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Dell inspiron 6400 hd upgrade

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Latest post 11/07/2009 01:32 PM by ejn63. 3 replies.
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Joined on 11/02/2009
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Dell inspiron 6400 hd upgrade

02 Nov 2009 03:55PM

I am recently trying to put a larger drive in the laptop. I tried a seagate 200gb 7200 rpm drive. It appeared to work fine till the ghost was complete. I found out I had errors on source drive so I would have to redo the process. When i tried again the seagate now only reports a size just shy of 60gb which is the size of my current HD. Windows disc manager and seatools will not allow me to regain the original size back. Seagate was no help and are sending me a new drive. So moving forward.. can i reghost the whole disk at once or better to just do a partion at a time? I have read here that the partion the dell utility is in causes the drive limitations due to its formatting. How can I get around this? Third qestion is the new drive has a jumper which limits transfer rate to 150mps from 300. Can my dell handle the higher transfer speed of sata2 ??

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Joined on 05/25/2001
Posts: 65,115
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Re: Dell inspiron 6400 hd upgrade

03 Nov 2009 08:23AM

You cannot clone the existing drive in its entirety - for  the reasons, see:

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm

The two parts you CANNOT clone are the Media Direct partition and the master boot record - those must be done manually.

The system has a SATA150 controller - no jumper should be needed.  That said, for anything other than a large array of multiple drives, there's no performance difference between SATA 150 and SATA 3G -- the limiting factor is the spin speed of the drive, which will, with either interface, limit you to less than half what SATA 150 can theoretically support.  SATA 3G is yet another interface improvements that purports to solve a performance problem that doesn't exist.  The fastest drives made for notebooks are fully supported by ATA-100 -- everything else just means the interface is more capable than the mechanics of the drive.

 

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Joined on 11/02/2009
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Re: Dell inspiron 6400 hd upgrade

06 Nov 2009 02:43PM

Thanks for the info. I have my new drive and have a few questions after doing all the reading. I now understand why the drive tanked like it did. To avoid this I am thinking of using disk management to create 4 partitions, main .backup. MBR and media direct. in the proper file format. The I will copy each partition over manually. Will this work or I am to understand that media direct has to be installed as a stand alone after the fact. If this gets too complicated i will just copy it over without the dell restore capibilities.

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Joined on 05/25/2001
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Re: Dell inspiron 6400 hd upgrade

07 Nov 2009 01:32PM

The Media Direct partition cannot be cloned - it must be installed from the Media Direct CD.

 

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