Solved! Notebook harddrive limitations

[864thomasp]

Hello,
I have a HP Pavillion zx5000 (zx5369cl) running windows XP Home, Service Pack 3, Pentium 4 (3.20 Ghz) with 2 GB of Ram.
It was bought in Dec 2004.
The original ATA 80 Gb hard drive has shown symptoms of failing.
I have everything backed up, and I am trying to replace the 80Gb hard drive with a PATA 320 Gb Western Digital.
The computer keeps giving the message that no hard disc drive is found...
It recognizes and accesses a 1 terabyte external with no hiccups.
How do I get it to recognize and install this 320 internally...?
864thomasp

 

[Guest]

I would ask HP if there's a firmware update for your computer otherwise I think you won't get past the BIOS issue and will simply have to settle for whatever maximum drive size the computer was designed to support.

It is quite possible to connect external drives of larger sizes because they don't have to be recognised at the boot up stage.

 

[jsc]

You need to physically install the new drive, go into the BIOS and change the boot device to the optical drive, boot to the optical drive, then partition (if desired) and format the new drive, then install the OS on it either from a system disk or a recovery disk.

 

[Guest]

jsc probably has a solution -- but the partition stage may still restrict you (to a series of small drives).