artbrooks -

I'll have to look some stuff up, but the quick question is whether it's a desktop or laptop. If it's a laptop, the internal space may not have allowed for a larger drive when it was built, and they may have buggered "customized" the BIOS in a way that does limit availability of larger internal drives. If it's a desktop, even if they left out the goodies to support larger drives, you should be able to get a BIOS update from the chip maker. That may be a more major change than you want to tackle; but it should be the sort of thing that can be done if you want to.

Updating the BIOS is a fairly major step, and it must be done exactly according to instructions, but it's not really all that difficult IF there's an update available.

I have an old Dell Latitude laptop with a 30GB plug-in HD, and I can't get a much larger plug-in (internal) HD from Dell, but it has no problem with my several 160GB USB External drives.

John