Dell M170 harddrive replacement

[drewblack9]

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.)

[Shane]

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.

[war59312]

I prefer http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/ myself.

Way better than ghost!

[Zan]

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

[Shane]

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&releaseid=R109319&SystemID=XPS_M170&servicetag=&os=WLH&osl=en&deviceid=10857&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=2&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=1&fileid=142079

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

[Zan]

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

[Zan]

Hi all,

I just wanted to bring closure to this issue. The problem was indeed the BIOS. The final BIOS version (A05 from Dell) for the Dell M170 only supports 28-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA), and so although Windows could see the entire drive (~250GB), the BIOS was not capable of recognizing addresses above 137GB. Hence, aliasing occured (i.e. the absence of the higher order bits made it so that data being written to the address space above 137GB was actually being written to the 137GB space instead).

WARNING: Contrary to the statements made earlier about being able to put any drive in the M170, it is not possible, or at least not possible without unconventional methods and proprietary software. Take caution. The full capacity of the drive may appear to be reconginzed by Windows and the drive may appear to function fine, until you store data over the 137GB mark. As I described earlier, the drive will eventually fail to boot, as the MBR, as well as potentially other data, will have been overwritten.

In any case, I have tried to use the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools 11.2 to overcome the BIOS limitation (which Western Digital claims is made possible via their data overloay algorithm included in the tool set), to no avail. I don't think the tool supports Vista installs, despite the fact that WD calims it does. But, I'll leave that for another thread.

Happy New Year!

Best Regards,
Zan

[Shane]

Glad to hear you found out what was happening. When the larger hard drives over 80gb started coming out years back I remember always running into BIOS's that had this issue. Kind of strange to hear of it again after all this time! I guess even the old stuff likes to pop back up every now and then.

Take care!
-Shane

[drewblack9]

So does this issue only happen when reinstalling Vista on the drive?, Also does this same problem occur on a M1710?

[faust858]

Hello everyone.  
I have a question regarding this issue.  I also have a Dell M170 and was looking into upgrading its hard drive.  Seeing that the Bios is what is limiting the size of the the hard drive, could you buy an over 137GB HD and partition it so each partition falls under the 137GB mark?  Or will the 28bit LBA restrict the hard drive to an overall size of under 137GB?  
Thanks for your response.

[Shane]

No the limit is for the size of the drive itself not partitions (at least im pretty sure, been a long time since I have had to deal with a bios not handling the HD size). there are 2 things you can try, first see if dell ever put out a bios update that fixes the problem. And 2nd a lot of hard drive manufactures have software that gets installed on the drive to over come the limit. But as you can see from earlier post it may or may not work. But you can try.

What ever you find let me know for future reference if you don't mind

-Shane