I9300 >160GB Hard Drive, Possible?

These notebooks are a bit old now. I think most 9300 users and XPS2 users left before the 250 GB drives came out. You can try it and post the results but I don't think you will be getting many answers here.

Western Digital Scorpio 250GB 5400RPM HDD

That would work with your system, you just have to get a PATA drive, not SATA, and that drive I linked above is a PATA drive, and it would work great.

I currently have one of these on or from zipzoomfly....better price....An will be installing this weekend. It should work fine!

How did you partion the drive? Is there some sort of utility in the setup screen when you boot up the computer?

The hard drive limitation in the BIOS is actually 137gigs, not 160; that is any drive larger than 137gigs isn't correctly recognized by the BIOS. That said, there isn't problem installing larger drives and there isn't any limitation on partition size because software that most drive manufactures include with new drives overcomes the BIOS limits and because 32bit Windows XP and Vista can support drives up to 3 terabytes even though the BIOS doesn't.

If you have a perfectly good working Windows setup on your original drive and you just want to copy your existing setup onto your new drive, all you need is an external drive caddy and the drive cloning software provided by the drive manufacture. Then you can create a partition as large as you want. This is because the program tricks the BIOS into thinking the drive is within the 137gig parameter then early in the boot process your BIOS hands-off control to Windows which can read the larger drive with no problem.

I'm running a 200gig Hitachi 7200rpm drive with only one large partition using the entire drive on my I9300 as we speak. Setting it up was easy. Just put your new unformatted drive into the external caddy and set your rig to boot-up from your optical drive. The bootable software provided from the drive manufacture will then practically do the rest for you. When it's finished cloning your old drive onto your new drive just switch the drives and your good to go.

If instead you want to do a "fresh" Windows install it requires a little more work but still doesn't require making smaller partions on your new drive. All you have to do is "slipstream" the latest service packs onto your original Windows installation disk. If you install from the updated OS disk your hard drive size will be correctly detected by Windows setup and formatted accordingly.

I hope this helps,
Ciao

What does it mean to slipstream the latest service packs? I understand computers but by no means am I an expert! Thanks for all the help.

"Slipstreaming" the service packs means to extract and replace the updated system files from the service packs newer than the version of your XP installation disc so that in the end you have the latest, most up-to-date version for a "clean" installation. When you slipstream the service packs into your installation disc not only are you getting all of the bug fixes and patches right from the start, but you also get all of the latest technology, system and driver updates newer than from when your disc was released. For example SATA support wasn't included originally with XP, but if you slipstream the service packs, it does.

The short not too detailed explanation: If currently your install disc is "original" XP ver.1, when finished you'll have XP service pack 3 ver.3 install disc. You can Google to find exact how-to's.

Basically, you need to download from the Microshaft website the full versions of the service packs you need newer than your installation disc, decompress (not install) them separately, probe into them and extract the updated system files from within, then overlay the newer files over the older so that the older ones are overwritten. Finally, you clone your XP installation onto your hard drive replace the older files with new, burn the new version and you're good to go!


BTW: What I like to do is get all of the latest drivers for everything in my machine and include them on my installation disc so that I can quickly get up and running should a disaster occur and I have to start from scratch.

I hope this helps,
Ciao

That's not exactly true. If you get close to full on that >160GB drive you may find that your laptop doesn't start up one day. Blinking cursor in the upper left-hand corner of the screen immediately after post will be the sign of the BIOS limitation.

I've got close to 170gigs on my 200gig Hitachi 7200RPM SATA drive on my I9300 as I'm writing this with no problems at all. And I don't expect any.

Hard drive manufactures have been overcoming BIOS limitations to HD size since the days when drives hit 30megs and original PC and clones couldn't read them. I've owned and worked on many machines with drives larger than the BIOS could detect, with no problems. As long as your machine is configured and working properly before a drive upgrade all should be fine afterward.

So to the other posters on this thread, I again say not to worry about the drive size limitation in the BIOS. If you clone your existing set-up with the provided copying software, or start from scratch with an up to date OS (XP with service packs slipstreamed, Vista, Linux, BSD, etc...), you shouldn't have any problems.

I hope this helps,
Ciao