Dell Inspiron 6400 hard drive upgrade

[GT]

Does anyone know of any restrictions on hard drive upgrades in laptops?
There is no point asking Dell because they will simply say that they can
only offer support on Dell products and cannot advise me on non-dell
upgrades.

I have an Inspiron 6400 with a 100GB (I think its Sata) drive at present.
Dell website lists an 80 or 120 drive, but I want much more. There are 320
and 500GB laptop drives available, but will they be recognised in my laptop?
I don't think there is a newer BIOS than the one I am using.

Anyone upgraded their 6400 drive to a non-dell branded drive?

Cheers,
GT

 

[David W. Hodgins]

Does anyone know of any restrictions on hard drive upgrades in laptops?

Depends on whether the bios supports LBA, or LBA48.

With LBA (28 bits for the sector number), the bios will not see more
that 128 Gigabytes (137 gigabytes using the marketing definition of
a gigabyte being 1,000,000,000 bytes instead of 1,073,741,824 bytes).

Checking on google, the Dell Inspiron 6400 appears to be using LBA48,
but apparently there are issues with Dell using a custom mbr.

See http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19248972/19397975.aspx

Regards, Dave Hodgins

 

[GT]

Depends on whether the bios supports LBA, or LBA48.

With LBA (28 bits for the sector number), the bios will not see more
that 128 Gigabytes (137 gigabytes using the marketing definition of
a gigabyte being 1,000,000,000 bytes instead of 1,073,741,824 bytes).

Checking on google, the Dell Inspiron 6400 appears to be using LBA48,
but apparently there are issues with Dell using a custom mbr.

See http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19248972/19397975.aspx

Regards, Dave Hodgins

Thank you all for the re-assurance. This is pretty much what I expected, but
have never upgraded a laptop before.

Oh and by the way the original Dell MBR has long gone. Reformatted and
re-partitioned the hard drive a few weeks after it arrived. All the system
on Drive C:, all the files on Drive D:. MediaDirect is a button on the Dell
that lets you quickly power on into a minute operating system that has media
player support. I never used it, so don't care about it!