D820 Hard Drive upgrade issues. HELP!

I just got a D820 with Vista Business, a 100 gig, 7200rpm Hitachi drive, 2 gigs of RAM, Nvidia Quadro 120M video card and WUXGA display.

I decided to upgrade it right off the bat and upgrade the RAM to 4 gigs and the drive to a Hitachi 7200RPM 200 gig.

I cloned the drive with Acronis True Image 10 like I do any other machine upgrade. I swapped the drives and here's where the problem begins. First, the BIOS does see it as a 200gig drive. That's not the problem. But, after the machine posts, the screen goes black and it reboots. Posts again, reboots again, and so on until I shut the machine down. Put the original drive back in, vista loads up fine.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Buster

 

You might have to set the active partition on the 200GB disk. Acronis often does not do this. Do you have recovery CDs/DVDs from Dell?

 

yes I have the recovery CDs from Dell but I've spent this entire week since I got the machine customizing it and tweeking Vista. I hate to start over from scratch unless I must. How do I view and set the active partition in Acronis?

Thanks!

 

I decided to look in disk management at the 2 drives (I have the new one connected via a USB device right now in case i need to make changes to it) and see what I could tell from there. The original disk under the OS partition has in parantheses (system,boot,Page File,Active,Crash Dump, Primary Partition). The new disk under the OS partition has (Active, Primary Partition). Is there anything missing from the description under the new drive that should be there if it's configured correctly?

Thanks!

 

Insert the 200GB hard drive and boot from the Dell recovery DVD. But dont install Vista again but just tell it to repair your computer. Hope that will fix it.

Here is a short guide if you need it:

http://vistasupport.mvps.org/vista_dvd_repair_your_computer_options.htm

 

Man if it's that easy I'm gonna be very happy and thankful. I'll give that a spin.

Thanks!

 

That worked like a champ. Thanks!

 

how do you like the laptop... lookin good now?

 

I like it. I'm still not caring for Vista very much but had the choice between it and XP and chose vista so i could learn it well enough to be able to support it.

Overall, a nice machine. Vista tends to make it thrash the hard drive a good bit for a couple of minutes after start up, obviously trying to load all it's Vista crap. I've tweeked it a little and helped it alot. I was hoping this new drive would solve that since it's got a 16mb cache, in conjuction with my 4 gigs of RAM but it doesn't seem to have helped that issue. I think I'll have to tweak more to solve the thrashing on startup.

I do wish it had a memory card reader built in like my Gateway has but I guess I can get over that and carry an external reader everywhere I go.

Besides the fingerprint reader, it has the best of every option available and I could add that to it for $39 by just replacing the plastic surrounding the keyboard. Don't really care about having it though.

I've read a complaint on here that someone thought the display was bland and lacked clarity. I'll say that's untrue with the WUXGA mine has. There is a low quality WXGA, and then a middle grade display so it's important to be sure which one you order.

My gateway has a glossy appearance to the screen whereas this one has a flat sheen. I like the flat sheen better b/c it doesn't reflect lights and windows as does the glossy. The glossy made it "appear" as if it had a better/nicer display than it really did.

Anyway, that's my review.

Buster