5200 rpm drive in 4200 rpm laptop

[sgtspector]

Here's a good one for you: I bought a new 60 GB 2.5 5200 rpm WD scorpio hard drive for my Dell Inspiron 2600 laptop to replace the 30 gb 4200 rpm Hitachi in there. Problem is I didnt know it was a 4200. ANyway I slaved it to a pc and used WD drive utitlity to copy over the partition. When place in the laptop I get nothing now. Windows won't boot and any disk I put in to boot it just locks up when it accesses the drive, even though the bios recognizes the drive. I then put the drive in a usb enclosure but although the safely remove icon pops up in the systray windows doesn't recognize the drive and it is not populated. When i check the properties it says the device is working properly. Have I trashed the drive by connecting it to the controller? Any ideas?

[glc]

Is it jumpered correctly? If so, zero it out and use a different cloning utility. I'd use Acronis and preserve the diagnostic and recovery partitions.

Are you sure the Dell bios can deal with a 60gb drive?

[sgtspector]

No jumpers are neccessary. I had it hooked up to the usb enclosure and had no problem before. Same with the 3.5 to 2.5 adapter. I though about zeroing it out again but whenever i attempt to boot a pc (not the notebook) with the drive attached to the ide connector it locks the pc up. It seems that as soon as the boot disk accesses the disk it locks up tight. There is a diag partition but no recovery partition. According to Dell the drives for this laptop whee avaiable as a 20gb, 30 gb or 40 gb so it's possible it wont read a 60 gb but the usb enclosure should still work unless it scrambled the mbr on first boot. I'll keep at it though there must be a workaround. Maybe boot0-it ng. will work.

[glc]

With no jumper, the drive is a Single or Master. If you use an adapter for standard IDE, it must be the only drive on the cable or be the Master. It will not coexist with another drive that's jumpered to CS on an 80 wire cable.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....7169421#jumper

[sgtspector]

Yea it was alone on the cable and I tried it on both connectors on the cable. No luck. Thanx. If i figure it out I'll post the solution.

[glc]

The drive may have gone south on you. I'd RMA it if you can't even get it to be seen to do a zero fill.

[sgtspector]

I got it working with Boo-it NG. Somehow the MBR was trashed. The question now is if the motherboard will accept a 5200 rpm drive at all? Also if the drive is bigger than supported by the mobo can I partition it smaller and make it work that way?

[flanzig1]

Should be able to partion out the drive as long as the PC will run a 5400rpm HD.

[glc]

RPM makes no difference, a 40 gig 5400 rpm drive was an option on the 2600 and I've used 5400 rpm drives in laptops a lot older than that one. However, I have my doubts about using a 60 gig drive. The only way to tell if you can use it is to install it and boot it up with your XP CD and see what Setup says about the unallocated space. if it's around 55 gigs, you are good to go. If it won't boot or shows less than that amount of space, there's nothing you can really do. I would also advise you use a better cloning tool than the WD DLG.

I have had issues trying to clone laptop drives with both of them out of the laptop and connected to a desktop IDE, if the desktop bios handles large LBA differently than the laptop you will have an unbootable and inaccessible drive when you put it in the laptop. I use my Apricorn USB housing to clone them - using the Apricorn software (which is OEM Acronis). I put the new drive in the laptop and the old one in the housing.

If you want to keep the 30 gig as a backup, order this up:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817155602

Housing and the software.

[sgtspector]

I cant figure out what the problem is. I have tried to do it several ways but each time I put the drive in the laptop it locks up on boot. I was at best buy earlier and asked a geek squadder if they had any 4200 rpm drives and he stated that he himself had put a 5400 in a Dell Inspiron 2500 recently. Said it was a 60 gb drive also. Oh well I guess i'll keep trying and if it doesn't work out I have a 60 gb portable. I already have a 2.5 Adaptec housing. Not bad construction but no software included. Is Acronis still available as a free download?

[glc]

You can buy the latest Acronis pretty cheap - might be a tool that's continually useful to you.

[sgtspector]

I mogth get one just to get the Acronis True Image. Anyway it looks like you were right about the LBA. I again wiped the drive removed all partitions and formatting and stuck it in the laptop. It booted with the WINXP cd and partitioned, formatted and imstalled WInXp. Would have rather avoided the re-install but "dems da brakes". At least it works and reads the drive at full capacity of about 57 gb. Thanks for all the help and suggestions. Next upgrading the ram but that's another thread.