Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity
by Dmitry PostriganThis article is a complete guide on recovering your hard drive’s factory capacity. At the end of this article there is a link to our program that recovers factory capacity of any hard drive.
“My hard drive has mysteriously became smaller! How can I restore its full capacity?”
There are several common reasons of why your hard drive might lose some megabytes or even gigabytes:
- Your Operating System does not support LBA48 addressing mode
- You are mixing binary and decimal gigabytes
- Your motherboard has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the BIOS binaries
- Your PC/Laptop manufacturer has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the Operating System installation files (needed for automatic restore functionality)
- You have used some software that sets HPA (Host Protected Area), messes with DCO (Device Configuration Overlay), or switches off LBA48 support
- You have misplaced a jumper on the drive
- There was Magic involved
Now I will go through these things one-by-one and provide some more details.
Operating System does not support LBA-48 addressing mode
Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME will not support big drives (>137GB) even if you install all hotfixes. There are ways to get around this problem, but since these Operating Systems are rather rare nowadays, I do not see the point of writing about them.
Windows 2000, 2003 and XP do not support big drives by default; you will have to install the latest service pack in order to get big drives working properly on these OS.
Windows Vista does not have any issue with big drives.
Binary and decimal gigabytes
Hard drive manufacturers use decimal gigabytes while operating systems use binary gigabytes. One decimal gigabyte contains
Motherboard creates HPA
Motherboard can create a so-called “Host protected area” on your hard drive to store its data. Usually this area is not bigger than 10 megabytes, so there is nothing to worry about.
PC/Laptop manufacturer creates HPA
Manufacturer of your PC can create a “Host protected area” on your hard drive to store an image of the original operating system and programs. This area is used when you want to restore the original state of your desktop PC or laptop without using CD/DVD disks. Usually this area is quite large (8-20 GB).
In this case, to restore the original capacity of the hard drive with the HDD Capacity Restore tool that we include in this article, you may need to remove the hard drive out of its original PC/laptop and temporary attach it to another PC. This is needed because most BIOSes will disable HPA/DCO operations to ensure that nothing can reset or damage that hidden area.
Software that has the ability to control HPA and DCO
For example, MHDD. This software allows you to set a Host protected area on your hard drive, so the hard drive will report less capacity to both BIOS and Operating System. MHDD can also access DCO (Device Configuration Overlay), and that allows you to not only change hard drive’s capacity, but also switch some hard drive functions, such as LBA48 support, Security commands support and others.
Some manufacturers (for example, Dell and HP) use DCO to reduce capacity for marketing needs. Example: they need to ship 1000000 computers with 40GB hard drives, but they only have 80GB drives in stock. They will use their own DCO tools to lock capacity to 40GB.
Jumper settings that limit hard drive capacity
Most hard drives have a special jumper setting that allows you to limit their capacity to either 32 or 128 (137) gigabytes.
Magic cases
These include things like HDD firmware bugs (believe me, there are plenty of them).
Also, sometimes a damaged Master Boot Record may cause the BIOS and/or the Operating System to misdetect the true hard drive capacity. In this case you would need to use a zero-fill tool.
Sometimes a very broken hard drive may report wrong capacity. In this case there is nothing you can do about that.
Solutions. Restoring factory capacity
1. Check jumpers. Consult with manufacturer’s instructions and set jumpers to the proper position.
2. Check your OS, does it have all updates installed?
3. Check disk partitions. Run Windows Disk Management console and see if there is any free space that is not used by any partition.
4. If steps 1—3 did not help, then we have a very cool tool that analyzes your hard drive’s LBA48, HPA and DCO status and recovers factory settings (see below).
HDD Capacity Restore Tool
We’ve came up with a freeware tool that handles LBA48 mode setting as well as HPA and DCO features. It does everything automatically: it extracts the factory capacity; then it restores the factory LBA48, HPA and DCO settings.
Download HDD Capacity Restore Tool.
All you have to do is to run it and click “Restore Capacity”. The program will do the rest.
Update May 24, 2008: Many people ask if this this tool formats the hard drive and/or erases the data. No, it does not perform any kind of formatting; furthermore it does not read from or write to the user data area at all (including partition tables, boot records, etc). It only alters HDD firmware (HPA and DCO settings).
I strongly recommend to re-power your computer before running this tool. That means, completely power off your computer; then power on, start Windows and run the tool.
If the tool fails to restore the original capacity, then the most common reason is that your motherboard is blocking HPA and DCO commands. You can check that by running BIOS Setup and looking for things like “DCO” or “HPA”. If nothing helps, try on another computer. If you are brave enough, you can also try the following: run the program, select your hard drive, and then when you see the “Restore Capacity” button, re-power your hard drive by detaching and re-attaching its power cable. Warning: you are doing this at your own risk!
After the program finishes working (3—20 seconds), you will need to power off your PC, then wait 10—20 seconds and then power on.
I believe I’ve covered everything. If I am missing anything, you are very welcome to leave a comment :)
Good luck!
July 26th, 2007 at 5:26 am
Well, on my system it detects the PATA drive and the SATA controllers (nForce4), but not the SATA drives.
July 26th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Ouroborus,
If HDD Capacity Restore does not see hard drives attached to S-ATA ports, then first of all I’d try to go into BIOS setup and locate S-ATA settings. There has to be a way to switch S-ATA ports into “Normal” or “Compatible” or “Legacy” mode (as opposed to “Native”). This should resolve the issue.
Dmitry
August 2nd, 2007 at 2:28 pm
how do i use it on my laptop where i only have one hard drive?
will it be possible to use usb mass storage devices in the future?
August 2nd, 2007 at 2:37 pm
pedro:
Sorry, you will have to remove the hard drive from the laptop and attach it to a desktop PC. USB mass storage is not going to be supported since it simply does not allow the protocol that we are using to access the hard drive.
Dmitry
August 3rd, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Hi, just looking around your site and tried this program
one of my drives says …’locked with ATA password” what is that all about?
August 3rd, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Leonard:
Please have a look: http://blog.atola.com/hdd-security-system/
Dmitry
August 11th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Wonderful! I had a stack of WD400’s showing 20Gig and I knew better - they’re all 40G’s now thanks to this wonderful utility.
yaaaayyy!!!
August 15th, 2007 at 11:32 am
I was always led to believe that the reason a drive is set at the capacity you buy (200gig), was because this is the reliable test size for the drive.
In other words it was not reliable enough durning tests at more that the 200gig size. Therefor it gets set at 200gig and sold at that.
Also i have tried this type of restoration before using ghost, and found the drive to become very unstable in saving data. Especially getting windows delayed write errors the higher up the drive as you fill it. (back to my first paragraph).
Just my comments - good tool though. Great site.
August 15th, 2007 at 11:48 am
Steve:
This software won’t be able to give you more gigabytes than you see on the HDD sticker. It just allows you to restore that capacity in case other software or PC distributor reduced it.
Thanks
August 20th, 2007 at 1:36 am
Hi Dmitry
Have a SCSI drive MAP3367NP which formats to 4.3gb, should be 36.7gb. Tried your program, however it only sees the IDE drives not the SCSI. How can I access the SCSI? Thanks
August 20th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Hello Bill,
I am not a big SCSI guru, but SCSI hard drives have the possibility to reduce the capacity when they are being “low-level formatted”. You may try to find a software that does SCSI formatting or use your SCSI card BIOS to format the drive.
August 27th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Thanks for making and releasing this! I was removing the evil Dynamic Drive Overlay from a 120 GB IDE drive by zero-ing out the first sectors of the hard drive. That seemed to get rid of DDO, yet the BIOS still said the drive was only ~32 GB. This tool allowed me to reset the drive to its full capacity, sans DDO.
One side note: The tool requires that the drive you’re resetting be on its own IDE channel. In my case I was using a dual drive system with both drives on the primary channel, so I had to move the drive in question to be Master on the secondary channel for the tool to work its magic.
September 7th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Hello Dimitry,
I have a 250GB hard disk drive installed with 2 partititions. I took it and installed it in another pc but instead of 250GB bios and windows recognize only 33GB. I’ve tried your programm but with no luck since also that recognizes only the 33GB.
Is there a chance that I did something wrong?
Stratos
September 8th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Hello,
From your description I can be 99% sure that you’ve set “32-GB clip mode” with HDD jumpers.
Thanks
September 9th, 2007 at 1:36 am
The wise man has spoken!!!!
You’were 1000% correct.That was exactly what I did and as soon as I choose the 16-GB clip mode everything returned to normal.I’m a happy man with my 250GB hard disk drive ready for new adventures and this thanks to your advise.
Thank you
September 10th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Thank you !!!!!
I cloned a Dell 40GB to a brand new WD800…. and all I got were two 40Gb drives!!!!!!
I run your program and within 10 seconds it was 80Gb back….
It`s a pity i didn`t find it sooner… spent a horrible week
Once aganin thank you……
Sincerely
From Argentina….
September 12th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
I have a 160GB drive that was previously full of all my data, but is now appearing unformatted to windows XP SP2, and as 33GB to the BIOS.
Capacity limit jumpers aren’t set on the drive, and some recovery software has been able to find the 149GB [formatted capacity of the drive] partition, but not restore it (it can’t restore 149GB of data into 33GB of space)
Will this tool restore the drive to full capacity without damaging the existing data on the drive?
September 12th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
David,
The best way to find out is to run the program. It won’t harm the data since it does not access the “user data area” at all.
Thanks
September 13th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Thank you very very good
September 14th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Thank you!
My previously useless hard drive [mysteriously reporting to windows as 33GB unformatted instead of 160GB 80% full of stuff] has been resuscitated in two clicks by this program. I spent two weeks trying to recover the data with half a dozen programs, and purchased partition recovery software, only to find this simple program could fix my drive.
One point though, an error initially suggested I should try it on another platform, and check the BIOS for HPA settings. This was not necessary - but the error dialogue in the next version of the software should ask users to check that the drive is a) on its own channel and b) set as master on that channel, by jumper if necessary (Cable Select wasn’t working)
Brilliance!
September 23rd, 2007 at 6:46 am
I have a Western Digital 250 Gig drive that when originally installed, I think on XP with Service packs 1&2, automatically shifted to 137. I’ve been using it, but am heading into a large editing job, and while I could just go buy a big drive I hate wasting the left over part. Thing is that my OS is on this drive, and using your tool it says I must disconnect this from computer. Right now I am doing a copy of the whole C disk, OS, programs and all so I can do this, but before I commit to this can you let me know if on disconnecting the OS disk from the system then your program will not work? Or??
Thanks.
September 24th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Hello Jon,
You would have to attach this hard drive to a computer that already has a hard drive to boot from. Unfortunately, you cannot “uninstall” a hard drive your PC boots from… Once you have this drive secondary on another PC, the program should work “as advertised” :)
Thanks
Dmitry
September 28th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I had two 160GB sata hard disks (Samsung and Hitachi). After a computer
crash both of them became 137GB (in bios and xp). I tried 3 different
motherboard’s en one pci sata controller but the result was the same.
After using HDD Capacity Restore Tool I could restor the factory capacity of my hard disks.
My thanks go to Dmitry Postrigan.
October 1st, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Messed up my Toshiba 2.5, 60gb using some hard disk utilies. XP detected it as only 32gb. Couldnt get HD Capacity Restore Tool to work on USB so mounted the Toshiba on my desktop as its 2nd HD. After running your program, whoalah!!! The Toshiba back to its original 60gb :-)
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!! More power to you!!!!
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:49 pm
I tried the program I got a message ” More than one device detected on the channel with the selected device. The device has to be single on a channel”
I am on XP trying to fix a samsung 160gb drive showing on your program as
Master IDE controller Channel#0,slave 33gb.
Of course I only have one HD controller.
Any suggestions ?
thanks
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Hello,
You can try to set the hard drive as Master, that might help. Make sure that there is no other device attached to the same cable (like another hard drive or a CD/DVD drive).
Thanks
October 10th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Hi Dimitry I need some help with my disk a Maxtor 250GB SATA2, under Win-XP + P4 it shows 120 GB capacity? I instaled Service pack 1-2 and even 3, no luck? Then I downloaded and ran your Capacity restore tool, and it showed the correct HD capacity difference so far so good! Then when I clicked this warning poped up? … Device is in use and can’t be removed. Please Remove Manualy in Device Manager and try again!
I dont fully understand do I go to system-hardware-device manager and uninstall the hard disk driver or actualize it, what do I do from their? what do they mean by remove manualy?
Please help me, Thanks Ed
October 10th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
i have a Sata WD Raptor 150GB that is reported only as 137GB and a WD 40GB pata connected too. When i try to restore the Raptor’s capacity i get an error saying the device is currently in use and that i should try to remove it from the device manager. But that’s not possible since this is my main drive. The other one is blank . What should i do? thank you
October 10th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
And something else too. Since my WD Raptor is has 2 partitions (C,D), where will the 13 GB be attached ? to the first or to the second one?what will happen to my data? plz be as analytical as you can because i am totally new to this one
thanx for your help
October 11th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Ed:
It seems that the drive you are trying to recover is your boot drive. Unfortunately, this tool won’t work in this case. You would have to boot from another source (another hard drive for example).
Thanks
October 11th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Billy:
Please see my answer to Ed; the same applies to your case.
13 GB won’t get attached to any partition. You will have to run Windows Disk Manager and create a new 13 GB partition.
No data will be affected by this operation, but I cannot provide any guarantee. You should always backup important data.
Dmitry
October 14th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
any chance to be able to add a optional raid controller driver to see my raid drives? Also the sata factor….
anyways, keep up the good work!!!!
October 16th, 2007 at 1:52 am
Sorry, but RAID controllers are not going to be supported in the near future (long story). Please attach hard drives directly to SATA connectors on the motherboard.
Thanks
October 18th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
is there free tool inverse (oposite) to Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity
to reduce hdd capacity
October 18th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Of course!
Here you go:
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:29 pm
WHEN I START HDD CAPACITY RESTORE…. I JUST GET A BOX THAT SAYS “PLEASE SELECT THE DRIVE” WITH NOTHING ELSE IN THE BOX TO SELECT!!!! WHAT IS MY PROBLEM??? THANKS
October 24th, 2007 at 5:31 am
Can you elaborate on the affhdd.sys driver? Trying to make this work in a WinPE environment without any luck. Noticed there are no entries in the registry, so I assume it is all contained in the executable. Any chance on making the app more portable?
Thanks
October 25th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
You saved me !!
My new 2.5 disk had a problem during a ghost and only 110 GO appeared after. I was looking for a program able to help me and i tested at least 10 of them during one week before finding this blog.
After some problem to connect the disk to a desktop (thanks to sate-esata), my disk recovered its full capacity of 250 GO !
Thanks again
October 25th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
blawson, CDG:
Guys, this tool works only under 32-bit Windows 2000/XP/2003. Please make sure you are using the proper OS.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
IN REF TO ” I JUST GET A BOX THAT SAYS “PLEASE SELECT THE DRIVE” PROBLEM … I AM RUNNING WINDOWS XP HOME EDITION 2002.ALSO HAVE A SEAGATE BARRACUDA 7200.7 MOD. ST380013AS FIRMWARE 8.12 80 GIG SATA DRIVE THAT IS NOT WORKING –WILL NOT SHOW UP ON BOOT SCREEN {SET-UP}.THIS HAPPENED AFTER TRYING TO RESTORE FROM A GHOST BACKUP.I ABORTED THE PROCESS BEFORE COMPLETION AND SINCE THEN, ON BOOT-UP IT SOUNDS LIKE IT IS SEARCHING.IT WAS WORKING FINE BEFORE. IS THERE ANY KIND OF FACTORY JUMPER OR A FIRMWARE UTILITY OR SOMETHING TO RESET THIS DRIVE? THE PROBLEM TO ME DOESNT SEEM TO BE OF A PHYSICAL ORIGIN SINCE I HAD NO PROBLEMS BEFORE THIS HAPPENED.ANY HELP WOULD BE APPRECIATED.
October 29th, 2007 at 12:32 am
Hello guys, i`m looking for an utility for repairing HDD bad blocks, 0. sector, HDD bios settings etc……
Anybody can help me???
Thanks a lot!
October 29th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Gabor:
You can try MHDD for that purpose:
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
Please make sure you’ve read the doc before running the tool. If you get any issues with MHDD, I suggest to post in hddguru forums: http://forum.hddguru.com/
Thanks
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:32 am
THX!
My 1 TB WD10EACS HDD is now OK…
One week they functioned without problems
Then they had only 32 MB
Many programs did not succeed
November 6th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
I have 160GB hard disk with 4 partitions and VISTA is installed on the primary drive (C:) which has a capacity of 30 GB. There are few other softwares installed. I did a ‘CTRL+A’ and checked the properties in that drive which showed 12 GB is used (~18 free) but when I checked the properties on the drive it showed only 8 GB is free. Could you please let me know what could have occupied that 10 GB?
Thanks in advance.
November 9th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Hi,
I have a Sata hdd 320G installed win xp and serivce pack 2, on drive.
file system is ntfs. when i go to properties he only detecs 127G . With
disk manager he says c/ (c:) partition basic ntfs healthy(system) 128,00GB 94.89GB But underneath it says disk1 c/ (c:) 298.09GB ntfs healty(system).
Can this be resolved?
November 13th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
HI, I have a common problem. I had a seagate 250g hard drive on an older computer which required a DDO to recognize the full 250g. The computer died and I am trying to install the hard drive on a different computer. I had a problem loading win xp that is related to the DDO. I tried everything, including zeroing out the entire drive (took 24 hrs0 and the damn DDO is still there.
How do I set this hard drive up in as a second drive on another computer in order to use your program and restore the full capacity? What does it mean to install it on it’s own IDE channel?
Once I put it on it’s own IDE channel, can I boot from the primamry drive and run your program on this drive?
Thanks
November 13th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
mikey:
I am not sure what is DDO, but you are correct, you would need to install it on its own channel, and you can boot from the primary hard drive without issues.
November 16th, 2007 at 4:31 am
hi! It’s very nice of you and the tool is very useful。
I have translate this article into chinese and post it on my website(http://www.shannon-dd.com/content/view/344/60/ ),I hope that wasn’t affend you.
November 16th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
webyu: Thanks for translating this article!
However, we are Atola Technology, we are not affiliated with R-TT in any way (as stated in your article).
Thank you.
November 20th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
I tried to recover my USB HDD and the tool tells me than the capacity is 0 bits when reality it has 160 Gb. What I can do?
November 20th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Hello,
It won’t work via USB. Please attach the hard drive to an IDE or SATA connector on the motherboard…
November 24th, 2007 at 4:16 am
Thanks for the tool, my 1TB WD10EACS was showing up as only 32mb?! Got it under control now.
November 25th, 2007 at 12:22 am
Excelent Software!!!
Thank you so much for freely distributing this siftware. It is the only tool (out of 12) that I was able to get working to restore the original size of my HD.
I tried using MHDD but it kept telling me to re-power the drive. So I tried to unplug the power right before I typed y to continue, but that didnt work.
(Note: I had to do the “At your own risk” method of unplugging the power to the drive right before clicking the restore capacity button. Once I tried this it worked like a charm!)
Thanks Again,
Jo
November 25th, 2007 at 4:27 am
My computer came with a single 40 gig hard drive. I was given a brand new hard drive which did read 60 gigs when I first installed it as a secondary drive. I came up with an idea to clone my original hard drive to the newer one. After cloning the 40 gig drive to the 60 gig drive, it started to read it as a 40 gig drive also. I downloaded this tool and I am getting a message when I click on the desired hard drive, that there are two devices on a single channel. I won’t be able to run my pc with the new drive alone cause I reformatted it and it still reads only 40 gigs, when it should read 60 gigs. Can I temporarily use a cd rom IDE to run the second hard drive on? Will restoring capacity erase any data in case I want to try it on my original hard drive as well? Both hard drives are Western Digitals.
November 25th, 2007 at 4:37 am
I also forgot to ask. My brothers computer is getting and error message at start up. “Explorer.exe file missing, must reinstall windows.” He doesn’t have the windows 98 installation disk, but does have the start up disk. Is there a way I can restore it back so it will run again without having to buy an installation disk? MY pc is running Windows XP and that was my Idea to clone my drive and put it in his computer . . . it didn’t work. I know it’s an old operating system, but he would like to get his computer running again until he can afford a new computer . . . HELP!
November 25th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
I managed to get my secondary 60 gig drive (that is only reading 40 gigs) to work on it’s own channel. I ran the HDD restore program and it says that “the drive is already at full capacity” (In which I know it’s not) “no restoration is needed”. It did read 60 gigs at first before I cloned my other 40 gig drive to the 60 gig drive. Why is it saying that? What am I not doing right?
November 27th, 2007 at 12:33 am
Johnny
The issue you are experiencing is related to partitions. I have covered that in my article.
Thanks
December 2nd, 2007 at 9:14 am
My HD Capacity shows 137G in the prior to recovery, disk manager shows it to be 32G. Capacity should be 160G. When I run HDD Capacity Restore I get the following error.
“Hard drive is not accessible or damage in some way. Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform.
My PC is a dell XPS 400.
Thanks
Terry
December 2nd, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Well, I would do exactly what the program suggests… :)
December 4th, 2007 at 2:41 am
Very excellent. I have many times run into drives that insist they are smaller than the manufacturer states. Most time I have been able to reset the drives but only after considerable trial and error. Your program fixed my WD400 drive perfectly in a few minutes.
Thanks for taking the time and making it public.
December 4th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
This is amazing tool Dimitri !
A huge thank you from Spain. I spent more then 2 weeks breaking my head why my hdd showed only half of the capacity. Now I installed your tool and I got 104 Gig back!!! Thank you ! Words are not enough to express my grattitude. Keep up the good work, buddy.
Best regards,
WR
December 5th, 2007 at 10:05 am
I must echo what WR said…in my case ~30GB of irreplaceable data…and I’d been at it for 5 months, off and on. I tried every recovery program I could find. This was the first thing that even acknowledged the drive was more than 32GB. My undying gratitude, Dmitry…If I were going to have kids, I’d name one after you…maybe two.
December 6th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
whit this tool can i fixed my usb memory was 2 gb end now is 16 mgbytes end the windows say can’t not format these dirve
December 7th, 2007 at 3:02 am
Hi guys! Please help me! :( I decided to make some adjustment in the partition of my HDD using Partition Magic. Then suddenly it hang in the middle of “Moving Partition” operation. I decided to restart my PC and then the terrible thing happen. Now it keeps saying “Hard Disk Failure”. I tried every HDD Diagnostic tool i found but still I cant recover my data or even my hard drive. I even tried wiping it but it doesn’t work. One thing I noticed using HDAT2 tool is that my drive HPA is enabled and it is FROZEN. Is this the reason why i can’t wipe my HDD? Is there chance to recover my files or HDD? Please help me recover my hard drive! any help would be very much appreciated. Thank you very much!
December 7th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Dennis:
We’ve heard numerous reports about similar issues when trying to move partitions with Partition Magic.
From your description I can only suggest to bring the drive to a data recovery lab (if you need data).
December 9th, 2007 at 5:35 am
Hi Dmitry
Do you have any low-level formatting tool for USB Pen/Thumb drive or any other utility can restore a USB Pen/Drive?
Looking to have your response
Thanks,
Lonely.
December 11th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Help please. I have a Western Digital 320 GB drive that I have moved from an old PC and converted to an external drive. It is only being detected as 137 GB. I have tried everything that I could think of, Jumpers, reformat, Partition Magic, plugging in to PC via IDE and nothing has worked.
Then I discovered your tool and had hope. Unfortunately, after install (v 1.2) and running your program it does seem to be working properly. When it launches, I see a window that states “Please Select the Drive”. There is nothing else within the window (i.e., no drives to select).
The design of the window appears to look a bit different than what is pictured in your screen shot? Do I have the right version? I’m running XP SP2. Any help you can provide will be most appreciated.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:15 am
Mark:
There are several reasons why the program might fail to The easiest thing to do would be to try it on another PC.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Great tool!!!
I have a maxtor 160gb. ata.
I had to covert the device to sata (more then two ata devices).
Up till then there were no problems…. but after a format the bios could’nt see more then 33gb. After running this app. the problem was solved, even in the bios!!! And that makes me happy because I want to install linux on this device.
I allready tried everything but this option was really simple, thank for this tuterial.
jurgen
December 18th, 2007 at 1:21 am
Thanks for clearing up the mystery for me. I purchased a 320 gb hard drive and it was telling me I only had 298 gb. Your explanation put my mind at rest. I was worried there was something wrong with my new hard drive. I wont stress over the loss of such a small amount of gb. and just enjoy what I have. Thanks again!!
December 30th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
I just want to say HUGE thanks for creation of this great utility! I had Hitachi 1 TB (SATA) problem with it turning into 32 MB brick, it was on Gigabyte motherboard (recent one), appears to be a bug specific to them. Hitachi’s Feature tool was crashing when trying to enter Capacity menu, but this little great tool restored disk back to useable state and data is safe! All hail the creator of this utility! :)
January 7th, 2008 at 12:44 am
I recycled a Maxtor FireWire enclosure once and learned to my chagrin that it helpfully set MAX LBA to the LBA32 limit on my 200GB drive. Not always just software that tinkers with LBA limits…
January 7th, 2008 at 6:34 am
Thank you so much for your help. My 1TB WD10EACS was showing up as only 32mb. Used a combo of capacity restore and partition find to get all ~900 gigs back. Thank you very much for both of your great tools that you share with the world.
January 7th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
I connected my device on a single channel and ran your utility and it says it is already set to highest capacity, but when I plug it is as the master, it only reads 127 gb. I did a low-level format on this drive and reloaded xp home edition. Is there something I am missing here?
thanks, jasi
January 8th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Спасибо!!! Очень выручает эта прога. Часто приходится сталкиваться с такими проблемами по роду деятельности
January 19th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Hi. I have the new WD320 hard drive for laptops. But when I check to see how much I really have I get 298gb. What happened to the rest of the 21gbs. Why did WD say 320 on the hard drive when in reality it’s only 298gb. Is there some safe way to get the whole 320gb. Thank you. Jackie
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:03 am
Jackie: My article fully answers your question, please take some time to read it :)
(see binary/decimal section)
January 27th, 2008 at 5:03 am
I have a new 320gb Wester Digital drive which is currently only displaying 130gig under WinXP. The drive has nothing on it and has been installed on it’s on channel. When I run your program it is detecting my primary drive and the trouble one (displaying correctly as 320gb). When I attempt to use HDD Capacity Restore, it tells me the drive is in use and should be removed manually. I have done that and rebooted. The drive shows as not being in use under Device Manager, but I still receive the program message that it is in use. What can I do?
Best Regards - Kris
January 28th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Kris:
In this case the best bet would be to try it on another platform since there is obviously some sort of software or hardware interference.
Thanks
February 1st, 2008 at 1:54 am
I recently bought a new WD10EACS 1Tb WD Drive that i tried to clone with Acronis. After the clone the disk showed as a 32Mb Drive. I tried every possibe HDD Utility (boot sector editors etc.) but i was unable to see the whole 1Tb. I turned the disk back and got a new one, just to realise that after the cloning, happened the exact same thing.
A little google searching brought me here… I really really really really really really really really want to thank you… You did a great job sharing this tool with the rest of the world…. It restored my 1Tb Disk instantly.
Thank you my friend… Really thank you…
February 5th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I noticed when I used to work for a large computer manufacturer (name withheld) that if they had a large order for smaller capacity drives but only had larger sizes they would alter firmware to force a “step down” to the size they needed… talk about a waste!
What I wonder is could this be portableized to run from a USB key or the like?
February 7th, 2008 at 2:54 am
I do not see any problem putting this tool on a USB stick or something similar…
February 7th, 2008 at 5:59 am
I tried thinstalling the thing is it says affhdd.sys (driver not found).
*Note: By portable I mean running without installation prefferable single file operation
February 10th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Hello Dmitry.
I have a Seagate ST380021A 80gig hard drive with Windows 2000 SP3 (or it is SP4?) installed on it. Several days ago it started crashing the machine and dissappearing from the BIOS, only to be detected again after disconnecting and reconnecting the drive (I thought it was caused by bad contacts and eventually changed the IDE cable).
Yesterday the OS stopped booting, complaining that the device was not accessible midway thru the booting process, and from that moment on the BIOS detected only 69GB. Installing the drive on other computers detected the same capacity, and the partitions didn’t show on those other computer “MyPC” (but the drive itself is shown on Device Manager).
Enter your wonderful program (thank you and thank google!) and it inmediately detected the wrong 69GB capacity, the correct 80GB, and allowed me to restore it. After a power cycle all the partitions came back with the data intact.
EXCELLENT! … only that, back on its original PC, the OS complains again while booting and somehow the drive BIOS capacity goes back to being 69GB. I have restored the correct capacity twice, only to have it returned to the same wrong capacity when I try to boot from the disk.
Do you have any suggestion that does not imply reinstalling the OS?
Thank you in advance!
February 11th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
HarshReality:
Make sure that you put affhdd.sys into C:\Windows\System32
Also, the operating system has to be 32-bit only.
Thanks
February 11th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Fik:
According to your description, the hard drive is most likely failing and needs to be replaced… That’s all I can suggest without having the drive in our lab :)
February 22nd, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Many thanks for your help. My WD 80Gb NTFS became 32Gb after playing with different tools such as Partition Magic and many others. I tried 20 different softwares (at least !) since 3 days and you gave me back my 48 missing Gb in only 10 seconds ! Thank you for your job and for sharing this to everyone.
February 27th, 2008 at 11:27 am
He utilizado este progranma y me ha recuperado un disco de 250 gb, el cual solo daba 137Gb. Muchas gracias…
I use this program with exit, one samsung disk 250gb, who only have 137gb, and the program restore 250 gb capacity. i dont know who was the problem, that change 250gb -> 137 gb.
Thanks, Joaquin
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:59 am
when i turn my toshiba on it only lets me into the bios set up ,it asks for the built in hdd user password-i dont know it and cannot figgure it out. PLEASE if anyone can help I would be forever in debt. again Please and thank you.
March 5th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
The best piece of software I have ever downloaded. My 2.5″ laptop 250gb wd hdd lost 100gb after messing with Norton ghost and partition manager. Tried everything to get it back and thought I had blown my purchase. Found this software and bingo had my original drive back in seconds. Nothing else like it around. Thankyou soooooooooo much.
March 11th, 2008 at 6:17 am
How can I install 80GB HDD to old PC which BIOS accept max. 8GB HDD?
March 15th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Okay, my computer’s 80GB Toshiba HDD is having some problems. After I ran the system recovery DVD (for my HP Pavilion dv6500t notebook, which runs Vista Home Premium), my PC only recognized the ~20GB Windows partition and would automatically shut down after a while. After I ran Active@ Partition Recovery (part of Active@KillDisk freeware bundle), it found out that ~50GB of hard disk space was unallocated. Will this program work to fix that, or do I need something else?
Thanks,
Joe
March 17th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Hi Dmitry,
I have a unique issue with my HDD, I have Samsung 40 GB IDE HDD on Desktop, one fine day it started showing MTR missing, I took the HDD to other Desktop. It started showing the capacity as 5.28 GB. The other desktop HDD also became the clone of this one and it started showing 28 MB rpoviding all the data loss. Suggest if Capacity Restore will help to restore the capacities of both these HDD. Is OS necessary to be installed on the HDD first before running the tool and is there any chance to get the data recovered from the other HDD. Please suggest…..
Thanks,
SySaAzm
March 18th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Thanks a lots and lots Dmitry,
Your rock man…………….. :)
I owe you….
SySaAzm
March 20th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
HDDGURU is my HERO! What we had here was a problem, I live in a very remote part of Honduras Central America and would have to drive hundreds of miles through rivers, jungle, and sprend days trying to find an answer from stupid people who sell computers but know nothing about them. And we don’t even HAVE a best buy. we suck, here!
Haaaaa Feels better to get that off my chest. 3 Cheers for the HDDGURU.
Thanks Squatty and all the guys from Cool Hand Luke
March 22nd, 2008 at 5:03 pm
I ran one article that stated that this would do a low level format on a HD. Is this a non-destructive format? I have Windows XP service pack 2 on one computer and another with service pack 3. The hard drives have applications that I can’t replace. Will the newer program restore that data on the hard drive>
March 23rd, 2008 at 2:28 am
Many, Many thanks, Dmitry
My 250 Gb Fujitsu was locked after Acronis recover preinstalled version of Dell software - disk was limited to 60 Gb. Only your tool fixed problem. By the way - I used my PCMCI SATA adapter to connect locked HDD to another notebook. It’s work! It was performed with STLab SATA adapter and ESATA portable HDD box (and SATA-ESATA cable). I think, it will work with any SATA adapter (Express Card too).
Many thanks again
PS. I spent more than 14 hours, and your tool made it in a second :)
March 24th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Terry:
This program does not perform any kind of formatting; it does not alter the data in any way. It is absolutely safe to use it (I won’t give any guarantee though). :)
Dmitry
March 24th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Iaroslav:
Thanks for your feedback! :)
PS. Not all IDE/SATA adapters are supported though. Unfortunately, I do not have a list of unsupported adapters, but generally, if it does not work on one PC or adapter, just try another :)
March 28th, 2008 at 1:19 am
When running the program, it’s showing both of my SATA controllers, but under each Channel #x, it shows “Unknown device” for all 4 channels (though i have 3 drives connected.)
When clicking the link, an error pops up saying “No device has been selected. Please select a hard drive from the list of drives.”
Is this the issue of swithching the type of SATA ports in the BIOS? I haven’t tried it yet, but don’t want to be tweaking BIOS settings if i don’t have to.
The drives are on an Intel 631xESB/632xESB SATA AHCI ontrollers.
March 28th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Dmitry,
Some of your utilities (true for HDDWipe and HDDLLF) seem to be unable to run on Win2000.
When run, a messagebox comes up saying “Error accessing device” and then another one with “Cannot change Visible in OnShow or OnHide.”
Then the program starts up, but all main windows are empty.
March 28th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Alex:
Those utilities were initially made for HDD Guru website and are not supported by me anymore, sorry…
March 28th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Blake MIller:
Please try BIOS settings first, and if it does not help, then the most reasonable option would be to try this tool on another PC.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I didn’t have BIOS control over the type of SATA interface, so i used it in another PC and PERFECT!!!! worked like a champ. (I had to first “uninstall” the drive from windows, which i think did it partially automatically) but once so and rebooted, the program worked perfect and i have a big drive again!
April 5th, 2008 at 3:36 am
got a wda10eacs (1000GB), pluged it in a updated firmware GA-p35-dq6 and all i GOT is a 31MB drive , pretty cheap for a 1000Gig drive … searched up WD support site and all i got is a messed up support page that doesnt have this info … (or i could be looking at the wrong page, duh) anyways THIS TOOL ROCKS !!! it worked under my Vista ultimate ! in less than a minute including the installing of the software I got the full capacity of the drive ! SWEET !
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:25 am
What if I have a Hitachi/IBM harddrive that is a 60GB (can be read on the label with the exact geometry of the drive) but factory default only reports 31 GB. Even the Hitachi tool fails to set the correct geometry. As far as I can tell there is no limiting jumper setting that I use (even though the drive has such features). I have used it with a computer that probably dont like bigger than 31 GB hard drives so I have probably done some magic back then. There is some OnTrack software on the drive which kicks in at boot and that is probably why I have been able to use it fully. Does anyone have any idea how to resolve this issue? The HDD Capacity Restore Tool can only restore the factory default but since that one is wrong it doesn’t work for me.
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Roger:
Have you actually tried HDD Capacity Restore?
May 3rd, 2008 at 8:58 am
Yes, I have and both numbers reported are wrong compared to the geometry on the label. And the Hitachi tool didn’t allow med to go above the factory default.
May 5th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Any chance releasing this tool on a self-boot iso image? or maybe (even better) as a static linux binary?
May 7th, 2008 at 5:06 am
i just want to give a BIG thank you for whoever created this tool! i literally spent hours trying to recover my hard drive. tried various methods, even the utilities from the mfr. but to no avail.
then by accident i stumbled upon this site and HDD Capacity Restore… and in a few seconds everything was back to normal! O_O
thank you so much :)
May 7th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Roger:
In this case I guess it might be damaged somehow. Not sure how could that happen though…
May 7th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Eugene
I am sorry, but I do not think this is possible at this time :)
May 9th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Hi Dmitry,
I have a Gigabyte Mother board and as in other cases above my 1TB Samsung drive is only recognised as 32MB in the latest Bios, and 7.87 in Windows XP.
The motherboard has 4 sata ports and attached i have 3 750GB WD drives which work fine. And the Samsung which isnt showing its full capacity
When i try and use your tool and click on the Samsung drive it tells me that the drive must be on its own channel to use the tool.
But the drive will not allow me to format it so i cannot install windows XP onto the Samsung drive.
What can I do to get the program to work on the drive??
Please help me
May 11th, 2008 at 7:15 am
hi!
i’m afraid your software didn’t work with my hdd. i’ve restarted my computer but it doesnt take any effect. i lost 7 GB and now i haven’t been able to restore it yet.
but thanks for your software, it may be work with others hdd.