Dell Inspiron 3500

Dell Inspiron 3500 Harddrive

So I'm hoping to replace the 2.5" 6Gb drive with a 60Gb 7200RPM drive. Hopefully a super fast drive will offset the 256Mb maximum RAM of the Inspiron 3500, by allowing a Gig or two of relatively fast swap. But before I buy I've been trying to check out if the machine will actually support this. Hunting around I found that the latest bios for the machine is a PhoenixBios A14 (search www.dell.com). But I could not find any specifications or limitations to either this bios or the motherboard. A very long phone call to dell support in norway (pleasantly surprised to not receive the "out of warranty, can't help you" line for once) going through every department twice eventually turned out to be somewhat fruitful. That only the Operating system would limit the machine. I don't think that's a problem for linux. Let's see how it goes...

Update. The following forum threads helped tremendously:

• Does Inspiron 3500 BIOS release A14 support large harddrives?
• hard drive Upgrade for Inspiron 3500? (has stuff about increasing RAM above 256Mb too!!)
• Bay-Wolf also has excellent information for Dell Inspiron & Lattitudes. Read an email from Bay-Wolf about my concerns.

Update: After updating to PhoenixBiosA14 both the RAM and the harddrive was recognised! I booted Gentoo LiveCD 1.4 and created 4 primary partitions with fdisk, and restarted the machine. The harddrive would no longer respond dumping error 0x40 and { UnrecoverableError }. Googling revealed nothing but advice to throw the disk out. I don't think so… Booting with Windows installation CDs didn't help either. I got it solved with the Ultimate Boot CD from Sigurd full of harddisk tools, it also contained a utility program to enable the firmware S.M.A.R.T checking on the drive.

Update: I've tried 3 times now to install from a Gentoo LiveCD, and everytime I reboot the machine (it actually ran out of juice during one attempt) the new Hitachi TravelStar drive becomes completely ruined. I've been a faithful Reiser3 filesystem fan, running it successfully on 4 different machines now, but it seemed to be the culprit on this new drive. After disabling the S.M.A.R.T feature of the harddrive and going back to ext3 filesystem everything seems to be going ok. touch wood… I just completed the Gentoo installation and will take a image of the disk to save time if the disk crashes again and I become too tempted to send it back… I did have some problems again (had to kill the machine) during trying to get Xorg-x11 configured, running fschk fixed the drive with losing only a few files (I had to emerge baselayout and pango again). I wondering if the large cache on the new harddrive contains critical unwritten information and is not getting flushed on abrupt power-outs. Maybe

hdparm -f /dev/hda

dell forums

#!/bin/sh
while [ true ]
do
 touch /root
 sleep 0.01m
done

I also found these good links for Linux on Dell Inspiron 3500:

• Petr Hlineny
• Fred
• Kal Ng
• Alexander Koller
• Zolan's Lair
• James Strandboge, older version (w/ useful ACPI info)

Power Management Guide

And the original Dell Inspiron 3500 Support page.