Old, but new.

[stevo1210]

Re: Old, but new.

I bought the adaptor today only to find that my 2.5"hard drives dont fit in this laptop!.
I've tried forcing the hard drive into it's slot but it only goes in aboput 1CM before it gets stuck. There are some rails in there which are screwed to the PCB and they need to be there. But no matter how hard I try, the hard drive won't fit. My patience is running out and I will have to sell this thing on ebay if I can't get a hard drive to fit.

Thanks.

Um. I take that back. My stupidity and impatience got me into some more trouble with my laptop. I actually samaged some small areas of plastic also managed to slightly bend/ warp the hard drive cage on the inside of the laptop.
What I did discover was that some 2.5"hard drives are thinner than others! The IDE hard drive in my Toshiba P25 laptop is an 80GB one and it fits inside this laptop perfectly as it'is about 1/2 a mm thinner than the older 2.5"hard drives. Hopefully I havent damaged the motherboard or anything like that, but then again my laptop still boots up.

Thanks.

[stevo1210]

Re: Old, but new.

Worth to upgrade to 800 if you can find one rather cheap. This will run 2000 rather well with full 512MB and this notebook have no problem with large hard drives like 20GB, 40GB, 80GB .

Are you sure it will support hard drives up to 80GB? I've heard that these laptops have a limit of 32GB maximum?
I have an 80GB 2.5" laptop hard drive that will fit this laptop.... in fact it's the only drive I have that will fit this laptop.
I can't find out until the weekend for sure because my IDE adaptor part is still coming. I've bought it/ ordered it but I've gotta wait for it. If worse comes to worse and I can't get the hdd to work, I think i'll have to sell this laptop.

Thanks.

[linuxguru]

Re: Old, but new.

There are 19 mm, 17 mm, 12.5 mm, 9.5 mm, 8.5 mm and maybe even thinner 2.5" drives. Currently, 9.5 mm is the most common, but 12.5 mm is/was a common size for many years. Barring mini-notebooks, almost any notebook should be able to accommodate a 12.5 mm drive. I'm guessing that you must have tried to squeeze in a 17 or 19 mm drive, which probably won't fit in most Dell notebooks.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Old, but new.

2.5" drives come in different heights.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Old, but new.

Yeah, what he said.

[stevo1210]

Re: Old, but new.

The drive I tried to stuff inside that laptop was a 12.5mm drive. the 9.5mm from my Toshiba fits in it perfectly. But I still want to raise the question.... will this Inspiron 4000 support an 80GB hard drive as I've heard that laptops made before 2004 only supported up to 32GB?

Thanks.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Old, but new.

Bogus >>> I've heard that laptops made before 2004 only supported up to 32GB?

I've run a 100GB in a laptop built in 1999.
Depends on your chipset and your BIOS.

.

[linuxguru]

Re: Old, but new.

Even if your BIOS doesn't support a drive larger than 32 GB, it's still possible to use a combination of tools to allow booting from it. You'll need to configure the drive (using tools from the drive manufacturer) to report a size of 8 GB or 32 GB to the BIOS, regardless of its actual size. You may also need a boot-manager like Smart Boot Manager (SBM) that allows you to boot from the drive once it is recognized by the BIOS (as a bonus, SBM also supports booting from CDROM).

The Linux kernel itself can handle a drive of any size once it is up - but it still needs to load and initialize itself, using boot loaders like LILO or Grub. On legacy notebooks like some Thinkpads which do not have BIOS support for booting from CDROM, I use a combination of SBM and LILO to have multiboot configurations, that can also boot from CDROM.

[stevo1210]

Re: Old, but new.

Bogus >>> I've heard that laptops made before 2004 only supported up to 32GB?

I've run a 100GB in a laptop built in 1999.
Depends on your chipset and your BIOS.

.

The chipset in my Dell Inspiron 4000 is an Intel 440BX chipset and the BIOS in the system is version A23 which was the very last version that Dell released for this laptop, so in other words I have the latest version of BIOS for my model.

In regards to the 80GB hard drive support. For some reason, I found a large number of online stores selling 80GB hard drives for my model. Here are some examples:

http://www.ciao.co.uk/Origin_Storage...eries__6341808

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/80GB-Hard-Dri...QQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/120GB-Hard-Dr...QQcmdZViewItem

Since there are a large number of stores selling hard drives of sizes 80GB and over for my model, I presume that it does support drives larger than 80GB.

Thanks.

[stevo1210]

Re: Old, but new.

The following are pictures of the silly damages I made'due to my stupidity when I tried to force the oversized well at least I learnt that there are different thicknesses in hard drives now....
Anyway, the yellow arrows indicate the areas of damage. As you will see, the metal cage that holds the hard drive has multiple bends as I used pliers to extend the cage very slightly at those points as I tried to fit the HDD.... I dunno if bending it back to it's original shape will work, but I think that may make it worse so Ill laeve it alone.
You will also see that the plastics on the case are slightly damaged and that the thin plastic tape on the har drive rails are slightly ripped as the metal base of the HDD scrapped along it. That also indicates the stopping point of the HDD as it did not fit, so luckily I didn't go too far inside the laptop, otherwise my HDD would be permanently stuck.

And also one of the images represents two hard drives I tried. The drive on the right that's covered with aluminium foil is from my Toshiba laptop and fits perfectly. The one on the left on the other hand is a Fujitsu MPC2040 4GB HDD that I was trying to force in which didn't fit. As you can see the drive on the right is thinner.

Hopefully the damage I made isn't too serious. What do you guys think? All I know is that my laptop still boots.

Thanks.

[i4004]

Re: Old, but new.

no damage there.

when hdd is damaged you'll know allright...hehe

[stevo1210]

Re: Old, but new.

I'm picking up the IDE adaptor today and I'm hoping for the very best. And that is to get an 80GB HDD to work in this laptop.

[stevo1210]

Re: Old, but new.

I was thinking.... instead of buying a hard drive.... will somthing like this work?

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Compact-Flash...QQcmdZViewItem

I wonder if I could use a compactflash card as a hard drive.... though I still face the issue of how to get the CF adaptor drive into the laptop because of the slot load....

Thanks.

[arneson]

Re: Old, but new.

I have that device but,
I have not got any flash large enough to be useful.
It might boot Ubuntu though.
I'll try it with an IBM microdrive first.

[Scenic]

Re: Old, but new.

yep. that works fine.

i'm using a 4GB High-speed CF Card as the system-HDD in my homeserver.
and 2x 8GB Cards in my laptop (Dual-Slot CF -> 2.5" IDE Adapter).
those cheap (=non highspeed) CF cards will work too, but they max out at 2 - 3MByte/s (real-life performance... not what the manufacturer says..)

edit:

@arneson: those microdrives are a bit contra-productive...

their energy saving mechanism turns them off after 3 - 5 seconds without activity... no matter what the OS running on it is set up to...

this spinup/spindown procedure every time makes the whole system horribly slow and laggy.. even slower than a cheap CF card

i've got a Seagate ST1 5GB Microdrive... so i know what i'm talking about...

[stevo1210]

Re: Old, but new.

I just got the adaptor and I have some news....
My 80GB hard drive works in the laptop and boots to Windows as well (can't go into Windows as the hard drive is from my Toshiba laptop and the hardware is different).
Only problem I don't understand is why the laptop detects my 80GB hard drive as a 15GB hard drive.... and there's no way to set the parameters or anything like that, but nonetheless, it goes into the safe mode prompt of Windows XP.
Now to find a proper hard drive for my Inspiron 4000.... finding a 20GB hard drive is so bloody hard.... it seems like no one has them no more.

Thanks.

[linuxguru]

Re: Old, but new.

32 GB BIOS limitation - the size will wrap-around (mod 32 GB). 80 - 2 * 32 = 16 GB, which is pretty close to the 15 GB that it's seeing.

BTW, Linux will see the full 80 GB even if the BIOS sees only 15 GB - but the bootloader needs to be able to boot the kernel first from the 15 GB visible to BIOS (which probably will not to be a problem on your system).

[stevo1210]

Re: Old, but new.

32 GB BIOS limitation - the size will wrap-around (mod 32 GB). 80 - 2 * 32 = 16 GB, which is pretty close to the 15 GB that it's seeing.

BTW, Linux will see the full 80 GB even if the BIOS sees only 15 GB - but the bootloader needs to be able to boot the kernel first from the 15 GB visible to BIOS (which probably will not to be a problem on your system).

I don't understand the part where you put 2*32 = 16GB. Because 2 * 32 is 64GB? or am I misinterpreting something here?
I shall go Linux with this laptop, but I will have to take the long way around. First I will install the HDD into a desktop PC using a 2.5" --> 3.5" converter. Then I will install Fedora Core and then bring the HDD back into the laptop. I hope this method works. I know that it works on my desktops because I just switch the hard drives and they work.... I dunno how the laptop will get around doing this. Oh, and I have to find a Linux distribution that supports my Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA wireless card because those cards are a pain to get working even under Windows.

Thanks.

[stevo1210]

Re: Old, but new.

I just had a look at the compactflash to IDE adaptor and it's a no-go because it's too short and I can't push it into the tray. Looks like a normal hard disk is what I'll need, but first I've gotta find a HDD under 32GB.

Thanks.

[Scenic]

Re: Old, but new.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=110293896590

lol... seems like those chinese sellers have anything you can imagine

that box is exactly the same size as a 2.5" Laptop IDE HDD...

edit: same adapter as above, but for SD-Cards instead of CF..

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI....m=110295693239