trubleshooting a laptop

Wed Apr 3 22:12:02 UTC 2013

On 2013-04-03 17:39 (GMT-0400) Douglas Pollard composed:

>          WEll guys this didn't turn out anything like i expected. She
> I installed Ubuntu and it says
> the hard drive is failing. I took it to the Geek Squad to run some
> diagnostics on it.  The guy said if Linux says the hard drive is failing
> it likely is.  I have to buy a hard drive  and it is an  IDE drive so
> they seem to be more expensive now.  I will likely find one used or
> rebuilt.  I will also have to put in a new battery.  The machine has
> Windows 7 in it and I will want it to be a dual boot machine with Ubuntu
> on it. It has a 80 gig drive and I would like to put something bigger in
> it.  Maybe a 150 gig drive The machine is a Dell Inspiron  6000. Does
> anyone have any idea if it can use a drive that big.  I want to use it
> on my sailboat and I don't really want to spend a lot of money on a new
> one to be eaten up by moisture.  Any advice anyone can give will be
> appreciated.

Even if the laptop's BIOS limit is 128G, you can still use a larger HD. By making boot and root partitions for Linux and Windows fit entirely below 128G, you can always boot either OS, then depend on the OS drivers to 
access the rest of the HD for data. If it's so old as to have a 64G limit, you could make a small /boot partition for Linux and still give the Windows OS partition 60G. The rest of the HD would be usable via the OS 
drivers. Even Windows can boot from a small partition and run from a larger one sitting beyond the reach of an ancient BIOS.

If indeed you have a BIOS size limit, with an advanced format HD (4096 byte sectors, as with a recent HD of 500G or more), you'd be best off partitioning to advanced format standards and making both Linux and Windows boot 
from small partitions at the front of the HD. 64 head/32 sector advanced alignment makes the BIOS reachable portion of a HD required for booting rather small.
-- 
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