Laptop HDD Upgrade Prob

[MrMikeL]

I have a Gateway 2000 Solo 9300 laptop, PIII 500 mhz, 288 mb RAM. Original HDD is 12 gb Hitachi. I bought a Toshiba 50 gb 7200 RPM and a clone software/hardware bundle called EZ-GIG from Apricorn.

Supposedly, you are supposed to be able to hook up the new drive to this PC card and cable, stick it into the PC card slot, boot off the EZ-GIG CD, and it will create a bootable copy of your old drive contents onto the new drive, then swap the old drive for the new drive in the laptop and tada - instant upgrade.

Imagine my disappointment when I put the new drive in and went to boot up and it said "Invalid System Disk". Went to the websites, tried doing a SYS onto the new drive, that didn't work.

Any ideas?? Hate to use that screamer as an external drive when what I wanted to do was speed everything up a bit.

I'm running Win 98 SE. Would this be a good time to format the new drive clean and load Win XP??

Thanks in advance for all your help and support!

-Mike

[whannanna]

You might be better off starting clean with Xp

How large of a HDD does the laptop support? It may not recognize over 40GB. If you're sure it'll support it, then you're not out anything by formatting and putting XP on it. I mean, you've still got the 12GB to put back in if you need to.

W/ only (remember when that was a LOT) 288MB RAM, you will want to turn off all the eye candy and stuff like that. I've got several machines w/ XP on them w/ 256MB. I've got all the purty stuff turned off and they move along real good like.

Just as I though, your laptop will only support up to 32GB's. See here

I wouldn't even both messing w/ that 50GB one. See if you can return/exchange it.

Look before you leap next time.

[HeadBand]

you might be able to fix it with a bios flash though

[ArcticFox]

Woah thanks for that link EvilRick. I have the same laptop with 128MB RAM and a 9.35GB Fujitsu drive, and it's a good thing I didn't grab a 40GB like I want to!

I don't think a BIOS flash will fix it. I would think if it did, it would say so on the page I gave or the BIOS readme.txt would say it, but it doesn't. I don't see anywhere except the first link I posted about size limitations.

Here's the BIOS page.

[MrMikeL]

I'm aware of the BIOS limitation, so I even tried cloning and only defining 30 mb of the HDD when I cloned and it still didn't work. Not sure if that proves anything.

Just that the BIOS won't accept a HDD over 32GB.

[MrMikeL]

Then how come I was able to explore the drive from Windows when it was connected as an external drive? Even tells me I have 42GB free space. And the BIOS window does show that the HDD is 50 GB.

Does the drive have to go back? I really wanted the fast spindle speed, but HDD makers aren't making the small drives with 7200 RPM.