Windows fails to boot (BIOS loops ad-infinitem)

I know these are old posts about old computers but it seems to happen a
lot with both Dell laptops and desktops in particular when a large disk
upgrade is attempted.

Bottom line:

If like me you have an old computer that works just fine for basic home
stuff like browsing, e-mail and photo storage and you want to extend
it's life by fitting a large (>137gb) internal hard disk, check that
operating system (you will need XP SP1 or higher) and BIOS are 48-Bit
LBA compliant.

There is a free HDINFO tool in 48bitlba.com that will do this for you.


For the potentail benefit of other old timers out there, here is my
long-winded story:

I had a similar issue when upgrading the hard disk on my Dell Optiplex
GX260 (running XP Pro SP2) from the old original 40GB IBM Deskstar to a
new 500GB Western Digital – both are IDE type drives. I cloned from the
old disk (master) to the new disk (slave) using Acronis TI Home 2009 and
then put the new clone as master leaving the old disk disconnected. The
new clone booted initially but stopped booting some days later – just a
flashing/blinking cursor on the top left of the screen. I then returned
the old disk as master and repeated the cloning process this time using
Casper 5.0. Two weeks later the new disk stopped booting again with the
same blinking cursor.

When I cloned the old 40GB disk onto the new (the whole disk - not just
the C: drive), both Acronis and Casper saw the Dell hidden FAT 16
partition and both cloned it correctly onto the new disk and everything
worked for a while. Booting seemed to fail after between 20 and 40 cold
boots when there was a non-routine restart such as after running
msconfig. If I was not in the habit of switching off the PC after each
session, I may not have encountered the issue for a year.

I contacted Casper Technical Support. As the clone booted fine for
several days, they pointed me to look for something outside the cloning
process such as the BIOS. I had thought my BIOS was OK for the new
larger disk for three reasons:

1. When I entered the BIOS, it saw the new drive and reported the
correct capacity of 500GB.

2. There were Optiplex GX260 units out there with upgrades to 500GB
drives and more – one website offers refurbished units up to 750GB.

3. When I reviewed the BIOS versions on the Dell website going from the
A02 version on my PC to the latest A09 version, there was no talk of
drive size in any of the Fixes and Enhancements for any of the
versions.

Then I came on this article on drive size limitations and barriers

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm

and reading the section on BIOS ignorance, I looked at the Dell Website
again very carefully. Lo and behold – in BIOS version A05 – not under
the Fixes and Enhancements heading but under a heading unique to that
version called Additional Information was some blurb that said version
A05 now supported 48-Bit LBA for drives >137GB and also now incidentally
supported booting from USB devices. Bingo – I needed BIOS version A05 or
higher to support my new 500GB disk.

I downloaded the latest BIOS version A09 for the Optiplex GX260 from
Dell. The Dell website provides very clear instruction on how to flash
your BIOS. If you want to do this, read the instructions very carefully,
then read them again and then again once more. Ensure you have no
disruptions from kids, pets, parents, partners, ensure the mouse and
keyboard are completely untouched by you hands or anything else during
flashing and that the chances of you having a power cut are negligible.
Get this wrong and you may well have a dead motherboard on your hands!
In my case, this meant ensuring the BIOS was for the correct model of
PC, I downloaded to a floppy as that was the Dell recommendation for my
PC, followed the instruction to the letter including withdrawing the
floppy at the end the flash process before booting with the new BIOS.
All went well.

Now I installed my Casper clone (that had stopped booting) as master
again and without any further repair or modification of any kind, it
sprung to life, booted just fine and has stayed booting ever since ( 9
months and counting). Problem solved.

I have since fitted a second Western Digital 500GB drive as slave for
backup and I am using Casper 5.0 to create incremental clones on it from
the master. I have also kept my old original drive intact and stored in
a safe and different place just in case!

For the Inspiron 9300, it looks like the BIOS does not support 48-Bit
LBA for drives >137GB. There are other options in this case. The drive
can be partitioned with partitions formatted or resized so that the
operating system partition is < 137GB. Take a look at:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/237351-45-boot-large-hard-drive


--
dellhell
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