New hard drive in VAIO VGN FJ1S

[kodanda]

Hi,

I have been using my sony VAIO VGN-FJ1S/W for three years. The hard disk that came with this note book is of 80GB SATA. I recently bought a 500 GB SATA disk which I wanted to replace with the old one.

Before the replacement, I have upgraded the BIOS to the latest version available through VAIO update.

(1) However, the BIOS detects the drive as 132 GB only.

(2) I could not use my recovery disks to install WinXP. When I put the recovery disk and power on the notebook, it displays "Setup is checking for your hardware..." which QUICKLY disappears. A blank black screen stays forever and the DVD will not spin nor the keyboard respond.

Q1. How to get the hard disk detected correctly in the BIOS?

Q2. Is the problem 2 related to problem 1?

thanks in advance.

Sincerely,
kodanda

[Blencogo]

Hi kodanda and welcome.

Check the specifications of your model and your old hard disc. It appears to me that the FJ1S Vaios have an IDE (Parallel) ATA hard drive - not SATA. I think the FJ3S had the SATA drive.

Older Versions of XP use FAT32 formatting which can only recognise up to 137GB of drivespace. You need to have the drive formatted NTFS and to be using one of the following Windows versions: -

Windows XP Home Service Pack 1 (SP1) or higher
Windows XP Professional SP1 or higher
Windows 2000 Professional SP3 or higher
Windows 2000 Server SP3 or higher

If your Windows XP is pre-SP1 you will have to install a slipstreamed version with SP2 included - you cannot install the older version.

I would not expect a Vaio produced in the last five years to have any size restriction in the BIOS

[kodanda]

Hi Blencogo,

Thanks for your reply.

Check the specifications of your model and your old hard disc. It appears to me that the FJ1S Vaios have an IDE (Parallel) ATA hard drive - not SATA.  I think the FJ3S had the SATA drive.

My hard disc is SATA. I have checked it. The connections clearly show that it is SATA. I agree that the sony website shows IDE for this model (at least the europe site). Here is my configuration:

ftp://ftp.acomp.hu/pub/SONY%20PDF/FJ1S/fj1s_en_spring2006.pdf

To convince you more, I have inserted my new hard disk, put a Kubuntu 9.04 installation CD and went until disc partitioning. There I see that it shows complete ~460 GB. Since the new kernels bypass the BIOS, I guess this is fine. I did not install Kubuntu, just checked it.

Older Versions of XP use FAT32 formatting which can only recognise up to 137GB of drivespace. You need to have the drive formatted NTFS and to be using one of the following Windows versions: -

My new hard drive is formatted as NTFS. Also the older drive is formatted as NTFS for all partitions including recovery partition.

Windows XP Home Service Pack 1 (SP1) or higher
Windows XP Professional SP1 or higher
Windows 2000 Professional SP3 or higher
Windows 2000 Server SP3 or higher

My factory installed WinXP has SP2.

I would not expect a Vaio produced in the last five years to have any size restriction in the BIOS.

The latest BIOS update is from 2006. There are no BIOS updates from VAIO website afterwards. I used Phonex technologies, web scanner to detect the BIOS version and it says that there is an update. It does not provide the BIOS updates for free, I have to pay like $30 for an yearly subscription of BIOS updates which is a lot for me as I am a student.

Any more ideas and solutions from this input?

thanks in advance,

kodanda