Thanks for the replies. Fred asked, *"How old is the notebook computer? Older hard drive controllers had the number of bits allocated for Logical Block Access to be 28 (?), limiting the size of the hard drive to 128 GB. There have been various controller limits over time. There are various sneaky ways to get around this but it involves loading drivers before they normally load. It generally involves some sort of special modification to the Master Boot Record of the large drive. The drive manufacturer generally has software for doing this."*
2006 - Dell Inspiron E1705 (a beast if there ever was one). It came with a 100GB drive but checking around I saw that larger drives in the 320GB range are supported by the controller. However, your last sentence, "the drive manufacturer....", started me thinking I should just see what it at the WDC site, and they do have support software there. Tony B wrote, * "... first I would want to make sure you can access the whole drive in it's bare state. Both from another machine, and from that one. That will at least tell you the drive is okay. So format. "Then it just becomes a question of restoring the image. If you can't restore it to the 500gb partition, try partitioning to 100g/400g and restoring it to the new 100g. "PS Even as we speak, I'm trying to upgrade my system drive (Vista32) and I haven't jumped through so many hoops since Win98. In fact, what's really depressing is that half the web searches I do on various errors eventually lead to old fdisk instructions! :)"* Before the restore with Acronis, I did do a disk r/w error check (when it was still "500GB" and had a FAT32X file system) and everything was fine. Loading it into another machine will be problematic as I don't have an external enclosure for the drive (which would really help things). Sorry to hear of your troubles upgrading the Vista hardware - is it the verification process that is tripping you up? And yes, fdisk lives. ..jc ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
