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?