October 5, 2008 by drewblack9
Posted in
Is it safe to swap out a laptop harddrive out of a dell xps m170 with just any old' laptop harddrive. (For disk space issues.)
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Re: Dell M170 harddrive replacement
As long as it is the same connector yeah, sata or IDE, hard drives and memory are some of the few things that can be replaced by the user in a laptop.
But you will need to reinstall windows if you do, or just ghost over the old drive to the new.
I prefer
I prefer http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/ myself.
Way better than ghost! ;)
Problems upgrading - possible BIOS issue?
Hopefully, I'm not too late. There IS a problem with upgrading the hard drive in the M170. Here's what I’ve experienced:
I purchased a 250GB Western Digital PATA notebook hard drive for my roommate’s M170. After replacing it and installing Windows Vista Home Premium all seemed to have worked. After a few weeks, however, the hard drive failed to boot to Windows. I tried everything to fix the problem, including trying to restore the MBR, to no avail. I ran CHKDSK, I ran the Western Digital disk analyzer tool, and could find no physical issues with the hard drive. Western Digital wouldn't issue an RMA because they insisted that nothing was wrong with the drive. Well, I figured maybe the OS got corrupted somehow, so I decided to wipe the drive clean and try again. Well, after a few weeks, the problem occurred again. I again, scanned the disk using CHKDSK and the WD tool, to no avail. So, again, I reformatted the drive and re-installed Windows. And, again, it worked for a few weeks and then wouldn’t boot. Admitting defeat, I re-installed the original 80GB hard drive, and guess what? No problems for the past 6 months. I’m not sure what the root cause is and am hoping that someone with insight will be able to shed some light on this issue. I have a sneaking suspicion that the BIOS was not tested with larger hard drives and that it is somehow causing an addressing problems on the drive.
-Zan
Re: Problems upgrading - possible BIOS issue?
Well you seem to be right on track. Its either the hard drive or the bios. There is one way to know for sure, if you have another laptop, or a laptop hard drive converter to hook up the drive in a tower your only way to know for sure is to hook and use the drive in another system, if the drive works fine in another system you know its the bios, if it fails again you know it is the drive. Basically a process of elimination.
But if you don't have that option, have you checked to see if there is a bios update for the laptop? I looked at dells website
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&...
and looks like the last Bios was version A5 from 2005.
I'm a seagate fan myself, it could be something with the bios only with that model hard drive to. You said the 80 gb works fine, well for Bios's if it can read the 250 fully then I would look towards the drive to start with. If you can confirm another hard drive works in the system you should get an rma. Nice thing about seagate, (I don't know about WD) is I just go to their site fill out a rma and im good to go. They don't care why you return the drive. 5 year warranty is nice to :-)
Re:Re: Problems upgrading - possible BIOS issue?
Thank you for the feedback and encouragement that I'm on the right track. I appreciate it. And thanks for the info on Seagate's RMA policy. I'll keep that in mind for future purchases.
Unfortunately, my roomate is using the drive as an external USB attachment and has his games installed on it. If I get a chance to further analyze the problem, however, I'll be sure to post the results for everyone's benefit. I may even clone the drive for him and do as you suggested, putting it in one of my desktop systems. Heaven knows, I've got enough PCs laying around the house. LOL!!
Regards,
Zan