Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[redeli]

I have tried to fit a Momentus 7200.4 500 GB ST9500420ASG hard drive to a Sony vaio VGN-SZ2XP_C.  The BIOS (R0083N0) shows    -  hard drive none. 

Does anyone know what the problem is. 

What is the upper limit to the size of the disk for this vaio? 

[AlanM]

Please see here.

If that doesn't work, please see here.

[redeli]

Hi

I have run the Seatools and but they willnot let me do an acutic test because they report “no harddisk found”.  I do not think that there is a power orconnector issue because the system works fine with the old drive (Mometus 5400.2100 GB).  How does the system work-does the bios interrogate the drive and only start it if bios is happy withit.  I still think that the problemmay be that the disk is too large for the bios and so the bios is not enablingit. I though that I had found some references to people using 500 GB driveswith this Sony but I am not confident this is true.  I would like to have some confidence of success beforeopening up my laptop again.

Best wishes

[fzabkar]

The 28-bit LBA limit is 128GiB/137GB. To determine whether your BIOS supports 48-bit LBA, try the following tool:

http://www.48bitlba.com/hdinfo.htm

MHDD is a low level diagnostic tool that does not use BIOS routines to communicate with a HD:

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

One other thing you could try is to place your new drive in an external USB enclosure. Be aware that this may be inconclusive as I have seen threads where a certain USB-SATA bridge chip failed to detect a working Momentus "-ASG" HD (with G-sensor), but was OK with the "non-G" version.

Can you hear the new drive spinning up?

[redeli]

Hi

No I have not heard it spining - Would you expect the disk to spin up as soon as power is applied or is there some hand shaking with the bios required?

It would appear that the bios does support 48 bit LBA and so this does not explain the computer not seeing it as can be seen from the output from the HDinfo programme shown here-

HDINFO Version 1.0
Copyright (c) 2003 FryeWare
All Rights Reserved
http://www.48bitlba.com
http://www.fryeware.com
IDE Channel..............: Primary Master
Drive Model..............: ST9100824AS
Serial...................: 3PL0L0DX
Firmware.................: 3.14
Manufacturer.............: Seagate
Size.....................: 100.1 GB
Type.....................: Fixed
Cylinders................: 12161
Tracks/Cylinder..........: 255
Sectors..................: 63
Drive Features...........:
48-bit LBA.............: Supported
LBA....................: Supported
DMA....................: Supported
IORDY..................: Supported
PIO Modes..............: 3 4
ATA/ATAPI Specs........: 2 3 4 5 6 7
Ultra DMA Modes........: 0 1 2 3 4 5
Current Ultra DMA Mode.: Mode 5

[fzabkar]

All that HDINFO told you was that your *drive* supported 48-bit LBA.

To confirm that your *BIOS* supports 48-bit LBA, you need to use the IDEINFO tool included with HDINFO:

http://www.48bitlba.com/hdinfodetails.htm

"HDINFO includes the self booting operating system independent tool IDEINFO which which provides information about IDE hard drives installed on the system no matter what operating system is installed and also tests your system BIOS for 48-bit LBA support."

"When they created the 48-bit LBA enhancements to the ATA interface specification they did not define a mechanism to test the BIOS for 48-bit LBA support through system software which could be run on the latest operating systems such as Windows XP. The IDEINFO tool solves this problem because it is self booting and operating system independent."

As for the drive not spinning, some drives are configured to power up in standby (PUIS). There are two ways to spin up such a drive. The first is to send it any ATA command that requires reading or writing to the platters, and the second is to send it a special Set Features subcommand.

[redeli]

Running the boot version of the HDINFO programme - I get no LBA device attached which presumably means that the bios does not support 48 bit LBA drives.  It would have saved a fair amount of frustration if Sony could have this in the specification for this laptop. 

Is 137 GB the largest drive that is likely to work with this laptop or are there any tricks that could overcome this.   E.G. a drive that works in 28 bit mode and appears as two separate drives.