Comments on: How to Upgrade a Laptop Hard Drive

By: Paul Salmon

Paul Salmon — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 03:43:15 +0000

My Dell 6400 has MediaDirect (button to the left of the status LEDs), and it functions perfectly have the hard drive was upgraded. After the upgrade I had four partitions: C (system), D (recovery), a hidden partition, and new partition I created from the remaining disk space that wasn’t used by the Dell-created partitions.

By: Raj

Raj — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 18:25:02 +0000

Are you using the DELL system with media direct? Please refer to the link – http://www.techhandbook.com/hardware/3097-How-Upgrade-the-Hard-Drive-Dell-Laptop.html. I am exactly facing the same problem.

By: Paul Salmon

Paul Salmon — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:03:49 +0000

When I imaged my hard drive it created the two dell partitions relative to the two original partitions from the older drive. I then went into computer management and created a third partition with the remaining drive space as it was uninitialized.

By: Raj

Raj — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 17:55:49 +0000

Hi Paul, I exactly followed the procedure you described. When I tried to boot my laptop it showed blue screen of death – 0x7B error. After doing google search for hours, I got to know about the HPA issue in Inspiron 6400 because of dell media direct. The work around is to zero out the LBA3 sector and then clone the hard drive. Since I did not zero out the LBA3 sector earlier, my hard drive size is now truncated to that of the original hard drive (100 GB instead of 640 GB).. Now, I need to find out a way to restore the original size of the hard drive..But hard drive replacement worked fine after zeroing out LB3A sector and then cloning the hard drive. Let me know if you need further information. Thank you.

By: Paul Salmon

Paul Salmon — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 01:13:04 +0000

I’m not really sure what the problem is, but I had absolutely no problem with imaging my Inspiron 6400 to a larger hard drive and utilizing all the space on the new drive.