Solved Western Digital Cavier Green 1Tb reading as 33.4MB

[orblitzer]

Hi all,
I recently plugged a Western Digital Cavier Green (Model WDC WD10EADS-11M2B1) into an old motherboard (Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G) and noticed that the Hard drive capacity had shrunk from 1000GB to 33.4MB
Apparently, the Gigabyte motherboard has an Xpress Recovery
BIOS. The BIOS writes a backup copy of itself to the top end of the
drive and then hides itself in a small HPA. Unfortunately there is a bug
in the BIOS which incorrectly adjusts the drive's capacity. This
results in 1TB drives being truncated to 31/32/33MB, 1.5TB are reduced
to 500GB, and 2TB drives shrink to 1TB.

So after reading this I attempted to recover the capacity using a collection of tools called Hirens Boot CD, but no luck,

If ANYONE has any advice of how could I restore them back to 1000GB (This happened twice, also on a Samsung 1TB HDD) please reply as this is 2000GB of space I desperately need!!!

Thank you all in advanced

 

[indianacarnie]

Have you tried updating the bios? Some older MB's have trouble with larger drives.

 

[jumanji]

Hi all,
I recently plugged a Western Digital Cavier Green (Model WDC WD10EADS-11M2B1) into an old motherboard (Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G) and noticed that the Hard drive capacity had shrunk from 1000GB to 33.4MB......

More info please:

1. Is it a new drive or plugged out from another PC?

2. If you plugged it out from another PC, how was it used in it - as a system drive or a second drive?

3. Was it showing full capacity in its previous location either as a system drive or a secondary drive?

4. What is your intention of shifting it into an old motherboard? In other words, is it going to be the system drive on the old motherboard or is it going to be the second drive?

5. If your old PC already has an OS installed- that is if you are going to use this drive as a secondary drive - what Windows edition and bit version is it?

 

[Britton30]

Go to the Gigglebbyte support site for the board, download the correct BIOS and follow their instructions and flash the BIOS yourself without using their silly Xpress Recovery, I've found it to be worthless.

 

[jumanji]

As the OP orblitzer has rightly said in his first post, it is a bug in the bios that truncates the size of the disk.

As Britton30 rightly said updating to the latest bios that would have hopefully fixed the bug is a must.

That however is not going to undo the truncation that had already taken place. That space will still remain unhidden and Windows 7 will not see it.

In order to remove the Host Protected Area and regain the full size, the OP has to use either HDAT2 or HDD Capacity Restore.

HDAT2 has to be run from a bootable CD/pendrive and an in-situ repair is possible.

http://www.hdat2.com/download.html

http://www.hdat2.com/files/cookbook_v11.pdf

Actual User experience: http://blog.gleonard.com/2011/07/gigabyte-xpress-recovery-and-host-protected-area/

For using HDD Capacity Restore which is a Windows program, the HDD has to be plugged in as the secondary drive on a Windows 7 32bit system.(64bit not supported)

http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity/ Do read till the end.

So over to you, orblitzer and let us hear whether this helped you.

I remain,

jumanji.

 

[orblitzer]

All fixed

Hi guys, sorry for the late reply been abit caught up with study
Both hard drives are now fixed

As indianacarnie said, updating the BIOS should fix it which it has,
The motherboard can now read The hard drives without shrinking them

As for the Two hard drives - I downloaded a free collection of tools called Hirens Boot CD (Download Hirens BootCD v15.2 (freeware) - AfterDawn: Software downloads)

and booted the "Seagate tools" (even though the hard drives were not Seagate it still worked
Then under the menu of the grapical interface chose to "Reset capacity" to default allocation size

This then reset the two hard drives to 1TB

Thankyou all for you're help and hope this information will help others with the same problem!!!

 

[jumanji]

Good to know that using Seagate's Disgnostic/repair Utility on a non-Seagate HDD, you were able to restore the drives to their full capacity. Well done and thanks for sharing that information.

EDIT: Please mark the thread as solved so that it may be of help to others looking for solutions.

 

[beaker]

SeaTools

Thanks for posting this. I found that the latest version of Hiren's disk to be overkill for accessing SeaTools. I also found that SeaTools for Windows does not work. I downloaded SeaTools for Dos from Seagate's website. It is much smaller than Hiren's Boot CD. It worked perfectly, even though I burned it to a DVD (a failing of Hiren's).