Lee Studley's solution.
02.15.2008 at 08:38PM MST, ID: 20907996
******SOLUTION******:This website and faq pretty much sums up what I've been experiencing.
http://www.48bitlba.com
http://www.48bitlba.com/faq.htm
My
current hypothesis is the 137gig limit in the bios, in coordination
with the XP SP2's ability to go above 137gigs. Using acronis I was able
to transfer upgrade( awhile back ) from an 80gig drive to this 160gig
drive. All was well until these issues popped up. I think as the drive
utililization grew, I started having problems with my bios's lack of
LBA48( >137 gig ) support. It's almost like I'm getting address
aliasing/wrap around problems after the drive started filling up. For
the Inspiron 8500 there is no bios yet that handles LBA48 correctly, so
I downsized my partition to 100gigs using Disk Manager and all seems to
be well so far. If you search on this problem, it seems it's common on
a lot of laptops that were made before 2004 and/or people not updating
their bios. I've not heard this solution, so I hope it gets
investigated more. I welcome comments on this !! -Lee
******SOLUTION******:This website and faq pretty much sums up what I've been experiencing.
http://www.48bitlba.com/faq.htm