Hard Drive detection in System bios Dell Inspiron 8600

The wrong Size HDD that is too big for BIOS to recognize.

You need to remember that Dell only make things as good as the hardware needs to be and no better so if the system came fitted with an 80 GIG HDD then you will not be able to increase that by much if at all. You'll need to look up the Options available from Dell for this Model to see what was the biggest HDD available direct from Dell but at a guess I would think that it would be 80 GIG as the next size up 120 GIG didn't become available for quite some time after the 80 GIG Drives where introduced.

Also have you checked the function of the Old HDD? It's possible that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the drive but the M'Board Controller has failed which will result in the same message. As far as finding the BIOS Setting for HDD's that should be on the first BIOS Screen with the Time Date and fitted Hardware. If there is nothing there look at the Dell Supplied Manual to see where the HDD setting in BIOS is or even if there is one and that BIOS does not just Auto Detect what is attached to it.

Col

Your system should detect the hard drive attached regardless of the capacity. If motherboard doesn't support the full capacity attached, it should still recognise the HDD and give you the supported size to play.

Check your HDD jumper setting, and upgrade your Bios carefully, it'll also enable you to add some extra memory if you like.

Regards-Naveed