Question about upgrading laptop hard drive?

When you install the OS you should be able to partition the drive at this point. Have you tried plugging in the drive to see if the computer recognizes it?

Hi,

Go into Disk Management and see if there is any free space. You can create a partition in that free space and use it. You can also see if there is another partition using the space.

Read the post again... we have a fried drive and want to introduce a new drive with concerns that the bios is only able to handle a 32 gig drive.

The 32 gig drive size barrier may not actually be a barrier with your computer. There are several incarnations of the barrier, one being a limitation in win95 and fat32 drives, another being XP’s being able to mount fat32 drives over 32 gigs but it can’t format fat32 drives over 32gigs and yet another that applies only to a very limited number of computers using a particular award bios. If you haven’t tried to format it NTFS with the manufacturer’s utility, I’d try that before anything. Several folks on the forum have upgraded successfully from 6 gig drives to 40 gig drives, bypassing several possible drive barriers. If it doesn't work, you can set it up as 2 partitions

Sorry so late in replying. First off when I installed the new drive and powered up the screen went to DOS and said 'No OS found'. I'm taking this to mean that I need to install my OS and then partition my drive or format my drive at this point.

Yep. Put the Windows XP disk in and let it boot from that disk. It will then take you to a place where you can partition. Read carefully and the partitioning should be a breeze.

Thanks for your help, I will start there.