how can I tell if my laptop supports 48-bit LBA?
I am upgrading my laptop (Dell C640) hard drive. How can I tell if it supports 48-bit LBA or drives larger than 137GB? It is at the latest BIOS (A10) but the dell site doesnt have much info on 48-LBA. Is there another way? Could I plug a larger drive (I have a 160GB drive) in and see what the BIOS says? I just don't want to corrupt any of the boot sectors, etc on the larger drive.
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http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=308985 Message #4
OK - maybe I dont know what the heck I am doing, but using a GParted boot CD I thought I was making 2 partitions on the 160GB drive: one 100GB partition, and one 60GB. Both of them were Primary, both NTFS, the first one had the boot flag set. Everything seemed OK when exiting Gparted. Rebooting and my bios screen still shows one 127GB drive. Weird? Also, running the ultimate boot disk and some partition tools on their all seem to indicate a) file systems are not supported and b) addresses are out of range or something like that.
Am I doing it wrong? Sorta seems like I'm not getting around the LBA problem.
Nothing is ever simple, eh?
OK, so even if I partition the drive into partitions that are less than 127GB, it still won't work?
Dang, I must have misread Snarkasm's post since I thought that was the point behind partitioning. Oh well.
If the OS doesn't recognize >127GB drives, but the system does, you can partition the HDD out so no partition is bigger than 127GB. You can then make use of your entire drive's capacity, it's just divided a little bit. But in cases where BIOS doesn't support 48-bit LBA, you're straight ****ed. :/
Got it. OK - onto to ebay to find a 120GB drive. Thanks for the help Thrax.