Dell complaints

[SBryant]

I've recently tried to upgrade the hard drive in a Inspiron 6400 for a friend, I tried installing a 120GB hard drive but the Dell BIOS only reported it as 78GB, which is what he already had. Now I've taken that drive out and put it back in another PC it's still only recognised as 78GB, so the Dell laptop seems to have reduced the drive's capacity by 40GB!

I've tried reformatting the drive over and over and it's still only 78GB. I've just been shouted at by one of Dell's "customer service managers" and I'm fed up with the whole thing. Does anyone else have any experience of this and what can be done to fix my hard drive???

Thanks for any help.

[diashto]

Had it been reported as a 120gb harddrive by any other machine? Are you sure you didnt have a swap-aroo from the box with an 80gb?

[SBryant]

Yeah I've been using it for some time as a 120GB drive in another laptop, I just upgraded that one and thought I'd use the drive to upgrade the Dell, big mistake!.

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

The machine itself can't change the drive capacity.

Not knowing the exact logistics by which you did this, I don't know how plausible this is. But in handling, the drive may have become damaged. They're extremely fragile when not mounted. Formatting would find all the bad sectors and mark them as unusable, thus changing the capacity.
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[FallenAngel]

Any computer known can't think on it's own. It has to be programmed by the flawed (mankind). Computers also don't have opposeable thumbs. They do only what we (mankind) tell and program them to do, and nothing else.

Simply, there's no way a computer can manipulate a drive capacity from one size to another.

It has enough logic to only manipulate the current capacity into different levels (partitions), which will amount to a size determined at factory, in this case 120GB. 120GB will be more accurately 110-115GB of actual space. All hard drives "round up".

Rocke's hypothesis is the most plausible, though I'd like to think that if the drive was that badly mangled to remove 30+GB in bad sectors that it wouldn't even boot up. I'd suggest using another old standby trick called DEBUG. You can Google the method from a billion places. Try that on the hard drive and see what the drive reports after that.

No computer has the capacity to reconfigure a drive like you mentioned though, so really, no need to think that out any further. It's just not possible under any circumstance.

[SBryant]

I wouldn't have thought it possible either, but just out of interest I tried another old 120GB hard drive that a friend gave me, and exactly the same thing happened, and yes it registered as 120GB in another PC minutes before I put it into the Dell. The likelyhood of having 2 drives that were registered as full capactiy but then were damaged immediately before putting them into the Dell is quite unlikely. I've changed a lot of laptop hard drives and have never encountered this before, only with this Dell laptop.

[FallenAngel]

Well I'd find it beyond amazing to know that a Dell system can change the laws of physics and electronics - but then, that's just me.

My gut says it's an issue with the motherboard, more specifically the BIOS chip. LBA issue perhaps?

Rocke? Any input?

[diashto]

Wouldnt LBA bring it down to like 47mb? And even then, it wouldnt hard-code the LBA limitation on the drive's firmware..

I can see if the laptop's firmware was bios-locked not to accept anything larger than 80gb, but again, it shouldnt hard-write that to the drive's firmware. That'd be just silly.

[StrangeFarer]

Hrm....

Did we hear back on how a debug script, run from another box, affected the drives?

Also, and I don't know if anyone thought of this...

Were the jumpers on the hard drives moved in any way? Portable drive jumpers do weird, unlabeled things, IMNSHE. That's why most portables (GAH! Too much DELL! LAPTOPS. LAPTOPS. MUST RE-LEARN TO SAY LAPTOPS...) hard drive installs never have you touch the jumpers.

[FallenAngel]

LBA issues *may* cause a drive to misreport.

I still find it unplausible that it would have any ability to recode a drive's firmware though. Something about that ain't right.

[SBryant]

Of course something isn't right, it's Dell

I'll do a debug report when I get home from work this evening and post the results. Thanks for all the feedback.

[StrangeFarer]

SBryant:

Be sure you search for "NON DOS DEBUG SCRIPT" (using the quotes) in Google, to find the correct one. There are many, many DEBUG scripts, but only that one will really blast the drive tables clean.

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

What? Que? Just plugging it in changes the capacity? Or plugging it in and formatting? Anyhow, that the exact same thing happened twice makes it NOT impossible.

No, I've never seen anything like that happen. (But there are a lot of things I haven't seen.) It's damn unlikely BIOS is rewriting drive firmware. BIOS memory isn't big enough to contain firmware codes for every brand of drive. But it can rewrite the sub-boot sector, like certain viruses do so they they can't be erased by simply formatting.

How old is 6400? Possible they just didn't make drives over 80G then? Though I can't understand why the IDE controller would impose that limitation.
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[StrangeFarer]

I remember the 6400. It was a modest powerhouse, and was in no way limited to 80GB for the drives. The base model comes with 120GB SATA, after all.

No, methinks it's something setting up 80GB partitions.

I can see, maybe a burnt controller causing this, but...

Well, let's face it- it just isn't likely. The software route (partitioning) is much more likely.

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

What's not clear here, is at what point and by what mechanism the capacity is being altered. BIOS doesn't write partitions, or anything else, spontaneously, that I know of.

Explored this with diskpart?
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'