Unfortunately I own a Toshiba Satellite notebook. My hard drive has recently developed some bad segments and I have been told that once that happens the hard drive is on its way out. The machine is out of warranty and I was looking at buying a hard drive. The current hard drive is 40 GB @ 4200 RPM.

I would like to upgrade to a larger and faster hard drive if possible. I was told once about a year ago by Toshiba that the BIOS would not support a drive larger than 60 GB if I remember correctly. I called Toshiba today and since my machine is out of warranty they want $35 for an answer so I figured I would come here first.

Is there a way to find out what the BIOS supports without paying the $35?

If it did only support 60 GB, if I got an 80 GB and partitioned into to 40's would that work?

Thanks for the help.

What's the model number of your Satellite and what series does it belong to?

I believe you can use a tool called AIDA32 to find out the kind of BIOS, motherboard, RAM, etc. that your laptop has!

Its a Toshiba Satellite 1905-s303.

It is a Phoenix Bios but when you go into the BIOS screen you can't really do too much.

I have the model lower than yours (Satellite 1900), but it has a 30 gig drive... When I called to get drivers for it (my warranty is expired), they helped me out without charging me...

Anyways, I've done some digging around on the Toshiba Support website and this is what I found based on your model number (yours is actually on the list, unlike mine):

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su...Model&x=18&y=14

I see some BIOS updates on there. You might want to take a look.

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su...gngdglj.0&ct=DL <-- Latest one

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su...modItemList.jsp <-- List of BIOS Updates

Actually this is the latest one:

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su...gngdglj.0&ct=DL

That's not for your model! Flashing the wrong BIOS on the wrong computer WILL cause many problems!

Yes it is for my model. It is listed on the website for the s301 but if you download it and look at the directions it lists models 301 to 304 or 5 whatever they go up to.

People make mistakes... One of those people is myself... Oh well!

Good luck!

There is no different between a 30gig and a 60gig drive for laptops.

You can pick up a nice 7200 40 gig drive for about $140. Bios won't have anything to do with it until you get into the big storage hard drives, but then again they don't have them for laptops so no worries.

You might also look into upgrading your CPU, I did.

If it would work I was thinking about an 80 GB 5400 unit.

That is why I am trying to find out if my BIOS will not support larger than 60 GB if I partition the 80 GB in half if that would work.

:offtopic:
why the heck does toshiba still put 4200 & 5400 rpm hdd in their laptops?
one of the 1st things I consider is the speed of the hdd. if u have p4 3.2e and 4200 rpm hdd u can't really get the performance out of it! come on toshiba!!!

Biggest battle for laptop makers has and always will be heat issues so they stick top notch hardware in the system but then throw a crappy 4200 or 5200 in the thing.

Doesn't make sense....I just rip it all out and redo it anyways.

I was under the impression that it had the 5400rpm drive in it until I removed it from the unit and looked at it.

Another thing is that this unit is almost two years old. I think 4200rpm drive was the base model drive. I would bet that the 5400rpm dirve was optional from some notebook manufacturers.

I don't even know if there were and 2.5" 7200rpm drives out at that time.

This will be the last Toshiba product I buy that is for sure though.