Ferrari Mailing List: Laptop Hard Drive Help (NFC)

[Charles Perry (charles]

Wonder if I could tap the brains of our PC gurus:
 
I have a Toshiba Satellite P25-S609 (vintage 2003-2004) laptop that
shipped with an 80GB drive and Windows XP Media Center. I have run out
of space on that drive. It is the standard 2.5mm size, marked ATA/IDE.
 
I bought a 250GB drive and an Apricorn EZ-BACKUP kit, which includes a
USB adapter for the drive and a program called EZ-Gig II to clone the
old drive to the new. New drive is marked EIDE, which my research
indicates is similar or identical to ATA/IDE.
 
The cloning process seems to go fine, but when I swap the new drive into
the laptop it will not boot - it gets past the BIOS screen and freezes.
However, if I leave the new drive in the USB adapter, it works fine and
I can read it from within Windows. Since the drive is obviously good and
the copy process seems good, I'm guessing it's a BIOS problem. The BIOS
does correctly auto-detect the drive name/model but doesn't indicate a
size for either the new or the old drive that might verify capacity
capabilities.
 
I can't find any information on a possible hard drive size limit for my
machine's BIOS, except some generic info that indicates that machines of
my vintage "didn't have LBA support and couldn't address more than
137GB."
 
I have checked with Toshiba's website and there is a newer version of
BIOS than what I have, but it only supports a processor change. It does
not mention any change in drive sizes supported.
 
Are there other things I should check? Should I drop back to a 120GB
drive and see what happens? I am otherwise happy with this machine still
and don't need to upgrade without reason.
 
Thanks,
 
-- charles
 
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  <outbind://1/CSC_files/image001.gif>  
 
Charles G Perry IV
Vice-President, Engineering
 
Carolina Sound Communications - MuzaK
7630 Southrail Road, BLDG B
N. Charleston, SC 29420 
(843) 571-4488         www.carolina-sound.com
<http://www.carolina-sound.com/> 
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