Hard Drive Problem - 500 GB Disk - only 371 GB un-allocated space ??

jumanji · 27 Jul 2013

In your case, it is crystal clear that 372.49 GB indicates that it was used on a Mcintosh, and the manufacturer of the PC had created the HPA wherein resides the image of the OS for recovery or whatever..

So the problem is due to HPA and not a corrupted MBR. And so it is no wonder that the HDD LLF tool did not touch the HPA. ( that is one of my favourite programs which I always use to zero my pen drives and recommend.)

Glad to know that you have seen the Atola blog Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity » Official Atola Technology Blog ( I had mentioned this in one of my posts here long back and infact my recommendation to you is based on it. :))

Honestly, I haven't come across any way to run the 32bit Capacity Restore Tool from outside Windows. I also do not know why the masters Atola do not have a 64 bit tool. May be there are some practical technical difficulties. Otherwise they would have made it.

May be an alternate way is to hide your 64 bits system partition, install 32bit Windows on another small partition just to run this tool once. Once you accomplish the task, you may revert your system back.

I may request other experts here to guide you on this, if you want to take that route.

tommyg562000 · 28 Jul 2013

Perhaps you could use VMware player to create a 32 bit windows 7 virtual machine and run the program from there.

BigFatBoy · 30 Jul 2013

jumanji,

I wanted to let you know I followed your instructions regarding my hard drive with a displayed reduced capacity. HDAT2 did show that a partition of 100.2GB was hidden on the drive. HDAT2 also easily removed the partition's hidden status and displayed the full capacity after I ran HDAT2 to set the Max address. The biggest problem I encountered was..*EDIT: confusing the CD drive letter when HDAT2 displayed the A:\ command prompt>. Of note, I may not have tried the software had it not been for the HDAT2 guidance document which I found indispensable.

thank you for your help; I would not have been able to identify the problem nor find a the solution without it.
best regards...
bfb

jumanji · 30 Jul 2013

Glad to know that you used HDAT2 and were able to reclaim the HPA.

I have to admit that though I had all the info and knowhow on dealing with the situation, I had never encountered a situation where I could have tried it and you had that opportunity. Great work.

Now I think I have to learn from you on using HDAT2.

I do not know exactly which version of HDAT2 you used but definitely there is a DOS boot CD ISO version. I faintly remember having used Rufus Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way to create a bootable pen drive with that ISO. I went as far as booting from it to run HDAT2 but as I said I had no occasion to use it. It was just a mock trial whether I could run it from a pen drive.

Good day. Cheers.