Laptop Hard Drive Capacity Limit

[LOKIDOG]

Are there any limits on the memory capacity or other limits or things I need to be aware of when upgrading a hard drive for a Laptop. The hard drive that it came with is: 6 GB, Enhanced IDE, 2.5” removable, 9.5 mm height, 13ms average access time, Supports Ultra DMA33Mode2 or Multiword DMA Mode2 or PIO Mode4. It is 4200 RPM.

I have a Toshiba Satellite 2210 CDT. I'd like to go up to a 40 GB drive.

 

[edfair]

Your manual should give you the information. There are some limits at 32mb that are BIOS related, which I think you will run up against.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[skinst]

Can anyone tell me what hard disk i need to buy for a 760xd laptop. It currentley has a 1.2gig in it is there a limit of how big i can go and how do i know which ones will physically fit........

thanks

Skinst.

 

[micker377]

I have an old Gateway Solo 2500 which had a IBM 2.1 gig Travelstar. I just put in a 30 gig drive, with no problems. I d/l all the Solo drivers before I started, just in case. I used a cloning program to copy everthing over. Since most laptop harddrives are built as drive0, and not switchable, I used a desktop, with adapters, put old drive on IDE 0 (as master) and new drive on IDE 1 (as master).

 

[skinst]

I have fitted a 5gig h/d. fdisk format install me. but drive only detected as 1.99gig any clue as to why. thanks.

 

[micker377]

Is there a BIOS upgrade for your computer? My Solo didn't need an update, perhaps yours does.

 

[DragonQ0105]

I have fitted a 5gig h/d. fdisk format install me. but drive only detected as 1.99gig any clue as to why. thanks."

Likely you formatted it as FAT/FAT16. You must use FDisk to format the drive as FAT32. To do this, you'll need the version of FDisk that comes with 98 or ME, and when it asks if you want to enable "Large Hard Drive Support", say 'Yes'.

 

[joemck2004]

Some BIOSes only support HDs up to 2 GB. Partitioning won't help, since BIOS can't see beyond the 1st 2 gigs. Workaround: If you have a Western Digital hard disk that didn't come built-into a computer, it should have come with a floppy labeled "EZ-BIOS." Partition the disk with that and you can use the whole thing, as long as each partition's size is within the limit.

I used the EZ-BIOS floppy that came with a 6.4 GB WD disk to partition a 730 MB disk to bypass the 512 MB limit in my 486's BIOS. That program seems to work with any BIOS limit and any hard disk.