BIOS HDD Size Recognition Not Right

I'm working on a Dell Inspiron 9300 Notebook. The old HDD failed so I opted to replace it with one slightly larger in size. The upgrade was to a 250GB PATA from a 100GB PATA. Anyway, I noticed one day that the system would post but wouldn't actually boot into Windows. Instead I was prompted with the lovely white blinking cursor on a black screen which usually indicates the system stalled waiting for the selected boot device. I thought this was kind of odd considering this was a completely new HDD and I didn't think I did anything incorrect with installing Windows XP.

I decided to check the BIOS to see if there were any issues with any settings. I glossed over the hardware section of the BIOS and it's reporting the HDD size as being 137GB when I know very well that's wrong. I did a reload of Windows and it reports the HDD size as being 250GB (237 after installation).

Could this possibly have anything to do with the previous error I got with the other HDD? Even if it wouldn't, is this a problem with the LBA?

What errors were you getting when you were using the other hard drive?

see if there is a bios update for your laptop. 137 is a common size barrier in older bioses, and in fact before sp2, xp couldn't boot off a partition larger than that.

The last BIOS revision that has been released for that laptop is A05. I had a look at the previous revisions and there is no mention of the Hdd maximum size.

If you have A05 then the maximum that the BIOS will read will be round the 120gb size.

Computerman :)

the size the bios sees really shouldn't have any bearing at all in windows. Windows loads its own device drivers and in fact even loads a virtual bios. If you format the drive using xp before sp3 you will have around 127gb depending on how you measure it, keeping in mind that a hard drive gb is larger than a million bytes, but you lose about 10% to file system. Check the drive maker's website for a tool for windows (requires a format of the drive).