How to tell how big a hard drive my old laptop can accomodate?

[1EZduzit]

I think the hard drive in my Dell LS400 died. It's an older thin laptop (2001) with no floppy or CDROM and only has a P3-400, but it has the newest bios in it Dell has for that system.

Well, the fan died on it one day when I had mistakenly left it on all day, all night, and most of the rest of the next day. It wouldn't boot back into WinXP but I was able to boot it thru the LAN port and get a few files off the hard drive, but couldn't write to the hard drive.

I'm guessing the hard drive died since it tries to boot to windows but is missing files. It had a 20 gig hard drive in it and I want to try putting a bigger hard drive in it, but how do I find out how big I can go?

80 gig drives are only $10 more then 40 gig drives so does anybody know what this laptop would handle or how to find out??

Thanks in advance. 😀

 

[1EZduzit]

Well, i found this article:

Assuming your laptop was manufactured after 1997 and/or currently employs a 3.0GB or larger hard disk drive; your laptop hard drive upgrade choices are, essentially, unfettered and unlimited. With few exceptions, and all those pertain to laptops manufactured prior to 1997, laptop hard drives utilize a 9.5mm hard drive height. Likewise, laptop hard drive mounting hole patterns are standardized with the screw holes located 3 inches apart on the long side. The screw holes are used for mounting the bare hard drive to the hard drive caddy with eight screws; four on the bottom and two on each long side.

Not all laptops, due to BIOS or Operating System limitations, can take advantage of hard drive capacities in excess of 80 GB. In order to access the full capacity of an ATA interface hard drive, for example, with a capacity greater than 137GB, and properly support 48-bit logical block addressing, a minimum operating system configuration of Windows XP (Service Pack 1) or Windows 2000 (SP 4) is required.

According to that info I should be safe using up to a 80 gig hd. That's big enough for me.

 

[Fraggable]

There is no limitation to what size drive you can put in, but I think the biggest 2.5" ATA drive out there is 200GB. Like that article says, there's a very slight chance that BIOS won't allow you to use more than 80GB, but even that's unlikely for a 6 year old system.

 

[corkyg]

Raise the bar! You can go 250 GB @ 5400 or 200 GB @7200.

ZZF

 

[1EZduzit]

LOL, can't use a SATA drive corkyg. I don't use the laptop for much, running street atlas and topo programs with my GPS and playing a few movies for my granddaughter when traveling. I had to compress the movies quite a bit though, down to 250 to 500 mb but they looked good enough on the 12" screen.

NewEgg has a 80 gig Seagate for only $60 shipped and I found a brand new fan on ebay for $15 shipped, so I'm going to go for it.

Thanks for the help corkyg and Fraggable.

 

[corkyg]

The biggest laptop PATA drive I have used is 160 GB. Excllent drives by Seagate.