A31p largest hard drive upgrade?

[mediasponge]

A while back I upgraded the internal IBM 60GB drive to a Fujitsu 120GB 5400rpm. Still works great. My daughter has filled up the disk with her so-called music. Anybody put a 320GB or 500GB PATA drive in an A31P? If I'm going to do that upgrade, I may as well do it now, before all the 2.5" PATA drives disappear. I just don't know if the BIOS will see all the disk space. BIOS is 1GET41WW, which should be the last update for this series (2653-N5U)

I'm still amazed that the refurbishing I did on this 8 year old machine is still holding up after 3 years. My daughters are still using it as an entertainment machine fairly heavily. My wife's relatively new HP will probably be getting it's 4th motherboard soon...

-- mediasponge

[ajkula66]

AFAIK, there are no laptop 500GB PATA drives available. 320 GB will work just fine.

You can also order an aftermarket SATA ultrabay adapter on feebay and throw in a 500GB SATA as a secondary drive.

[mediasponge]

AFAIK, there are no laptop 500GB PATA drives available. 320 GB will work just fine.

So, the BIOS does not have a 137 GB C drive limitation? I'm running XP SP2 with NTFS, so if the BIOS is happy, the OS should be happy.

[ajkula66]

I went up to 250GB with no issues, and currently have 160GB in one, works like a charm.

[gb_ibmguy]

I've have Samsung HM160HC 160 gig drives in 2 of my A31p's, they are fast, quiet and cheap.

I did run into a strange problem with both of them when using the R&R disks. The install went fine, but when I attempted to put XP SP2 on the drive, the update failed. I had to re-size the partition back to 120 GB, install XP SP2 & SP3, then expand the partition to the full 160GB. (My R&R disks are the original XP Pro.)
Without using the R&R disks, and just using XP Pro with SP3 slip streamed the install worked smoothly. This was all done with the newest BIOS's, of course. Just my experience, for what it's worth.

Greg

[mediasponge]

I completed the upgrade. I got a WD 320GB for $94. Probably could have gotten something for less, but I was in a hurry and that's what was available locally (Fry's). I did have one strange problem with it, but it was only because of a dual-boot config. Apparently Linux Grub loader has a known problem with boot volumes that are located beyond the LBA limit (Grub Error 18). When I cloned the drive, I let Acronis True Image enlarge the Windows partition, and that pushed the /boot volume out past the LBA limit. The system needs to be a Windoze machine primarily, so I nuked Linux. Don't fret. I have plenty of other Linux machines to work with. There wasn't anything IN that Linux install anyway.

The strangeness began after I ran fixmbr on the drive to set it back to Windows only. The partition table got corrupted, but not fatally. Windows XP booted just fine. My old copy of Partition Magic isn't happy with this setup, but the thing runs now. Lots of space, slightly better performance than the 120GB Fujitsu it replaced. I may need to get a partition tool that's more up to date. If I clone the new drive to another drive, and clone it back, Acronis True Image can do it, but that's more trouble than it's worth at this point. Thinkpad keeps on truckin'.