R51 1836 Hard Drive Upgrade Woes

[nineyards]

Howdy.

well my stock R51 model 1836Q4U came with a 40 GB harddrive. I tried to upgrade to a Fujitsu 100 GB MHV2100AH with absolutely no luck. The drive would sometimes be recognized in the bios, but mostly it was incomplete.

So then I thought I saw somewhere that the R51 supported the 48-bit LBA Hard drives for sizes >137 GB. So I went to a Seagate ST9160821A. The IBM site says there is definite support for the ST9100821A, so i was hoping that it would work for me too. The BIOS recognized it right off (but as a 131 GB drive). I cloned my original drive to the new seagate but after that the BIOS wouldnt recognize it. My guess is that the R51 1836 does not support 48bit LBA. (Though I couldnt not find this anywhere in the manuals or IBM sites). And when I cloned it, I cloned it as a 160 GB and then the bios got confused and could not find the OS.

So now I am going to settle for the 137 GB, but since I can not clone, I am going to have to reload OS /Products from the recovery disks. (or maybe fresh WinXP install using the guides on this forum).

But my sanity would be grateful if someone can verify that the R51 does not support 48Bit LBA.

Thanks,
Daniel

PS I had upgrade to 3.21 BIOS.

[nineyards]

UPDATE:

Ok, so it seems the main problem was that hidden partition. Windows was never booting properly because it was looking for the "Predesktop area" partition.

So I entered BIOS and disabled the PreDesktop area in the Security section. This cleared everything for me. Plus it recognized my drive as 160 GIG.

Hooray!
so all seems well.

Thanks