Replacing hard drive VGN-BX396XP

[mintongary]

My laptop has a 120gb hard drive, which is not now sufficient for my needs. It is a Toshiba MK1234GSX and my intention is to replace it with a Hitachi Travelstar 320GB with a spin speed of 7200. I think the old drive is 5400?

I enquired at PC world as to the compatibility of the HDD and they said that some Vaio's impose a limit on the size of the drive, via the BIOS. Is this correct.

Though originally loaded with XP I upgraded to Vista shortly after purchase, via express upgrade. Since then I have installed Windows 7 pro, if that is of any relevance.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Blencogo]

Many laptops sold with XP installed before SP1 was released have a 137GB hard drive upper limit - this representing the maximum available sector addresses using 28-bit Logical Block Addressing.  However, since XP SP1, 48-bit LBA has been activated and the 137GB limit does not apply.

Your BX396XP was originally released with XP Pro SP2 installed so it should be OK to fit any size SATA hard drive.

[mintongary]

Thanks Blencogo, i'll go ahead and start the install. Out of interest is it best just to do a clean install of Windows 7 or is it better to perhaps revert it back to its delivery state and work through the upgrade to Vista and then Windows 7. I have made a copy of the drive via a back up and do, of course, still have the original hard drive.

I do know that Sony do not support an upgrade to W7 and that the upgrade is not very straightforward!!