[plug] [OT] HP notebook Pavilion 3350 IDE drive size

[Chris Caston]

Hello,

I've just been upgrading this old girl and getting her ready for a nice
clean Debian Sarge install. 

It came with 128mb RAM in 2x 64mb chips and I've replaced one of them
with a 256mb pc133 SDRAM notebook ram chip and I suspect it will happily
take a second one. 

So far, however, I haven't been as lucky with the HD. I tried installing
a 2.5" 5400rpm 40gb Hitachi and the machine just froze on the detecting
IDE drives message at boot and would not let me enter setup. 

It did however work with a 10gb IBM HD. I'm not satisfied with 10gb
however and want to run it with my 40gb Hitachi drive.   


There is a document on updating the BIOS at:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&cc=us&docname=c00026926&product=59495&dlc=en&lang=en

The only driver available seems to be on this page.
The odd thing is it only lists it under Windows 95 but the laptop has a
"designed for Windows 98" sticker
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?dlc=en&lc=en&product=59495&lang=en&cc=us&os=19&softwareitem=ob429en

So I worry that it may even be a BIOS update that resolves issues when
using the laptop with Windows 95 rather than giving me a larger HD
capacity option.

The page says:

 Release Date: 2001-06-04           Version: 1.21 

HP Pavilion Notebook N3310, N3330, N3350, N3370, N34XX Bios


The current BIOS on the system says:

 DI.M1.12

1982-1999 Insyde software
Build time 11/11/1999

Any idea if this will likely allow me to use larger drives? 

Do 2.5" HD's have a "limit drive capacity to 32gb" clip by any chance?

regards,

Chris Caston