 
CockyRooster said:
Yep. You can pretty much Get a new hard drive with a new laptop installed around it for cheap.
Click to expand...

You can get a new hard drive for about $50 though. I think I paid 55 bucks from Central Computer for an 80GB notebook HD last week. I think you'd have a hard time getting a netbook for $55.

side story... the hard drive crapped out in my son's laptop too. I was thinking about shitcanning it and getting a new one, but I decided to cheap out. It turns out that I had 2GB of memory laying around that was compatible (didn't even know it), I picked up the hard drive from CC, and I found a place in fremont selling a dual core AMD Turionx2 for $15. So for about $80 out the door, I got a new hard drive, went from single core to dual core, and doubled the RAM. Still cheaper than a netbook, and I'll be less disappointed when he drops it and it breaks into pieces.
 
radvas said:
You can get a new hard drive for about $50 though. I think I paid 55 bucks from Central Computer for an 80GB notebook HD last week. I think you'd have a hard time getting a netbook for $55.
Click to expand...


But after spending the $ and 50 hrs. trying to get everything working the mother board craps out and the batteries turn to crap as well. I'm not saying how I know:mad

500GB in my Macbook Pro though:banana
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top