Older Dell XPS Upgrade Bios bsod 320 gb hdd

[wayout2day]

Customer brought in the massive "laptop" Dell's original Inspiron XPS. This PC had been blue screening on occasion. Eventually, the HDD died. He insisted on replacing it with a 320 GB IDE by Western Digital.

1. The IDE HDD faces the 137 GB limit.
2. I made a 137 GB partition.
3. My attempts to reinstall Windows XP have been met with success, and then blue screen.
IRQL_NOT_LESS and some others. The error messages are not the same each time.

4. The PC actually shut down on its own, but only once.

The BIOS shows as A01. DELL shows a bios download of A06.

I am about to try to track down the driver errors using MS methods that follow the IRQL error.

Questions:

1. If I upgrade the bios, will the A06 upgrade take care of the bios upgrades A02 thru A05 ?

2. Can I upgrade the bios further to maybe A09 (not listed on the Dell page for this PC)
--so that I can use the rest of the IDE HDD ?

3. Would installing Win 7 take care of the driver errors that cause the BSOD ?

thanks...will keep surfing the net to find a solution....

 

[munkle]

Questions:

1. If I upgrade the bios, will the A06 upgrade take care of the bios upgrades A02 thru A05 ?

2. Can I upgrade the bios further to maybe A09 (not listed on the Dell page for this PC)
--so that I can use the rest of the IDE HDD ?

3. Would installing Win 7 take care of the driver errors that cause the BSOD ?

thanks...will keep surfing the net to find a solution....

1. Yes
2. If it's not listed how can you update it further? Only use the bios on the page for the laptop, any other bios will either not install with dells updater or if it does it will brick the laptop.
3. Depends, I would run a memtest I have had that error before from both drivers and bad memory. Also some older hardware doesn't have drivers for win 7.

 

[wayout2day]

thanks for the quick reply. As a note, I rebooted, got to the desktop, and BSOD with 0x0000008e error.

 

[wayout2day]

running MemTest.....errors are appearing...will post after completion of the test...Would this be the reason for BSOD ?

 

[munkle]

running MemTest.....errors are appearing...will post after completion of the test...Would this be the reason for BSOD ?

Yes, if there are errors they can cause bsods, does the laptop have two sticks of ram installed or just one? If it has two try each stick individually to rule out both being bad, I would replace the defective stick and update the bios and you should be able to use all of the 320gb hard drive and not get anymore bsods.

 

[wayout2day]

screen shot shows the MemTest results....I haven't a lot of experience with this program, so I will have to look up what this all means....I have to figure out how to post the screen shot...lol....anyway..Test #7 shows 29 errors...There are two memory sticks. 3 errors per Memory Slot. Bits in error: Total 32 Min: 3 Max 19 Avg: 14 Error Confidence value: 122 pass: 65% Test: 53% 1 GB of Ram. Guessing that both sticks need to be replaced.... any other hints ?

 

[wayout2day]

Yes, if there are errors they can cause bsods, does the laptop have two sticks of ram installed or just one? If it has two try each stick individually to rule out both being bad, I would replace the defective stick and update the bios and you should be able to use all of the 320gb hard drive and not get anymore bsods.

Really, this should take care of the 137 GB limit ? I hope so....I will repost on this after replacing the RAM.

 

[munkle]

Really, this should take care of the 137 GB limit ? I hope so....I will repost on this after replacing the RAM.

It should if dell updated the bios to support larger drives, which I would expect they did with that many revisions, but it is not a guarantee. The bios update should do this not the ram replacement.

It's kind of weird that both sticks would go bad, it can happen but you could have a bad motherboard. Do you have a good spare stick you can put in and take both the bad sticks out to test if you get errors on the good spare stick?

 

[wayout2day]

These RAM sticks are kind of unique. I searched here at the shop without success. I did find some thru a supplier listing on eBay. He responded to my note that he has the 64x64 match.

The bios upgrade, tho....the notes do not state that A06 allows for larger hard drives. I had created a 137 GB partition to use. I wonder if the PC sees this as a problem -- thus the BSOD.

Thanks all...will report to client that Memory needs to be replaced, based upon MemTest results and update this posting in the future.

Any further comments are welcome.

 

[wayout2day]

UPDATE: Just in case anyone following this.... Updated the Bios to A06....did it direct download from Dell...went smoothly.

client decided to go with 2 GB of RAM... so this came and I installed with no hassle.

No more BSOD...yet at least.

But, PC would not recognized more than 137 GB of HDD...so we will just live with using a portion of the 320 GB HDD...live and learn, but got a good HDD...