[Update 2024]

These days Atola Technology makes digital forensic tools that allow restoring HDD capacity, among other more complex and effective capabilities:


 

This 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 1 000 000 000 bytes (1000 x 1000 x 1000), whereas one binary gigabyte contains 1 073 741 824 bytes (1024 x 1024 x 1024) — that’s more than a 7% difference! So, your 300 GB hard drive will show up in Windows as a 279 GB hard drive.

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.

HDD Capacity Restore Tool

Download HDD Capacity Restore Tool.
Supported OS: 32-bit versions of Windows XP/Vista/2003

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!

Dmitry Postrigan
Latest posts by Dmitry Postrigan (see all)
Categories: Hard drives

536 Comments

Ouroborus · May 9, 2018 at 5:00 pm

Well, on my system it detects the PATA drive and the SATA controllers (nForce4), but not the SATA drives.

Ouroborus · July 26, 2007 at 5:26 am

Well, on my system it detects the PATA drive and the SATA controllers (nForce4), but not the SATA drives.

Dmitry Postrigan · July 26, 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

pedro · August 2, 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?

Dmitry Postrigan · August 2, 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

Leonard · August 3, 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?

Dmitry Postrigan · August 3, 2007 at 1:07 pm

Leonard:
Please have a look: http://blog.atola.com/hdd-security-system/

Dmitry

DetroitGeek · August 11, 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!!!

Steve · August 15, 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.

Dmitry Postrigan · August 15, 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

Bill Diachuk · August 20, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · August 20, 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.

Keith · August 27, 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.

Stratos · September 7, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · September 8, 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

Stratos · September 9, 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

Canella · September 10, 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….

David · September 12, 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?

Dmitry Postrigan · September 12, 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

ellia · September 13, 2007 at 2:21 pm

Thank you very very good

David · September 14, 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!

jon jost · September 23, 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.

Dmitry Postrigan · September 24, 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

Nicol · September 28, 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.

Japorms · October 1, 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!!!!

Abe · October 3, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · October 3, 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

Ed · October 10, 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

Billy · October 10, 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

Billy · October 10, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · October 11, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · October 11, 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

Squeezin · October 14, 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!!!!

Dmitry Postrigan · October 16, 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

japs · October 18, 2007 at 2:03 pm

is there free tool inverse (oposite) to Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity
to reduce hdd capacity

Dmitry Postrigan · October 18, 2007 at 2:40 pm

Of course!

Here you go:
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

CDG · October 23, 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

blawson · October 24, 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

Lo · October 25, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · October 25, 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.

CDG · October 25, 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.

Gabor · October 29, 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!

Dmitry Postrigan · October 29, 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

MrDumdidum · November 2, 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

Sunil · November 6, 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.

johan verbist · November 9, 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?

mikey · November 13, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · November 13, 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.

webyu · November 16, 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.

Dmitry Postrigan · November 16, 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.

Alfonso Mendez · November 20, 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?

Dmitry Postrigan · November 20, 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…

Drew · November 24, 2007 at 4:16 am

Thanks for the tool, my 1TB WD10EACS was showing up as only 32mb?! Got it under control now.

JoMo · November 25, 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

Johnny · November 25, 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.

Johnny · November 25, 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!

Johnny · November 25, 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?

Dmitry Postrigan · November 27, 2007 at 12:33 am

Johnny
The issue you are experiencing is related to partitions. I have covered that in my article.

Thanks

Terry · December 2, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · December 2, 2007 at 6:05 pm

Well, I would do exactly what the program suggests… :)

Don · December 4, 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.

Whalerider · December 4, 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

fluxtatic · December 5, 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.

carlos · December 6, 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

Dennis · December 7, 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!

Dmitry Postrigan · December 7, 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).

Lonely Ranger · December 9, 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.

Mark · December 11, 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.

Dmitry Postrigan · December 12, 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.

jurgen · December 12, 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

Lilia · December 18, 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!!

AlexC · December 30, 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! :)

Chris Combs · January 7, 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…

JasFromColo · January 7, 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.

JaSi · January 7, 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

Servise · January 8, 2008 at 4:12 pm

Спасибо!!! Очень выручает эта прога. Часто приходится сталкиваться с такими проблемами по роду деятельности

Jackie Sherwood · January 19, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · January 23, 2008 at 8:03 am

Jackie: My article fully answers your question, please take some time to read it :)
(see binary/decimal section)

Kris · January 27, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · January 28, 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

Karasardelis · February 1, 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…

HarshReality · February 5, 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?

Dmitry Postrigan · February 7, 2008 at 2:54 am

I do not see any problem putting this tool on a USB stick or something similar…

HarshReality · February 7, 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

Fik · February 10, 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!

Dmitry Postrigan · February 11, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · February 11, 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 :)

babble · February 22, 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.

joaquin · February 27, 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

woods5150 · March 3, 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.

Craig · March 5, 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.

Thomas · March 11, 2008 at 6:17 am

How can I install 80GB HDD to old PC which BIOS accept max. 8GB HDD?

Joe · March 15, 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

SySaAzm · March 17, 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

SySaAzm · March 18, 2008 at 9:01 am

Thanks a lots and lots Dmitry,
Your rock man…………….. :)
I owe you….
SySaAzm

Squatty T Justice · March 20, 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

Terry · March 22, 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>

Iaroslav Tsaryk · March 23, 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 :)

Dmitry Postrigan · March 24, 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

Dmitry Postrigan · March 24, 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 :)

Blake MIller · March 28, 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.

Alex · March 28, 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.

Dmitry Postrigan · March 28, 2008 at 1:22 pm

Alex:

Those utilities were initially made for HDD Guru website and are not supported by me anymore, sorry…

Dmitry Postrigan · March 28, 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.

Blake MIller · March 28, 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!

western digital 1TB · April 5, 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 !

Roger · May 2, 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.

Dmitry Postrigan · May 2, 2008 at 7:32 pm

Roger:
Have you actually tried HDD Capacity Restore?

Roger · May 3, 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.

Eugene · May 5, 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?

clint · May 7, 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 :)

Dmitry Postrigan · May 7, 2008 at 7:46 pm

Roger:
In this case I guess it might be damaged somehow. Not sure how could that happen though…

Dmitry Postrigan · May 7, 2008 at 7:46 pm

Eugene
I am sorry, but I do not think this is possible at this time :)

Paul · May 9, 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

Anonymous · May 11, 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.

scrieler · May 26, 2008 at 4:07 pm

heya, thx to u, 1000GB back,
but my windows displays a yellow exclamation over dynamic disk in my diskmanagement. no partition. how can i get my data back?

scrieler · May 26, 2008 at 6:18 pm

i got it!

http://www.computerbase.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-135480.html
u can test the disk with ‘TestDisk’ and set the disk partition to primär and u get the data back

Jim · May 26, 2008 at 9:02 pm

Hi Dmitry,

Did you write this utility, I noticed that its Copyright is Atola anyway
thanks to Atola for allowing me to download it and if you wrote it
a big thanks to you. I been surfing days looking for a utility that would reset my SATA drive WD2500aaks LBA code. It all started ……. after I
built the system BIOS set to IDE and loaded a upgrade version of Vista which allowed me to do a clean install but denied an upgrade presumeably because I did not have XP home installed yet I cann’t remember whether Vista indicated at the time that it would not validate ? Anyway the load went perfectly even rebooting okay. Now was the time to do the final load on the other disc setting the BIOS to AHCI the other options on the board are IDE and RAID I think my problem started because I did not relize that the AHCI driver also loaded other RAID drivers or are they the same. Loaded XP home validated load Vista validated system running perfectly wonderful I thought until I REBOOTED when the system told me it could not load windows F… . Checked BIOS my disc was now showing 33.8gb instead off 250gb. Managed to reset disc first by zeroing it with WD utility followed by old Maxtor utility used this method twice unfortunately on the third attempt it failed to work whether I had set some thing differently, I don’t know or whether first two times were reset by some else I had done ? anyway thats when the surfing started until I accidently came across your site which solved the problem in the time it took me to load your program. I’m not sure why the disc kept changing but I think loading AHCI requires two discs ? as if it had been set to RAID . Any ideas ……I would love to know what was causing the size to change. Thanks again JIM Ps. sorry I couln’t make any shorter.

Eugene · May 27, 2008 at 9:11 am

I wish this tool would work for me :(

I screwed with all four of my 750GB samsung drives LBA48 settings, and the samsung ES tool does not work to turn the LBA48 bit back on :(. Damn buggy samsung. So I had to pull out an old PATA hard drive, install windows XP32bit on it, install SP3, install the latest nvidia force3 drivers, and hdd capcity restore.

Unfortunatelly, the drive does not show up in windoez at all, not even in device manager, and neither does it show up in your tool, even though it shows up fine in during boot time (on the pre-boot screens) and in shows up fine in linux on the same exact machine (well, as a 137GB drive).

The drive is plugged into the main (sata1) sata nvidia controller.

Is there any other things I should try?

Nik Papadopoulos · May 28, 2008 at 6:50 pm

Hi,

I have a Fujitsu MPG3102AT-E hard drive
connected to one (of my early PCs)
Pentium Socket-7 (QDI P5I430TX)
and I had no particular problems for
8 consecutive years ……. except a
strange “clack” at every boot !!!!!

So, I decided to apply a firmware update
(found from Compaq, SP16768) in case
I got read of the strange clicks and clacks.
The firmware was indeed for MPG3102AT-E
and the firmware was updated to ver.9211.

BUT,
after powering down and powering up
I enter the BIOS of my motherboard and
,to my surprise, I found my HD capacity
short of 243 megs !!!!!!

BEFORE the update the geometry of the disk was
CHS –> 19857 / 16 / 63 OR
LBA –> 1246 / 255 / 63

AFTER the update the geometry went down to
CHS –> 19386 / 16 / 63 OR
LBA –> 1216 / 255 / 63

I.e from 9773 actual megs to 9539 !!!!!!!!!
Although the BIOS screen “screamed” it was
10248 megs (which I knew was NOT true).

I tried your tool (after installing WinXP on it,
which took me about 1 hour and a half)
and the window read :
Reported capacity : 10,005 MB
Factory capacity : 10,005 MB
Capacity difference : 0,0 MB

I wonder if there is any way to regain
the actual capacity on my Fujitsu …..
….. or is too late ??????

Thanks in advance.

David · May 30, 2008 at 9:28 pm

Hi
I have 1TB samsung hard drive, it is only reading 32mb, plus I am useing Vista 64, how can i fix.

Glenn · June 3, 2008 at 8:10 am

Hi Dmitry

Mine is a similar story to many others here. Bought a brand new Seagate Barracuda 500Gb PATA drive and after playing around with it, the drive became a 137Gb drive. I think connecting it to a Win XP SP2 laptop via an old Maxtor OneTouch I USB enclosure was to blame.

I tried the SeaTools for DOS that Seagate said would fix it. No love. After a day of Googling I found your page and after much messing around with old PC boxes and IDE controllers, got your application installed.

Worked like a dream where all others had failed.

Killer app dude, I thank you Dmitry, great work.

Richard · June 4, 2008 at 8:48 am

Hi,

the HDD Capacity Restore Tool was able to fix my “only 33gb with a 1tb hdd” problem in minutes, and allowed me to recover all my data, thanks very much. :-)

Cheers
-Richard

David · June 5, 2008 at 3:22 pm

Capacity Restore Tool not work on vista 64, I reinstall xp, then HDD Capacity Restore Tool was able to fix my Samsung 1tb hdd problem in minutes from 32mb to 1tb, thanks very much. :-)

ziki · June 10, 2008 at 9:24 am

Hi Dimitri,
I’m more or less desperate: I have set LBA mode of my Samsung HD753LJ (750Gb Sata2) to 28 bit, but now I cannot restore the HHD to the LBA 48 bit (the Samsung HDD tool, ESTool, gives me an error). The native size is now set to 137Gb and also “HDD Capacity Restore” shows me a Factory Capacity of 137Gb and so it restores only this size.

If I run “Config” command in MHDD it say me that the HDD does not support config changes (or something like this).

If you have any idea how to restore the LBA48 mode, please …help me.

Thanks

Dmitry Postrigan · June 10, 2008 at 6:37 pm

ziki:
If you have checked the jumpers as described in the article, then I guess you can return the drive for a replacement.

ZeBong · June 12, 2008 at 9:59 pm

Hello,
i have 1 TB seagate maxtor that detect 0MB, i run the tool and it say´s Protect with password ??

How can i resolve the problem ?

Thanks
ZeBong

czer27 · June 13, 2008 at 5:16 pm

HDD Capacity Restore doesn´t work, following constellation:

I want to restore my PRI MASTER IDE drive after a mistake with SeaTools option “Set capacity to …”

I´ve removed PRI SLAVE IDE drive and started Windows XP from a third drive. There I´ve installed HDD Capacity Restore.

When I start HDD Capacity Restore and choose my PRI MASTER IDE drive (that is a WD1200JB) to restore, it says me: “The drive you choosen is used and cannot be deactivated. Go to the device manager and do it deactivate manually.

When I this do, I must restart Windows, before the deactivation is made.

When Windows will be restarted its first activity is to reinstall the drive I want to deactivate.

It is a snake biting in her tail.

Dr. Klahn · June 15, 2008 at 7:50 pm

Thank you, Dmitry. I’ve reformatted more IDE drives than I can remember, and I never knew that capacity reduction is a drive option.

W/R/T the comments early in your article about Windows 2000 not supporting drives larger than 137 GB, I’d like to issue a warning. Don’t install W2K directly to such a drive. Not even if it’s been slipstreamed with SP4 or later, and the EnableBigLBA option is set. Windows installs, but neither partitioning nor LBA handling is correct. At some future date it fills the first 137 GB, and (I speculate) the LBA addresses wrap around, and the drive silently corrupts itself.

This looks exactly like a BIOS 137 GB problem from outside. The giveaway is that the BIOS does know how big the drive is, and displays it during the prestart.

I tried slipstreaming SP6 and presetting the EnableBigLBA registry fix. Didn’t work; I don’t know why.

I found an easy workaround is install on a smaller drive, install SP6, set EnableBigLBA, then make a backup with Acronis True Image (google for “free acronis true image.) Then attach the large drive to the secondary controller, and restore the Acronis backup to the large drive with partition expansion enabled. Now the system is on the large drive and you’ve got a safe backup as a bonus.

So if you think you’ve got a BIOS 137 GB problem on a scratch install of Windows 2000, it’s quite possible that’s not the real problem.

czer27 · June 18, 2008 at 6:46 pm

Hi Dimitry,

in addition to my first reply:
Today I´ve tried run HDD Capacity Restore on another PC, to restore my boot drive. But it was the same procedure as before:

First Vista installs the standard volume and the driver for my WD1200JB HDD. After restarting OS I started the HDD Capacity Restore, choose the WD1200JB (Master on SEK IDE) and run the tool. After a short time came a pop up window: Device is currently in use and cannot be removed from the system. Please remove it manually in the Device Manager and try it again. Device Manager says: You must restart. After restart the first action is to new install the drive.
This seems to be a general failure of the program.

Dmitry Postrigan · June 18, 2008 at 8:13 pm

czer27:
It is possible that you have a file system or partition corruption on that hard drive, and that corruption prevents Windows from unmounting it. You can fix that by either fixing those file systems/partitions (for example, with chkdsk) or deleting all partitions from that hard drive.

John Woods · June 27, 2008 at 4:15 am

When I found your software I thought that my dreams had been answered.

However, after trying this on 4 different machines,(3 desktops and a laptop) it only seems to recognize EIDE drives, not the SATA that I want to repair.

Am I doing something wrong or is there a newer version of the software?

My primary machine uses Intel ICHR8f AHCI drivers.

zaher · June 29, 2008 at 12:28 pm

if i use the tool will i lose my data on hdd??

Dmitry Postrigan · June 30, 2008 at 3:00 am

zaher: The tool is safe to the data, however, we make no guarantees – it is always wise to have a backup.

Tony_c · June 30, 2008 at 8:56 am

Wow, Just wanted to pop in and say thanks for the tool, worked 100% and 100% easy to use.

Also great job with the on going support on this page, that is just amazing and rare to see, Thanks guys n Girls!

kevin · July 2, 2008 at 7:40 am

Just bought a new computer, got os on it, started copying my files and to my suprise the hdd got full. its a seagate 250 but only shows 127. i have service pack 3 on both my computers, and i tried taking the hdd out and putting it in my other comp, and using this software. it says the hdd is already at factory 250 capacity, and after i ran the software the drive dissapared from ‘my computer’. if i reboot it shows up again but still at 127gig.

John Woods · July 3, 2008 at 9:58 pm

Solved my problem with SATA drive with an adapter from Addonics in San Jose, CA. Replaced my ATAPI DVD drive with this combination and the drive was recognized. After running the repair routine it reported an error with the drive so I restored my system to normal, very disappointed.

However, when I checked the drive on a USB-SATA adapter, the program had done its job, my 250GB drive was restored to its full capacity.

Thank tou!!!!

Thomas Abercrombie · July 4, 2008 at 7:07 pm

I reduced the capacity on my four Samsung HD103UJ (1TB) by switching off the 48-bit LBA mode with the software provided on the Samsung homepage. Unfortunately, this process doesn’t seem to be reversible, as none of the Samsung tools (ESTool or HUTIL) nor HDat2 were able to switch it back on.

And all HDD Capacity Restore has to say is: “Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform” -which I did, as well as on others of the four drives… No progress.

Couldn’t find much about the Drive on the net, as it’s relatively new, but I strongly advise anyone who owns one of these little frackers to never ever switch off the 48-bit mode… It’s a one-way-street!

In the meantime, any tip would be highly appreciated – It’s some 500 Euros worth of Harddisks, and Samsung say it’s not their responsibility, since switching off the 48-bit mode with software provided by Samsung is not the “intended use”…

Bakica · July 5, 2008 at 10:03 pm

Hi Dmirty.

Can I use your program to restore hard drive capacity from primary hard disk? Or should I just make another partition and run the program from it?

Thanks from your help!

David · July 7, 2008 at 3:36 pm

Same problem as Thomas Abercrombie: I reduced by error my samsung hard disk HD502IJ/Y with estool to lba 48bits to no, and now I am blocked to 137 Gb! I am getting mad, even this tool doesn’t work: Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform”.
I didn’t contact samsung, but I have asked a refund to go on seagate disk (forget about samsung). Bby the mean time, if anyone has a clue, that would help a lot of people.

Dmitry Postrigan · July 8, 2008 at 12:33 am

I have two thoughts:
1) What happens if you use that estool to enable LBA48?
2) What happens if you try Capacity Restore on another PC?

Bevsta · July 9, 2008 at 1:01 pm

You’re a lifesaver.. my 1 TB harddrive which had all my data on was reporting on 33 MB and coming up as RAW in Windows. Windows kept asking me to format.. Thought I had lost everything! I tried OnTrack Recovery, then TestDisk with no luck and then tried this! Worked a treat.. and so simple to do.. Thanks heaps!!

Ken · July 12, 2008 at 12:34 am

I cloned a 40 Gb hdd to a new 120 Gb hdd to upgrade my Dell Inspiron laptop. Now I have a new 120 Gb hdd that reports 40 Gb. I’ve learned now why and how that happened. Removed the new drive and attached via USB to my pc running your Capacity Restore Freeware. The application does not recognize the new drive when attached to the pc. So, how do I get the Capacity Restore tool to recognize and restore the capacity on my hdd? Please help!!

Dmitry Postrigan · July 12, 2008 at 12:42 am

Ken:

Please try CTRL+F while on this page and then type “USB”; and you will find your answer :)

Tom Walter · July 15, 2008 at 8:53 pm

I purchased a new Samsung Spinpoint 1TB drive a month ago to put into my music studio computer (I constantly run out of space with all the samples and high quality audio I use). It worked perfectly.

Bought the same drive today and it said it was 33Mb.. I was ready to send it back as faulty, but this program fixed it first time!

Thank you so much! Do you have a paypal donate option? A few bucks is a bargain for this free utility.

Question is.. why was is shipped from Samsung like this?

KW · July 19, 2008 at 9:58 am

Encountered odd problem and tool didn’t even recognize drive.

Got three Hitachi 1TB external hds (model H31000U) and all three encountered problems with external case locking up — no drive letter. Had to power off, power on. From online forums, apparently problem with the case. Removed drives from two cases and used in other cases. Third drive kept using in original case and went through the lockup/power off/power on procedure until it no longer showed up.

Computer Management->Disk Management now shows the drive as “UNALLOCATED”. Is there any way to get the drive letter to show up again without INITIALIZE DISK? I’m afraid I’d lose my data.

If I INITIALIZE DISK with Computer Management->Disk Management, but not FORMAT, is there a tool to recover what was on the drive?

spike · July 20, 2008 at 4:10 pm

well i downloaded HDD Capacity Restore and it say 41gb but system says 38gb why i bet you cant explain that can you ? where is the other 3gb ????

TomUnderhill · July 22, 2008 at 10:02 pm

Exxxxxxcellant! Thank-you. Now the 120Gb drive that only reported 31Gb is as it should be. Wish I knew about this program years ago!

Arvin Bautista · July 23, 2008 at 4:45 am

This worked perfectly turning my Samsung hard drive that was handicapped at 31.4 gb back up to 120 gb.

Note on my end, I had to use Disk Management to first remove the 31.4 gig partition, so it’s completely unallocated. I was then able to run Cap Restore and brought me to the right size.

Thanks for this product, it solved my issue when 10 other programs and two days of searching around couldn’t do it!

Csaba · July 26, 2008 at 12:36 am

I have same problem as Thomas Abercrombie and David with Samsung HD502IJ (500GB) HDD. I can’t enable LB48 mode again. It’s stoped 137GB.
Error message by estool: “Abort command”.
I sent mail to Samsunghdd support, not yet response…

Vitor · August 2, 2008 at 2:03 am

Hi, i have a 80GB western digital disk, model WDC-WD800BB. I used it in a PIII with DDO with windowsxp and linux. Now i instaled it on a motherboard ASRock K8NF&G-VSTA and it only reconizes 33GB on bios, on windowsxp the disk doesn’t appear, on linux the disk shows it’s full capacity. When i run your program, on windowsxp, as i get to the point to restore the disk capacity I get the message: Reported capacity:33.820GB; Factory capacity: -1 Bytes and cappacity difference: -33820284929 Bytes. I haven’t clicked restore capacity yet. Is it normal to appear this Factory capacity message?
Hope you can help me.
Thanks.

Andy · August 5, 2008 at 6:44 pm

I bought a 1TB drive to replace my 320GB one in my PC. The 1TB drive developed an error after I ghosted the image of my old C: drive on to it, causing the BIOS to register the drive as only 33mb!

After trying every solution on the net, nothing worked – until I tried this software. Within 1 minute everything was back to normal.

Thank you so so much.

alex · August 7, 2008 at 10:09 pm

Okay, here’s another Samsung F1 1Tb rescued.
Been running linux on f1 750gb for quite a while. fast, silent, liked it. when it came to building a htpc, the choice was obvious: f1 1000gb + vista ultimate (played with mythtv and vdr, didn’t like it). now, everything ran smoothly until i tried to install dvb-s card driver. got a bsod and here we go! the drive of 33megs. your tool brought it back to life. MANY THANKS!
Still, i’m kind of puzzled: is this vista or samsung i should blame? anyways, don’t think in any case drive should crash that bad!

Manos Arvanitis · August 8, 2008 at 11:37 pm

Dear friend! thank u very much for this little program (HDD Capasity Restore), I run it and everything is OK.

I have a WD1001FALS 1TB and suddenly VISTA and BIOS recognize only 33MB. I did everything, updated the BIOS of my mobo (Gigabyte X38-DS5) and nothing happened. Then I found you (via Google) and you saved me!

Thank you very much once again!

Eugene Gluzberg · August 10, 2008 at 5:00 am

Looks like I have the same problem as ziki, and some others on this page. I have the samsung HD750LJ (4 of them) and i cannot turn the LBA48 bit back on, using 2 different hardware configurations both using estool and this program. Sending all 4 of my drives for RMA :(

tristan · August 14, 2008 at 7:13 pm

THANK YOU !!!!

So many hours spend trying to format the disk, update bios, trying every SATA slots, calling the samsung hotline, etc…

“HDD Capacity Restore” fixed it in several seconds !!

THANK YOU !!!!

Tony · August 16, 2008 at 7:27 pm

> 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

I don’t think you are correct. I tried cloning my disk using EZ Gig 2 software with my new 250GB drive attached via a USB adapter and it was able to change the new drive’s size. It now reads 93GB instead of 250GB. So, if it can get into that state via a USB connection, it can get out of it using the same connection. If you don’t want to support USB drives because you don’t know how that’s one thing. But don’t say it can’t be done, because it can.

David · August 19, 2008 at 3:30 pm

I am trying to reset my western digital external hard drive. when i plug the hard drive there is no icon also disk says its full(ALL BLUE) when it is actually empty any sugestions?

Dmitry Postrigan · August 19, 2008 at 5:20 pm

Tony:

I am perfectly aware of what are you talking about. But I don’t like discussing it this way.

Rodrigo Riadi · August 25, 2008 at 9:38 pm

Hi Dmitry,

While attempting to clone my laptop HD (60Gb) into one with more capacity (200Gb), the software I used apparently locked the new HD’s capacity to 60Gb. I’ve tried reformatting the new drive but can’t seem to get it to its factory capacity. Both HDs are S-ATA but I’m connecting to the larger drive via USB.

I would love to hear any thoughts on how to address this you may have?

I’m considering installing your utility in a bootable CD with Windows XP, installing the larger drive into the laptop and then trying to restore capacity with your software. Would this make sense?

Tanks much,

Paddan · August 30, 2008 at 4:02 pm

Hi, seems i have got a odd error with HDD Capacity Restore Tool.

It read the drive, its current size is about 10 000MB, its specs natively should be 40GB, and it oddly was reported by the program as -2Byte. Ofc it fails to recover it. Any way to fix this?, or is it a bad disk or something?

Edward · September 8, 2008 at 7:48 pm

A great utility, but on my new server it recognizes the drives connected to the mainboard, but doesn’t see the two TB-drives that are connected to my Promise SATA TX4-card (or the card for that matter). :(

Dmitry Postrigan · September 8, 2008 at 8:06 pm

Edward:

Unfortunately, it will not see hard drives on Promise or any similar additional cards; this is “normal”.

Dave · September 9, 2008 at 12:19 am

Just used this on my 3 week old WD 1TB 10EACS + Gigabyte P965-DS3, the drive was showing only 33MB.
This made it work instantly! Many many thanks

nief · September 11, 2008 at 12:33 am

You are a genius!!

1tb drive from samsung in a gigabyte p35c-ds3r just recovered in a moment with this small tool!!

Many thanks to you!!!

samsung spinpoint f1 1tb hd103uj capadidad incorrecta 8gb gigabyte volver a tamaño de fabrica Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity

Lets google index this great blog!!

Keeper · September 11, 2008 at 9:32 pm

Excellent sounding tool however it’s not working for me.

I have a Gigabyte GA-8i915MD-GV Mobo and a Samsung 1TB Hard drive
BIOS flashed to newest version but still reports 33MB and in Disk Management reports 7.87GB, and won’t format properly.

I installed The utility, and restarted
Started up the utility, and it reported that i DO have 1000GB Drive, and it did it’s thing, and asked me to power-down.
After I started up again, Disk Management still reports I only have a 7.87GB Drive

What am I doing Wrong??? Please help me!

Keeper · September 11, 2008 at 9:48 pm

WHOOOO HOOOOOOOO – My Bad! LOL

I just ran the program again and waited about 30 secs this time before switching on.
As the pc booted up i went to check my bios – and it reported 1TB!! So good so far….
When in windows, Disk manager also reported 1TB, and formated properly! Thanx Dude!

GREAT GREAT GREAT TOOL – THANX!

Thermal · September 13, 2008 at 10:51 am

its not working for me at all with the same issue

Frustrated · September 13, 2008 at 2:46 pm

Hi Guys,

I have a Samsung HD103UI 1TB, that was only reporting 32mb in the BIOS of my Gigabyte 965 PS4 board. I wasted a whole day trying to use other tools and bios updates nothing worked …what did work “HDD Capacity Restore Tool”, this is all you need
http://hdd-tools.com/products/cr/download/crsetup.exe

Browncoat · September 16, 2008 at 9:12 am

d/l the utility …. haven’t tried it yet but could have used it back in May when my 160 gig went
wonky and I lost data. After reformatting assuming that having W2kP SP 4 was good enough..
I only got 128 gig….so since the machine that it happened on is a old HP VL400..I then set to format
that drive on the eMachine/Gateway unit that came with XP Home pre-installed and got my 149GB back.
the loss of data was no big deal….with the Gateway as the primary I use both as DVR/PVRs so all I lost were a few TV season finales which have been repeated this fall anyhow. Still perplexed as to what happened as even the drive letter disappeared from windows explorer[My Computer].

Browncoat · September 16, 2008 at 9:30 am

Oh….limited space eh!
continued…… Now I’m an XP hater…..I don’t like that activation nonsense and I don’t care for the built-in spyware..[WGA etc]. For the computers that I build and upgrade I prefer W2kPro, generally 2000Pro has been more stable for my everyday use, worms and trojans can’t hide because there are no restore points.
So I read where you broke off with HDDGURU…..therefore I ask….what utilities does Atola offer that I can run on Windows 2000 Professional? It uses the same NT5 kernel that XP and Vista wraps around on and the only advantages I see in XP is faster bootup[no waiting for the ‘preparing network connection’ dialogue box] and different handling of USB devices..not worth the cost when I can just drop in my W2kP CDs. What is Dr. Klahn talking about? there has never been more than SP4 for W2kP If there is an SP5 and SP 6 I’d sure like to see them.

Dmitry Postrigan · September 16, 2008 at 9:02 pm

Browncoat:

I am not sure why do you say we broke off with HDDGURU (never occurred).

All our utilities run fine under Windows 2000.

Thanks

Browncoat · September 17, 2008 at 12:29 am

In a previous post you said that the utilities on the HDDGURU site you no longer support….in business that implies you broke off with them to form Atola. Is that not correct?
Anyhow thanks for the heads-up on W2kP.
I’d be willing to pay to order a cd with all of your utilities on it…..aka Spotmau.
Sorry for any misunderstandings.

Dmitry Postrigan · September 19, 2008 at 6:06 pm

In short, that is not correct :)

Thanks

DP

Uriel Utter · September 19, 2008 at 8:51 pm

Dmitry, I was just reading some of the comments and it seems clear that I have to put an image of my functional C: drive back on the truncated disk and run capacity restore from there. I would have done to begin with but for some reason your program wants me to manually disconnect the device in device manager. I am confused, and I was scared to lock up or injure my computer. Can you enlighten me?

Dmitry Postrigan · September 19, 2008 at 9:29 pm

Uriel Utter:

This utility has nothing to do with partitions or images of anything. It only works with the hard drive as a physical device. You certainly cannot alter (restore) capacity of a hard disk that you use to boot the Operating System… If this is the case, then you would have to boot from some other hard drive (or attach this hard drive to another working PC as a secondary drive).

Uriel Utter · September 19, 2008 at 9:40 pm

Ok, I guess I included too much information and was unhelpful, sorry about that. What I’m getting at is, 1) Can I run the utility on a HDD in an external enclosure (reading above tells me no, but I’m not versed in this program) and if not, how do I get the utility to function?

Also, once I try to run the program for a HDD installed in the machine, the utility wants me to manually remove the device from Device Manager, which prompts a restart. Will I get system functionality in this case?

Sorry to be so ignorant, this is a frustrating voyage of discovery for me.

Rodrigo Riadi · September 26, 2008 at 12:44 am

If you’re looking to restore capacity on a notebook drive and you don’t have a desktop available, you can use Hitachi’s Feature Tool, which must be copied onto a bootable CD/DVD. Google Hitachi Feature Tool and follow the instructions. Good luck!

Jim · September 26, 2008 at 6:34 am

I disagree with your statement: “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.” I have Win ME and was searching for the drive limit problem. If you have the knowledge, why not share it anyway for people like myself? Thanks and best wishes to you.

DvB & Heinz · September 27, 2008 at 1:12 am

Dmitry, thank you very much!
Your Tool save us a lot of Time, is work’s fine with a Samsung HD103uj that was after a Systemcrash only reporting 33mb in the BIOS of a Gigabyte Board and with a external USB HDD Connector. And the Best all Data was ok.

Thank you for this fine Tool, good work!

Lubbp · September 30, 2008 at 5:45 pm

Hi,
I haven’t try your utility yet, but I’ll try this evening (my WD1001FALS is recognized as 32MB instead of 1Tera).

My question is:
my system worked fine until windows said that the hardware was changed and it was necessary to reboot the system. After the system never booted up.
Could it be a virus or an unwanted application that runs silently and brakes the bxxs? ;-)
I don’t want that after the repair the HD will fall again in the same situation.
Windows was installed on another HD (Seagate 250Gb) and works fine. This problem happened when I cloned the Seagate partition with Ghost 9.0 on my new WesternDigital partition to replace it…
Any suggestion?
Thanks a lot

Diana · October 3, 2008 at 7:55 pm

Since every hard drive has to be hooked up to a single cable for the program to work, I hooked up a 80 gb HD to the cable that I disconnected from the CD Rom. The program says that the HD already has full capacity and no restoration is needed. But … MyComputer, drive E, says that it’s only 21.3 gb. Again, your pogram’s screen says: Channel 0 Master Maxtor 30 gb [that’s correct for one of the HD] Channel 0 Slave Unknown device. Then … Channel 1 Master WDC 80 gb, Channel 1 Slave Unknown Device. What am I doing wrong? Is the HD faulty, is the jumper set wrong? Your help will be appreciated. Thanks for the free program, Dmitry!

Diana · October 7, 2008 at 10:00 pm

What ever happened to our good friend and mentor Dmitry? Is he in Hawaii? Dmitry, if you read this, WE NEEEEEED YOU!!!!!!

Ivan · October 8, 2008 at 1:15 am

Hi, I have the same problem as others on here, and I haven’t seen a solution for when HDD Capacity Restore gives you a drive not accessible/is damaged error.
I tried two of the Samsung HD103UJ 1 TB SATA2 drives, with the 32 MB of space/7.97 GB unallocated/can’t format or use problems and they both get errors in the program.

What is the problem here? I run a fully updated XP, have a Gigabyte P35-DS3L, and am using a SATA 500GB WD as my primary.
And does unplugging and plugging back in the power source work?
What will it do?

Thanks for what seems to be a great tool, just wish it would work.

Dmitry Postrigan · October 8, 2008 at 1:40 pm

Diana: you probably have only one partition and the rest of the space is not occupied. Just use Disk Manager to create more partitions.

Diana · October 8, 2008 at 6:28 pm

Many thanks, Dmitry, and welcome back! I will try to partition my 80gb second hard drive although I wanted to use it, in conjunction with the main 30gb drive, just for storage (documents, MP3s, photos) whole and without partitions. Hence, I was planning on keeping just WinX Professional on my primary 30gb drive and all the rest of my stuff on the second (80gb) drive.

Dmitry Postrigan · October 8, 2008 at 7:16 pm

I was talking about the one that you have issues with…

Diana · October 8, 2008 at 8:03 pm

Thanks again. I do not want to hijack the thread thus taking up your valuable time and precluding you from helping others. Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. I have two hard drives on my PC. One is 30gb and registers just the right capacity on your program. In it I have my OS. No issues with that drive.

I am trying to connect a second hard drive for storage, just one big 80gb partition. Your program tells me that this specific 80gb drive does not need to be resized. However, when I look at it from MyComputer it shows not 80gb but 23.3gb.

If I understood you well, I must partition tis additional (slave) hard drive since I can’t use a whole 80gb partition. Maybe I am wrong.

I appreciate your free program and all your help.

Dmitry Postrigan · October 8, 2008 at 8:36 pm

In this case it really does not have one 80GB partition but one 23.3GB partition :). You would have to either create one additional 55GB partition or delete the old 23.3 GB partition and create a new 80GB one.

Hard drives do not function without partitions, so 23.3 GB is the existing partition on that drive.

Diana · October 8, 2008 at 10:33 pm

VERY clear explanation, Dmitry. Thanks a million and until next time.

Ryan · October 9, 2008 at 5:35 am

For those of you wondering whether it was Vista or the drive manufacturer:
My old OS was worthless due to viruses, so I bought Vista and a new 1TB Seagate SATA hard drive. Took out my old drive, put in the 1TB, boot up, the BIOS only sees 33MB. It has nothing to do with Windows. I messed with a few hard drive settings in the BIOS and rebooted a few times and it came up as 1TB. Not sure which one of the settings did it.

Dan · October 10, 2008 at 3:50 pm

Dmitry Postrigan, you are a GENIUS!! My humblest Thank You :)

Im quite a seasoned IT guy but this one had me under my table in tears, I wish you all the very best and
thank you again for your time to release this beautiful open source application :)

Regards,

Dan from Australia

Adrian · October 19, 2008 at 7:16 pm

Dmitry, I have just used your tool. Unbelievable!! in a matter of seconds I recover the full capacity of 3 old hard drives that I had in the closet!

Excellent tool +++++

bob · October 20, 2008 at 3:14 am

Does it run from Linux? I don’t have Windows on my computer.

Anonymous · October 25, 2008 at 4:36 pm

super program, i bought 1 tera wd caviar, and I saw only 33mb, this program fix it to 1 tera bytes

GaryP · October 27, 2008 at 9:57 pm

Thank you so very much!

I had my 500GB PATA drive that I tried to use in Maxtor Onetouch USB enclosure. It changed the size to 128GB, even that the original drive was 250GB.

You saved my day! I asked the support from Western Digital, how to restore… they just told me to put the jumpers correctly and told me that Serial ATA drive should work just fine… I already told them the model and type… suckers, they probably didn’t even read my support call!!!!
;-)

Cheers,
GaryP

Kay · October 29, 2008 at 4:53 pm

When I try to open the utility, I get the error “Error opening driver”.
What is wrong? How to solve?

GaryP · October 30, 2008 at 8:36 am

I got the same error when I tried to install it on Bart PE, which is on my USB bootstick. Then I desided to install it on regular XP and that’s it. What OS do you use?

Cheers,
GaryP

[email protected] · November 1, 2008 at 12:46 am

Fist of all thanks for all who wrote her/his experiences about this subject and congratulations to the prof Dmitry!

I have a External 1 TB HD brand: Smartdisk (inside a Samsung HD103UJ ). After a powerloss i got only 38 Mb instead of 1 TB!

I tried several methods like formating this small partion, delete it etc. but it doesn’t help, untill i found this Excellent tool BUT:

I got the HD out from its case and connected it to my Desktop (Because this tool can NOT recognise USB Mass Storage devices)

I restart my pc and run the tool: I get my 1000GB back (actually 931,51 Gb and it says %100 Free space)!
The PROBLEM is now:
1-) I had 600 GB data on it and i think i loose all of them. Some people here wrote, that they get their capacity + all Data back ! How ?

2-) I am still at the moment to make a the big decision:

a-) Format it ! otherwise i can’t use it ( so i will have a clear 1 TB HD but loose all my data)

b-) I am waiting a suggestions from some experts..Maybe there is still a solution ?

As i wrote before, i ONLY formated the 38 MB part before i use the tool and i hope someone can help me before i shoot myself :-)

Thank you in advance….

Mike H · November 2, 2008 at 6:52 am

Nicely done! I had tried to upgrade my Dell Inspiron 1705 hard drive and didn’t know about the difficulty with that due to the HPA issue until my new Seagate hard drive was resized and no utility I could undo the change (Seagates, Magicboot, etc) until this one. The one thing I did discover I needed to do was to format the partition (even though it was the wrong size) before the utility would see the drive – but once that one done the full size was restored in seconds (However the partition remained at 95 gig – but that was easy to resize using another utility.).

THANK YOU!

[email protected] · November 3, 2008 at 12:31 am

****************************I Need Urgent HELP !****************************

Fist of all thanks for all who wrote her/his experiences about this subject and congratulations to the prof Dmitry!

I have a External 1 TB HD brand: Smartdisk (inside a Samsung HD103UJ ). After a powerloss i got only 38 Mb instead of 1 TB!

I tried several methods like formating this small partion, delete it etc. but it doesn’t help, untill i found this Excellent tool BUT:

I got the HD out from its case and connected it to my Desktop (Because this tool can NOT recognise USB Mass Storage devices)

I restart my pc and run the tool: I get my 1000GB back (actually 931,51 Gb and it says %100 Free space)!
The PROBLEM is now:
1-) I had 600 GB data on it and i think i loose all of them. Some people here wrote, that they get their capacity + all Data back ! How ?

2-) I am still at the moment to make a the big decision:

a-) Format it ! otherwise i can’t use it ( so i will have a clear 1 TB HD but loose all my data)

b-) I am waiting a suggestions from some experts..Maybe there is still a solution ?

As i wrote before, i ONLY formated the 38 MB part before i use the tool and i hope someone can help me before i shoot myself :-)

Thank you in advance….

Fedon · November 11, 2008 at 12:03 am

Dmitry: Please HELP!!

Jimmy · November 16, 2008 at 10:05 am

I have 2 Samsung HD753LJ (750GB) drives that I removed LBA48 support, using the Samsung ESTool utility. They are now stuck on that, and neither the ESTool, or the HDD Capacity Restore utility can fix them.

I will have to send them back to Samsung.

I noticed someone else had the exact same problem with the same model drives. Lesson: DON’T CHANGE THE LBA SETTING FOR SAMSUNG DRIVES!!!

Dmitry Postrigan · November 17, 2008 at 7:47 am

Fedon:
Sorry, but I can only suggest calling a data recovery company in your area…

Fedon · November 17, 2008 at 11:20 pm

Dmitry,
Some people here wrote, that they get their capacity + “ALL DATA” back ! How ?

Regards,

Rob · November 19, 2008 at 1:28 am

I have to say thank you for this awesome program. Saved my life!

Charlie · November 22, 2008 at 5:20 am

Excellent Utility – Direct and to the Point – It reminds me of the days 20-25 years ago when the simplest programs were some of the most useful programs you could have!

I have been using an “old” Alienware machine for a 2TB media Server using TVersity for the past year and a half.

I recently built a new gaming machine and converted my old gaming machine as the new media server. When I did this, I installed a new WD 1TB Caviar Black drive. It worked perfectly for a month until this problem occurred (33 MB in the BIOS, etc.). Fortunately, I had the right mind to not fool around with the data and search for answers. This utility fixed the problem.

I appreciate your explanations at the beginning of the page of the causes of the problem. One question though for future reference – Does this utility work with Windows Vista 32 bit? What about 64 bit OS?

Thanks and superb work!

Dmitry Postrigan · November 23, 2008 at 1:57 am

Charlie:
It should work fine under 32-bit Vista. 64-bit OSes aren’t supported at this time.

Thanks

Fred · November 30, 2008 at 8:40 am

Could someone please tell me how can I find out if OS (XP or Vista) is 32 bit or 64 bit? Thanks

Dave · December 3, 2008 at 3:11 am

i have had both these errors

errors
1/ Device is in use and can’t be removed. Please Remove Manualy in Device Manager and try again!

2/ ” More than one device detected on the channel with the selected device. The device has to be single on a channel”

problem solved on my pc

i had the ide cable for the hardrive[ system board end] connector inserted into the secondary slot of the motherboard, changed them round as they should be, ide cable [system board end] to primary slot on motherboard

thanks for the tool

RaSi · December 4, 2008 at 3:38 pm

Fedon:

Re: data loss
You said: “after a powerloss i got only 38 Mb”
–> The power loss event may have also damaged the drive. As Dmitry said, try a data-recovery expert at this point….

You do use a surge protector, don’t you?

Lindy · December 11, 2008 at 2:20 am

I ran Norton Ghost 14 and was creating an Ghost backup file on a 1TB WDC 10EACS when Ghost crashed and left me with a 33MB drive. After much searching, I found your utility and my drive is now back to 1TB. Many many thanks for the utility – much appreciated – T thought I had a brick and had lost hundreds of megabytes of data that I was just trying to back up!

Paul Keane · December 12, 2008 at 12:40 pm

Hello there I just want to thank you very much had three 1tb seagate drives each showing 32mb ( no help on Seagate site ) I ran your program on all three and two came up perfect with all data in tact. Excellent tool and simple to use. well done.

I have one drive that show the drive having 931.gb unallocated is there any way to retrieve this drive with out losing the data.

Regards Paul

Anonymous · December 14, 2008 at 6:49 am

GA 965P DS3 + WD10AEDS 1TB HDD resulted in 31 or 33 MB available, your proggy fixed it. Sweet. Now I can install Windows, yea. –bitbum

Steve F · December 18, 2008 at 12:02 am

Many thanks for providing this utility and web page. It took me 5 hours from the first size reporting error, forum searches,arrival here, system reconfiguration (to set up Windows on another SATA drive so I could run the fix) before my stupid Samsung HD103UJ 1TB/Gigabyte P35C DS3R combination could be ‘repaired’, but finally I’m there. Samsung do themselves no favours by not recognising this problem on their support pages, even if it does only occur with some motherboards and may or may not be entirely their ‘fault’.

Anonymous · December 18, 2008 at 5:36 pm

its of no use at all

Hai · December 18, 2008 at 8:49 pm

Hi dear …

I use program and my 31 MB hard disk convert to 137 GB har disk …

The original size is 1TB…

What is the solution ?

Thanks a lot .

Anton · December 20, 2008 at 1:16 pm

My Gigabyte P35C-DS3R motherboard was detecting my 1TB Western Digital WDC WD10EACS as 33MB ….
Your magic program fixed it …
although I had to juggle the power and uninstall on the device manager and reboot a few times to get it to avoid that “Manually remove from Device manager” pop up…
and I had to re-run your crsetup to run the program each time because I got an “Error opening driver” popup otherwise…
Thanks for helping me avoid returning the drive to the shop :-)

Anton.

ahmad · December 28, 2008 at 6:07 pm

Hi Dear
I have eagate st 3250310ns with 250GB when I connect it to the pc the bios detect it as 0 size with the HP model gb0250c8045
and windows can’t detect it can you help me
B.R.
Ahmad

Paul Maconochie · January 6, 2009 at 12:44 am

Thank you for a brilliant utility, it worked like magic.

I was trying to clone my C drive to a 1Tb Samsung HD103UJ drive and without knowing what I did wrong I ended up in the situation where my PC showed just 33M capacity oin the HDD. The Samsung HDD tool seemed unable to correct the problem and in desparation I did another Google search and found your site.

Thanks again.

Paul

Florent · January 9, 2009 at 2:38 am

Hi Dmitry,

First thanks a bunch for the tool. I had a hard drive whose capacity was mysteriously shrunk from 160GB to 23.1GB, and thanks to this tool I recovered the full use of my hard drive.

I’d like to understand exactly what happened though from a technical standpoint, if you can shed some light… Here is my what happened: I had a dual boot Windows / Ubuntu, and my hard drive was partitionned this way:
– 150 MB for /boot (grub)
– 120 GB for a NTFS partition for Windows
– 15 GB for an ext3 partition for Ubuntu mounted on /
– 17 GB for another ext3 partition for Ubuntu mounted on /home
– 1 GB of swap

One day, my Windows displayed a nice blue screen of death, and that’s when my problems started: Windows couldn’t boot anymore, BIOS was reporting a capacity of 23.1 GB, and so were other recovery tools on other PCs (I had put the drive in a USB enclosure, and the drive appeared to contain a single unformatted 23.1GB partition). However, Ubuntu still booted normally, and tools like gparted and fdisk on Ubuntu were still seeing the full disk with all the partitions, and were able to mount the partitions properly and read from them.

What do you think could make different tools report different sizes? Some were looking at what the hard drive controller was reporting (including the effect from the DCO), while others were looking at the MBR?

Also, a suggestion: it would be awesome to make this tool usable from a Live CD of some sort; because when this happens to a laptop, using this tool becomes very tedious: you need to unseat the hard drive, and install it on a desktop (with a 44 pin to 40 pin PATA connector adapter for PATA drives). It would be much easier if you could just insert a CD and run the tool. Any plans for that?

Florent

Pete Knight · January 11, 2009 at 12:23 am

New Samsung 1000GB HDD, installed on an XP machine, formatted and reported the whole drive size as being available. I used Acronis to do an image of my Operating System shortly after not sure what happened or what I did but I couldn’t see the Acronis image any more and the Samsung reported its size as being 33Mb / 7.8Gig. Tried absolutely everything have probably wasted some 20 hours downloading progs/images to blow to a CD, to boot from to change this that and the other and then eventually came across you.

Ran CR first time and got a weird report that CR thought the size would be actually less than 33Mb and made the factory capacity out to be less than zero – strange, on running and a restart it reported 7.8G. Anyway ran a second time and it declared that the factory capacity would be 1000GB, ran CR, restarted machine, used XP Disk Management to partition = all present and correct! FANTASTIC.

You are a GOD, it would seem from all the surfing I have done on this topic you are the only one who seems to understand the problem and is prepared to help out with a solution that is easy for the average guy/gal. I would have thought you would have been extremely rich by now with every disk manufacturer wanting CR on their utility disk? Once again many, many thanks for ending my nightmare.

Chris · January 15, 2009 at 7:40 pm

When I run this program, it doesn’t find any harddrives. When I click “Show All Channels”, it has things like “Channel Master #0” and “Channel Slave #0”, but it says “Unknown Device”.

Any ideas?

More specifically, the program says “No drives detected on this controller” for both the controllers listed.

Nick · January 21, 2009 at 7:27 am

I have a new 320gb drive for my laptop in a usb enclosure. i cloned my old 60gb drive to the 320gb. now the 320gb drive shows only 54gb. now this sounds like just the utility i need but can anyone tell me how I connect my laptop drive to a pc?

randall · January 23, 2009 at 7:18 pm

i am eternally grateful! you saved me from further depression! i thought my 1TB western digital would be gone along with all my precious data in it, but you just saved my life! i am eternally grateful sir!

Stuart · January 27, 2009 at 11:55 pm

I have the same problem as Chris.. Same drive size and same problem.. Was wondering if anyone had any ideas..

Thank you

Schuin · February 5, 2009 at 6:28 pm

Downloaded your utility, saved to desktop then “ran”. Would not install, indicated the file was corrupt. Deleted file and downloaded again, same results “corrupted”. I am running XP SP3 on a new laptop. Any suggestions?

Schuin · February 6, 2009 at 12:27 am

Downloaded your utility using VISTA just fine and installed. With the hard drive that I want to increase back to OEM capacity installed in the laptop, how do I run your utility? It must “unmount” the drive to change it, but I am running from it. Can put the drive in an external USB caddy, but your utility does not support USB to see and work on the drive.

WaldemarF · February 13, 2009 at 12:24 am

I have WD 80 GB SATA boot drive. When I tried to use Partition Magic (wihout any action) the program reported that there is a problem wih my partition table and that it may correct it. Like a fool I clicked OK and as a result – my disk simply disappeared from my computer. In detail – the disk is seen by BIOS correctly, but it is not seen by XP.It is very strange to me that:1) the XP starts from the this disk( it means that the computer sees the boot.ini file and ntldr), but after several seconds computer reboots
2) no program can be started flom the floppy , when tihis faulty HDD is installed. I checked it with CD-boot rescue program and it reported that there are no faults on my disk!!. When I started my XP from another disk, the computer worked fine, but my faulty disk was still not seen. to my opinion there could be the problem with Master boot record or partition table. I have discussed my problem with several my friends and they treated it as unsolvable, because all repair programs are working under Windows installed on another disk – but as I already mentioned any of the the operating systems do not see this disk!!!! Do you have any idea what could be the reason and wherecould I find a remedy program working e.g under boot CD with Linux which could simply format the whole disk to make it visible to Widows. I do not care very much about my files there, I want my disk working!
Than you for your assistance
Wlavek

JTeixeira · February 18, 2009 at 11:09 pm

Iive tried to run this tool on a Samsung HD502IJ that got the 48 bit problem. The tool reports factory capacity 500,107MB and Reported Capacity 137,438MB, however when I try to restore capacity I got the message: “”Hard drive is not accessible or is damage in some way…”, but the HDD is working, however with only 137GB.

pd2jk · February 20, 2009 at 1:00 pm

Holy shit, I’ve given up hope until I ran into this remarkable little tool. A 69GB WD Scorpio turned 160GB again and now I can get the data back. Thanks a million!

wahid · February 22, 2009 at 12:22 pm

I have 1TB External Hard Disk Western Digital (WD), now its only read 31MB , I am Used More program to resolve but not resolved.

thanks

barb · February 22, 2009 at 7:04 pm

Hi there, I have been going round & round here and getting very frustrated…here’s my problem..I have a Dell laptop..I copied my 60 GB HDD to a new 250 GB WD Scorpio Blue HDD using EZBackup..worked like a charm, I could even boot up using the new, larger HDD in my laptop, but it only showed as a 60 GB drive..ok, enter your fantastic program…which restored my drive back to 250GB. Then I used Windows Disk Management to partition my 190GB (actually 187GB) and then I installed it back in my laptop, turned it on, only to receive the BSOD, stating something along the lines that my hard drive has a problem, etc…it will not boot with the new drive. My BIOS reports that my HDD is 58GB and that this field is not changeable, period. I know it also has to due with the Media Direct hidden partition, etc…that Dell puts on here. The questions I have are, 1..how can I get my computer to boot with my new drive installed? and 2…can I remove Media Direct at all, seeing as I’ve never used it in the 4½ yrs I’ve had this laptop? TThank you in advance

tristan · March 3, 2009 at 11:00 pm

hey, it says “device is currently in use and cannot be removed from the system. please remove it manually in the device manager and try again…” first of all how do i manually remove it and second if i do will my computer not turn off because its got my OS installed on it…

Song · March 4, 2009 at 1:51 am

Hi,
Do you have any suggestion to restore factory capacity of a 2.5 in external hard drive without using USB enclosure? thanks
Song

neil · March 7, 2009 at 11:44 pm

I had a new western digital 1 tb hdd I bought last week and it’s been working great, I decided to reinstall windows. I loaded up BartPE moved some of my old folders and when I rebooted my bios (and my pci sata card) both detected my 1 tb hdd as 33MB, I used your tool and it WORKS GREAT, . Thank you so much, everyone that has helped out and put in time is wonderful thanks a lot for all your hard work.

TLDR: HDD Capacity Restore Tool restored my wd 1tb hdd showing 33mb back to ~937gb and I powered it off, rebooted and everything was there and working great. Only thing I had to do was disconnect the sata cdrom on the same channel because it wants only one device on it which is understandable. :)

Roman Zhovtulya · March 10, 2009 at 2:16 pm

Hello,
Thanks a lot for the great tool, but I cannot figure out why it shows “factory capacity -2 Bytes” for my SATA OEM drive (windows reports 127GB), but label on the drive says 250GB (it has no jumpers).

Any ideas ?

Thanks a lot,
Roman

Roman Zhovtulya · March 10, 2009 at 2:29 pm

Hi,
I’m trying to restore a 250 GB SATA OEM drive (windows reports 137 GB), but your tool reports “Factory Capacity: -2 Bytes”. What could be the problem? (I connect directly to a SATA cable, using version 1.2 of the tool, the drive has no jumpers and a PC is 1 year old).

Thanks a lot,
Roman

junioiru · March 13, 2009 at 12:18 pm

hello,
i have one hdd samsung 103UJ of 1TB.My bios says that he is only of 32MB…what is to do?plzz help meee

shane · March 16, 2009 at 2:07 am

i have had 2 WD SATA 1T drives in my system for some time now. and was startled when i found out one of them started coming up as 33MB. after running a few recovery programs to try and find out what was going on. discovered that the drives CHS was coming up incorrectly. went to the bios to check what was going on but unable to set those settings manually in these newer computers. i knew i had to try and find a program that would allow me to set these values manually and hopefully override the bios’s settings. i did find one but after 3 days of pounding the drive i gave up on it. i was almost going to take the drive back to them but decided to do a google search. your page was the first thing that came up. and withing minutes my drive was working the way it should again. now just seing if the previous programs didnt damage the existing data on the disk. brilliant program!

Ismael · March 23, 2009 at 5:25 am

Hi, I have a 40GB HDD, a virus somehow manage to infect my HDD (Notebook IDE) and now I cant even format my HDD, It is always delayed write failed on an enclosure (plug into other pc), It has no bad sectors at all, but miraculously I manage to format it and divide it into two partitions, I thought it was a Thank God I restored my HDD physically, but the bad news is, when I tried to put it back into the laptop to install windows in it, but it is sad to discover that the HDD is cannot be accessed by the windows installer cd….I tried to use different CD installers but it is always the same result. so, my question is, is there anything that I can do to revive this HDD?, I need it so bad…

Jon · March 27, 2009 at 5:49 pm

Sounds like an extremely handy program for many people, unfortunately not me… It simply kept giving me the error ““Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform” – Which I did, but windows, bios, and other recovery tools very stubbornly would only see a 32mb disk or nothing at all. I tried other PC’s, and even replaced the Mobo on mine with an MSI figuring even if it didn’t make this tool work, I would need a replacement anyway after my anger at this Gigacrap board would have forced me to repeatedly drive over it in my car.

Just when I was coming to the conclusion: Gigabyte GA-945GM-S2 Mobo + Samsung 1TB Hard drive with all family photos = Divorce waiting to happen. I came across http://www.hdat2.com. Booted with the free iso, did the easy steps in the answer to Q1 – method 1 in the FAQ (luckily the command didn’t abort as I wouldn’t have wanted to do the steps it says to do if it does abort. I think moving to method 2 would have been a wiser move at that junction). Then rebooted, disk back to normal with all my data eagerly awaiting me to set up that backup solution I had very stupidly been putting off doing.

AWC · April 5, 2009 at 12:54 am

Add another Thank You to the list, Dmitry Postrigan.

As a web developer for free software I (/we) see alot of downloads and installs with little feed back except for the “can you add this” or “theres a bug here”; so with respect to your time and knowledge, you have been a big help to me, thank you.

Just recently i started to play around with VMware’s ESXi Server and somewhere along the lines a 1TB drive was changed to 33mb. This drive had around 200GB’s of important information and another 500GB’s of misc stuff which was only partly backed-up.

After trying a few other “recovery” software to no avail, your program brought the drive back to life will allfiles intacted and working like normal. Thank you again.

MDA · April 10, 2009 at 8:01 am

Big thanks to the author for this tool. I have a WD WD10EACS 1TB, full of important, but backup up, data. After a MB bios update, the drive would only be recognized as 33mb, and in need of a format. Thanks to google and your tool, I was able to quickly restore my drive to believing it was 1TB.

Now, my big question is: Why does Microsoft not buy/license your software and incorporate into Windows so it can recognize this issue and fix it on the fly? It would save many people who do not find your tool the heartbreak of losing photos and the like.

Cheers, and thanks again!
Matt.

SCT · April 13, 2009 at 5:59 am

Jon:

Thanks for your post about HDAT2! I’ve been trying for months to get HDD Capacity Restore to fix my 200GB 2.5″ HDD, but never got it to work properly. My drive got screwed when I tried to ghost a 60GB drive with Norton Ghost and it dropped down to a formatted capacity of 54GB. Anyway, after messing with HDAT2 for about 15 mins, I’ve got my full 200GB back! THANKS!!!

Robert · April 13, 2009 at 12:22 pm

Hi,

I am upgrading my brother’s Dell Inspiron 6400 120GB hard drive. I put in a brand new Samsung HM500LI 500MB drive, and it was magically truncated to the original drive’s size. After browsing a lot and trying various utilities, including Samsung’s own utility, and nothing would restore the drive to it’s correct size. Every utility that issued a command received a “command aborted”.

Fortunately I ran across a post about your utility. In about 60 seconds, I downloaded, installed, and ran it with the result being that the drive size was correctly restored.

Thank you very much!

Bruce · April 15, 2009 at 3:19 am

I wanted to upgrade my wife’s Dell E1505 from 80GB to 250GB, both were Seagate drives. The new drive was truncated back to 80GB during the clone using Seagate’s cloning software. I had to find a SATA to PATA adapter to allow me to attach the SATA drive to my old desktop system, but it worked. One comment, you have to make sure that there is only the one drive on the channel. Thanks much.

Kris · April 18, 2009 at 3:15 pm

I had a problem with my Samsung HD103UJ (1TB) drive with all my personal photographs on it.
Drive showed 32GB! This excellent program restored my capacity and best of all ik kept al my pictures!
So thanks a lot :-D

Iggy · April 26, 2009 at 4:24 pm

Thanks a bunch. I had a WD 80 gig that only showed 33 gig and within a minute running your magic program I now have 80 gig again. I have no idea when or how it happened but I’m sure I did something wrong a few years agao. LOL
Also the change of the HD space didn’t erase any of the OS on the drive.
Thank you , Thank you, Thank you!

Anyway I’m using the 80 gig now for Windows 7 Beta test.

Mick · April 28, 2009 at 7:36 am

My problem was with a Samsung HD103UI 1TB, similar to others above. The drive after purchase only showed/allowed a 32MB partition. Problem was solved with the utility, despite it giving an error at first. I followed the advice about disconnecting the power cable – despite having a brain fart and doing the SATA cable instead, but the result was the same. So as a headsup to people, if you get an error that it can’t fix the drive, run the program again and when the “restore capacity” button appears, disconnect the power or SATA cables from the drive, reconnect, and try again. Worked perfectly fine for me.

NOTE: My drive was empty since it is brand new, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to anyone who has information already stored on their drive that could be lost.

M. H. Lei · April 28, 2009 at 4:57 pm

Thanks a lot. I bought a WD 1TB HDD yesterday and it shows 931.51GB initially. After formatting, it showed only 31MB. It didn’t help after I updated my motherboard to the latest BIOS version.

Goggled for this issue and it appears to be kind of LBA48 problem. I am not familiar with it but this program just helped me to get back my 1TB in a few clicks!! THANKS SOO MUCH!!!

Bob · May 13, 2009 at 5:10 am

I have two 120 gb Maxtor HDs with the exact same problem at the exact same time (not likely hardware failure). They were recently in a TIVO, installed by me, and they were “married” as a dual drive. The TIVO went bad, so since these were new (3 months) and worked OK in the TIVO, i wanted to reuse them in a PC. Both report 10.24 mb (not gb) capacity. No tool I tried can get them back to 120 gb, They will not zero fill because it is less than 65556 sectors reported, I see no partitiions on either. Seatools, recommended by Seagate/Maxtor, passed the test for 10mb, and did not restore them. I tried your restoration program, it reports it sees the manufacturer’s capacity of 10 mb (that is, it did not restore the 120 gb). What shall I try next, I don’t know what to do, both fail in the same manner at the same time after working OK in the TIVO? Any suggestion is welcome.

Dan Tidswell · May 20, 2009 at 12:40 pm

RE: Samsung HD103UI 1TB

The instructions in this comment got my entire drive full of data back:

“…the drive only showed a 32MB partition. Problem was solved with this utility. If you get an error that it can’t fix the drive, run the program again and when the “restore capacity” button appears, disconnect the SATA cable from the drive, reconnect, and try again.”

That you to the utility author and thank you to the commenter above.
Dmitry, please put a PayPal button up, I have $20 with you name on it.

Thanks,

Dan

David · May 26, 2009 at 5:23 pm

I have a 300 Gb WD VelociRaptor drive that I installed Win 2000 Pro on. And which has a ceiling of 137 Gb. I then did an XP upgrade and then partitioned the drive into three more drives as I plan on multi-booting the drive with XP, Vista, and Server 2003 and a fourth drive. I formatted the partitions and attempted to install Vista on the second drive. When it asked to install on a specific partition, I selected the second drive which should have been D: drive. An error message stated that all drives, not just the three partitioneds that I did in disk management stated that they all were either unformatted or damaged. This is a brand new drive that I received less than two weeks ago new. Will this program be able to correct my problems and allow the drive to revert back to its full 300 Gb capacity?

Arnie · May 28, 2009 at 1:53 am

It’s great to read of others’ successes, so I’m wondering if this program could help in my situation…
I have a 250GB WD Caviar SATA drive (2500KS) that now thinks it’s a generic 8GB ROM drive due to firmware corruption.
Since the capacity restore tool extracts the factory capacity, will it report my drive as a 250GB (by scanning the drive itself) or 8GB (by reading the firmware).
Before finding this site, my only other option was expensive data recovery (AU$1,000+ !!!) – Backup drive died two weeks ago and I hadn’t got around to replacing it.
Any thoughts would certainly be appreciated.
Thx

José Luis · May 28, 2009 at 9:31 pm

Arnie:

If your hard disk firmware is corrupted (one simptom is it doesn’t correctly report its
model on BIOS), you can try Repair Station (also developed by Atola) available here:

http://www.hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/

This software can repair most of firmware problems on most hard disks for a very
reasonable price ($49.95). You can download for free to check if your drive is recoverable
before paying for the recovery.

I used it once and worked well for me (a drive that identified correctly on BIOS, but reported all its sectors as bad, and no smart information). After using Repair Station, drive was accessible again (though I received some scary warnings about inminent drive failure because of many bad sectors) but I also had to use data recovery software (EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional) to recover files, because file system was damaged.

In my opinion Repair Station is a very useful tool because allows PC technicians and advanced users to recover data from drives (with corrupted firmware only) which otherwise would require the services of a data recovery company (very expensive). However, it’s not a one click solution for the ordinary PC user. If your data are valuable and you are not sure of doing it for yourself, contact with a PC technician to do it for you.

José Luis · May 29, 2009 at 10:59 am

Arnie:

If your hard disk firmware is corrupted (one simptom is it doesn’t correctly report its
model on BIOS), you can try Repair Station (also developed by Atola) available here:

http://www.hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/

This software can repair most of firmware problems on most hard disks for a very
reasonable price ($49.95). You can download for free to check if your drive is recoverable
before paying for the recovery.

I used it once and worked well for me (a drive that identified correctly on BIOS, but
reported all its sectors as bad, and no SMART information). After using Repair Station,
drive was accessible again (though I received some scary warnings about inminent drive
failure because of many bad sectors) but I also had to use data recovery software (EASEUS
Data Recovery Wizard Professional) to recover files, because file system was damaged.

In my opinion Repair Station is a very useful tool because allows PC technicians and
advanced users to recover data from drives (with corrupted firmware only) which otherwise
would require the services of a data recovery company (very expensive). However, it’s not a
one click solution for the ordinary PC user. If your data are valuable and you are not sure
of doing it for yourself, contact with a PC technician to do it for you.

José Luis · May 29, 2009 at 11:10 am

Arnie:

If your hard disk firmware is corrupted (one simptom is it doesn’t correctly report its
model on BIOS), you can try Repair Station (also developed by Atola Technology)
available here: http://www.hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/

This software can repair most of firmware problems on most hard disks for a very
reasonable price ($49.95). You can download for free to check if your drive is recoverable
before paying for the recovery.

I used it once and worked well for me (a drive that identified correctly on BIOS, but

reported all its sectors as bad, and no SMART information). After using Repair Station,

drive was accessible again (though I received some scary warnings about inminent drive

failure because of many bad sectors) but I also had to use data recovery software (EASEUS

Data Recovery Wizard Professional) to recover files, because file system was damaged.

In my opinion Repair Station is a very useful tool because allows PC technicians and

advanced users to recover data from drives (with corrupted firmware only) which otherwise

would require the services of a data recovery company (very expensive). However, it’s not a

one click solution for the ordinary PC user. If your data are valuable and you are not sure

of doing it for yourself, contact with a PC technician to do it for you.

Sqrach · June 9, 2009 at 6:57 pm

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You

This issue was annoying me so much. When I get my life managed again, I will have to make a donation to the creator.

I had the problem with Dell. If you try to clone a media direct HDD. So my new 320GB drive was stuck at 75GB and dell support claimed it couldn’t be fixed. With the aid of another site for parts, I bought a IDE to Sata converter, hooked it up to an old computer and ran this. Took maybe 1 whole second.
After I just had to go to disk management and format a new partition with the 230+Gb of space I now have. Awesome
..

Tom Jenks · June 9, 2009 at 7:57 pm

You my friend are wonderful!

I tried restoring my Samsing F1 1Tb hard drive which had the 32MB error on Windows 7 64 with no luck, and tried it again on Windows XP 32. I had the same drive is in use error, but powering down the drive and on again (just before repairing) worked. Restarted, and there we go! All my files back – over 400GB’s worth!!

Not too sure what caused the problem, but Im guessing it was something caused by the power out I had.

Lets just hope that it doesn’t happen again! Once again, MANY THANKS!!

On

André Stein · June 16, 2009 at 12:58 am

I did exactly how many of you did…but my Samsung HD103UJ couldn’t be “resized” or even recognized just after trying HDD Capacity Restore Tool. My mobo is a Gigabyte GA-MA69VM-S2…

For those who did like this…

“…the drive only showed a 32MB partition. Problem was solved with this utility. If you get an error that it can’t fix the drive, run the program again and when the “restore capacity” button appears, disconnect the SATA cable from the drive, reconnect, and try again.”

…is it safe to disconnect and REconnect SATA cables with the cpu ON?!

André Stein · June 16, 2009 at 1:46 am

Just to let you know…I DID disconnect/reconnect SATA cable and…DIDN’T work. Too bad. Dunno what to do anymore…

Fred Hunter · June 20, 2009 at 5:32 am

Bob –

I’ve got the same problem… two maxtor dirves, one 133 GB, the other 120 GB, after being in a TiVo they only report 10 GB. Did you ever find a fix for this?
Thanks!

Josh · June 23, 2009 at 7:38 am

This program didn’t work for me. I installed it on my laptop, and ran it with the hard drive in the laptop. It came up in the list within the program, but when i tried to continue it said the hard drive was in use so it wouldn’t work.
So i thought, ok that makes sense, i need to put the drive in an enclosure an plug it into a different computer. So i did that, but now when running the progam with the drive in a enclosure plugged into my mum’s computer, it wont recognise the drive, i think because it’s connected via usb. In device manager the drive is displayed as Generic USB storage device.

So how can i use this program i wonder? The only thing i can think of is running it from a boot disc, but there’s no mention on the site of needing to do that, and the software is designed to run on windows, so i’m just wondering how to use it.

Gideon · June 27, 2009 at 8:43 pm

Hi,

It didn’t work for me either ;-) I have a WD Blue Scorpio 320GB [2.5inch] reporting as 98GB. I suspect it was my fault using it in an external box that only supports up to 160GB when trying to migrate my system from the old drive using Acronis Easy Migrate

I have removed it from device manager. It is recognised in Disk management [computer management]. It makes no difference which of these I ‘remove’ it from [or both]. I have shut the program down and restarted – and also rebooted – no joy.

HELP !!!

Thanks

Gideon · June 27, 2009 at 8:44 pm

p.s. it is not connected by usb – it is connected directly to the m.b.

Gideon · June 27, 2009 at 11:57 pm

Spent all day trying to resolve my issue as per 3 posts above. Tried fresh window install and then install of HDD capacity restore – still reported as locked. Tried good old DOS debugging.

Then I found this

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/archive/index.php/t-223100.html

Seagate tool work on WD drives :-)

This info especially

SeaTools for DOS
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=SeaTools&vgnextoid=720bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Manual on how to do that..
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/SeaToolsDOSguide.pdf

F. Set Capacity
————
Occasionally, a disc drive may be too large and its size needs
to be reduced to a lower capacity. Similarly, a drive with a
reduced capacity may need to be reset to its native maximum
capacity. Three choices are available under this section:
S – Set 32GB Capacity. A common setting for older systems.
R – Reset to Drive Maximum. Full capacity is restored.
M – Set Manually. Allow you to set a specific size.

Hope this helps folks !

G

Iggy · June 28, 2009 at 5:54 am

Josh
Some laptop manufacturers have hidden particians to save and protect bio files etc. Compaa and Dell do. This may be the reason you can’t get 100% of your hard drive space. Anyone else have any ideas to help Josh?

Santiago · July 2, 2009 at 2:19 am

HI , im from brasil, sorry my poor english , but i’ll try to explain what happened to me,

i have an hd seagate DT980310AS, 80GB, and in laptop, with Xp, y can see 76 GB, iinstaled HDD CAPACITY RESTORE, AND APEARS TO ME (SHOW )

Channel#0, master st980310as
SERIAL 5ST09FY6 SIZE 80GB
Security : NOt Locked
when i confirmed i get a wrong msg, what i did wrong? can u help me?
i really need to recover my full hd .. it’s an dell laptop thanks

thnak

this operation will determine factory capacity

Santiago · July 2, 2009 at 2:38 am

Not finished post**
this is the message that apears to me!
device is currently in use and cannot be removed from the system Please remove it in the device manager and try again.
guys i ran the hdd cap recover in my Xp, did i wrong , please in need help.

tnxs

Tucho · July 6, 2009 at 8:30 pm

Awesome tool, you have saved my HD, from 32 Mb to 1 Tb with only one click. Thanks a lot :D

John · July 7, 2009 at 7:45 am

Thank you so much you saved my hard drive. A 1 TB WD Green Caviar, 10EAVS i believe, said it was 32 mb of raw data instead of 1 tb and now its fixed after one click. Thanks a million times over, I hope my comment helps people find this.

Haderade · July 13, 2009 at 4:29 pm

Excellent program. I had this 160GB that was showing up in the BIOS as 33GB and I could get no more out of it. I tried everything, zero fill, hex editors, fdisk /mrb, nothing worked. Then I download this little Capacity Restore and *POOF* It is 160GB.

Thanks a million!

Matt · July 14, 2009 at 10:43 am

Fantastic!

Fixed 1TB drive that read at 32mb. Would not work at first so I used the Power Plug in/out method.
Worked like a charm.

Thanks heaps! saved me the nightmare that is RMA.

john scoles · July 16, 2009 at 12:51 pm

Yeah but how can you fix a hard drive when you are running 64 bit??

Steve Jacobson · July 19, 2009 at 4:08 pm

I am trying to use this on a Dell laptop. I upgraded the SATA hard drive from a 100 GB drive to a 500GB and remaged the old drive onto the new drive using Acronis True Image Workstation. I now get 100 GB max capacity on the new drive. I tried using this utility, but it wants to unmount the drive, and of course it can’t because the Windows XP is running on the drive. How can I get this utility to run and free up the remaining 400 GB on the drive?

I know the BIOS can see the entire drive, because when I first installed the drive (before I imaged it), the drive was showing 500GB.
Thanks in advance.

Thank

George Georgiev · July 22, 2009 at 2:27 am

For some reason, main drive on my Dell laptop (160gb SATA Seagate Momentum) got same capacity (73gb) as the external drive connected. After several tries with SeaTools to “unlock”, I landed through hddguru.com to your excellent utility.

The main problem was removing the cover from my desktop so I can attach the disk :) After that, couple of mouseclicks – and I got my three-way boot disk back!

Thank a lot (большое Спасибо!!), you’ve saved my day!

Deano Montreuil · August 9, 2009 at 4:02 am

I”m trying to restore two laptop drives to their native size after Norton Ghost resized them to the size of the disk I was trying to clone.

HDD Capacity restore is reporting Unknown Device for all SATA drives in my Dell Desktop (including the laptop rives I’ve attached to the SATA cables in my desktop.

What can I do ???

David Zhao · August 9, 2009 at 12:12 pm

Thanks a lot, this saved me a lot of trouble!

Jaison Niehues · August 12, 2009 at 4:10 am

I tried to use this software on my Samsung HD103UJ 1TB (1000GB) HDD, but not worked for me. It is showing 33mb on BIOS and 7.87Gb on Windows (non allocate space). The following message appears: “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.”

I already tried to do that trick, pull of the power cable and put it back again, still not working.

I think the problem is my current motherboard, a Asus P4C800 Deluxe (not the same motherboard where the HDD was messed up, it was on a Gigabyte mobo).

Lenny · August 18, 2009 at 4:38 am

I was hoping to make this utility work on a BartPE disk, but it does not. Any suggestions?

scrat · August 19, 2009 at 2:31 pm

i got the same problem and massage from ur Program by a Samsung HD103UJ 1 Terrabyte

if here any tricks ?

Mfg: Scrat

Crazylegz · August 21, 2009 at 4:29 pm

This is an invaluable tool, fixed a Samsung HD103UJ 1TB that was showing as 128gb when formatted, and this is on a failing drive which has to be sent back.

If your a system builder like me this tool is part of my portable tool kit.

Thanks M8 you saved me a headache.

Jerome · August 23, 2009 at 7:51 am

Have used this excellent tool in the past, however ia unable to get it running on Windows7 (either 32 or 64bit) have tried running it under win xp compatability mode but no joy, any ideas ??

The problem i have is an error message “error opening driver”.

Aelphais · August 28, 2009 at 6:37 am

Aww, this was great.

I had taken my computer apart for blowing it out with some compressed air.

I do this occasionally and always ensure I write down which drive the sata cables were in and even which position in the case they were in, as sometimes that weird magic thing happens where something is wrong even though nothing should be. Well even after putting everything back in the same way it came out, powering it on caused me to notice something. My 1tb Samsung (about 700 gigs full, one of 4 internal drives) was reporting that it was not formatted, and something about 7.87 gigs. Long story short, your program just saved the universe from complete destruction tonight. So yeah, good job.

Greybear · August 31, 2009 at 6:40 pm

WHOOHOOO!

Thank you.

joeclown · September 1, 2009 at 9:45 pm

thank you so much!! it fixed my two 1TB Samsung HDD “33MB Problem”s… i was gave up and i saw your solution i tried it and fixed immediately!! thank you so much again…

Mary · September 1, 2009 at 10:08 pm

How do I get the harddrive I want fixed on one channel.Says there is more than one on this channel.
Thanks,
Mary

Splunge · September 1, 2009 at 11:10 pm

I tried the program but it does not give results that I am comfortable with. I have a WD1600BB drive. Disk management shows 7.88GB. this program has a reported capacity of 0 (zero) with a factory capacity of –2 (negative 2). I did not attempt to restore the capacity. Can you give me an idea as to why I get these results? Would it be harmful to click the restore button?

serpentiny · September 4, 2009 at 9:18 am

Hi, there
I have MB Gigabyte GA 35T-DQ6(rev.1.0) and bought one HDD 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 Raid edition(HE103UJ). BIOS recognize it as HDD with capacity 33 MB.
When I tried to fixed it with your program it shows this Error:

“Hard Drive is not accessible or damaged in some way.
Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered.
Please try to run this program on another platform.”

Please tell me what to do next?

C Guan · September 10, 2009 at 8:36 am

This tool is magnificent!!
relief my days long pain,
save me hundreds of hours’ work,
(I know I should have backup)
you are really great!

care to disclose a little technical details? may be this concept can work on other hardwares.

thanks again

Robert Littell · September 17, 2009 at 11:18 pm

Thank you for the info and the app. i used it on a WD 1TB driver and got 400+ gigs of backup data back and dont have to buy a new drive.. 1000 thanks

Dsarvadi · September 22, 2009 at 4:42 am

Got a variant for 64 bit systems?

Andrey · September 22, 2009 at 8:41 pm

With your program I was able to repair the hard drive WD1001FALS 1TB, but the number of LBA is slightly different from what is specified on the disk can I manually set the number of LBA?

Andrey · September 22, 2009 at 9:19 pm

Thank you very much. all values LBA recovered accurately, but only at the second attempt …

Nolo · September 24, 2009 at 6:55 am

Dmitry,

I have read through all the posts and seem to have a problem that is slightly different to that most have experienced. I recently cloned a 160MB HDD to a 320MB HDD, and the new 320 HDD shows up on Windows XP as a 160 MB drive, nevertheless, it shows up as a 320 MB HDD on HDD Capacity Restore, thus when i have run the program it simply says there is no capacity to restore. It also shows up as a 320 HDD on my BIOS and on Drive Manager in Windows, but when i explore the drive it shows up as a 160 MB one. Have tried putting the drive on various different PC`s but the result is always the same, for some reason XP reads it both as a 160 MB and a 320 MB drive, and I have not been able to find a way to make Windows XP explore or see it as a 320 MB drive.

Rizzo · September 25, 2009 at 5:44 pm

Happy Days,

My friend just got back his replacement WD 1TB drive for it to only be 32mb in size after reading this article and running the tool everything is good the 1TB drive is all back.

Thank you and good work!

porp · September 25, 2009 at 7:37 pm

hi
i have a 64GB kingstone usb data storage .
it not format & not storage any data on , what work i do ?
please help me

Shez · September 27, 2009 at 4:19 am

I concur….anything for 64bit systems? As some people above I get the same error when opening which is error opening driver. This did work on my 32 bit system but several months ago I built 64 bit and last week literally cleaned out my computer that had dust in it and of course when putting back the 1TB HDD Windows Vista can’t read it properly…I don’t really want to put it into an expernal caddy and move the data off just to format it again…..then put the data back on.

Ion · September 28, 2009 at 10:33 am

Hi everyone,

I have a problem with my secondary 1TB hard drive.
Here are the symptoms in the order that they occured, and how I have responded thus far.

1) My 2nd hard drive suddenly stopped getting read by Windows 7. It said that it needed to be formatted in order to be used and for some reason, it said that it was in FAT32, even though it was NTFS last i checked.

2) I looked on the internet and found that even if I quick formatted it (in an attempt to get it back to NTFS) the data would still be on the hard drive as long as I didn’t write anything more to the hard drive.

3) So I did that, with the plan of using some sort of software program that could retrieve data after a format of the hard drive.

4) After that, Windows started reading the drive as an NTFS hard drive.. but it said that it only had 32MB of hard drive space.. which was obviously not right. So i looked on the internet again and found out about a common problem (probably what most people here are having) about hard drive caches being read instead of the actually capacity – or something like that.

5) So i got this atola hdd capacity tool from here, however when I try and select the drive, it says that the device is in use and that I need to manually disable it from device manager. I tried this, restarted my computer as instructed, but it still said the same thing.. the settings in the device manager didn’t indicate any changes (still offering the option to disable the hard drive).

6) I have a LOT of reaaaally important documents and files on this hard drive. If anyone can provide any help, suggestions, solutions, etc, I would be extremely grateful. I’ve been at this for about 4 hours now.. and am getting really worried about losing my important information

Please offer your advice.

Thanks

name · October 1, 2009 at 12:48 am

Worked superb on my Western Digital WD10EADS – HDD size trunked by guess what – a Gigabyte motherboard. (M61PM-S2, MCP61 SATA controller, Nforce 430 chipset)

Thanks!!!!!

I have one · October 5, 2009 at 1:44 pm

i used this program and lost all my 830 GB data from a 1 TB WD caviar green hard drive

cyberdiver · October 8, 2009 at 11:02 am

Durch das Imaging mit Acronis, habe ich an einem Dell Inspiron eine 250 GB zu einer 120 Gig HDD gemacht. Leider habe ich dieses Tool erst nach 3 schrecklichen Wochen gefunden.
Nun habe ich das Tool genutzt und wieder eine 250 GB HDD. der restliche Plattenplatz wurde freigegeben und kann nun als zweite partition genutz werden, die original Daten wurden nicht verändert.
Es ist ein großartiges Tool und gehört in jede Werkzeugkiste
It works great.
Greating from Hamburg

RickRock · October 24, 2009 at 3:45 pm

I used Acronis to clone my 30g drive to a larger 120g drive plugged in to a USB HD adaptor and, of course, it made the large drive only 32g. I understand that your utility does not work via a USB adaptor – I understand that. My questions is this: If Acronis could mess it up via USB, why can’t a utility (like yours) fix it via USB. That is, couldn’t you offer an option that just “does what it can” to a USB drive even though you can not do “every thing possible”?

A thanful guy having his personal files back · October 24, 2009 at 5:10 pm

I can’t say how much I’am thankful for your tool, Dimitry. Your software safed so much money, a few thousand euro maybe. All my files are back, after I finally made the tool run with that “if you’re brave enough-trick”. I have learned (hopefully) to make regular backups from now on.

I am using XP with SP3, it is the 1 TB HD103UJ from Samsung together with the Gigabyte 965P-DS4 Rev. 3.3 F9 (Now F12b) Mainboard. The old BIOS version destroyed the hdd within a few seconds (hopefully the new one is fixed), when I connected the 1 TB hdd to the first channel on that mainboard. It is the typically Gigabyte Bios bug so many people report about.

I don’t know what I would have done if my files were lost for ever.

Thank you so much

Chris · October 31, 2009 at 4:03 pm

Does anybody knows if there is a similar tool like this, just with the ability to detect and change capacity of USB attached drives in Windows XP?

My goal is to find a tool, where i can remove HPA-Partitions in Windows XP via USB attached drives.

Any help is very helpful.

ALAN AVELLA · November 5, 2009 at 4:02 am

Tried to clone a Dell 80 GB drive into a Toshiba 320 GB drive then somputers would only recognize it as a 78 GB hard drive (the 320 GB toshiba) none of the tools available on the Internet fixed it as this tool. I have to say Thanks. Now I will install it from zero not cloning. Something very common with dell computers. Thanks again. At first the tool did not work on an Intel DG33 aso I installed it on a 965 asrock and just great…. by the way always good to have an asrock option.

angelhj · November 7, 2009 at 2:50 am

Thank you for the tools,i have fixed my 1T WD Green Disk which became 32M raw disk.

Silvio · November 17, 2009 at 11:11 am

Thanks for this comprehensive explaination and the comfortalbe tool – solved my 32MB problem with 1T WD green HDD on Gigabyte 965P system.

njnike · December 9, 2009 at 2:04 pm

hi…
i have a problem that my pendrive KIngston USB 2.0 4 GB is showin 0 bytes of used, available and total space.How can i correct it?
Plz reply to my email…
I really thank to whosoever replies!!!

corpz · December 14, 2009 at 9:36 pm

Many thanks! This also fixed by 33 MB problem with my WD10EACS 1TB drive!

fareed · December 19, 2009 at 3:28 pm

during recovery of hard drive data i got this message..”more than 1 device is detected on the channel with the selected device the The device has to be single on a channel”

Corsair · December 20, 2009 at 1:37 am

I have a new 1TB external WD USB HD which shows up on 2 different computers as being 468MB and completely full. Tried to DL the fix program from here, but windows tells me the program file is corrupt when I try to run it. I re-tried but got same msg. Any chance the download file got corrupted ? thanks in advance for any help.

pamungkaz · December 24, 2009 at 2:10 pm

i have maxtor 80GB sata, how i restore it?? i try boot win UBCD4win and try Restore, but shown warning that HD is used, why..?? i boot from USB stick, it not from My HD, thanks,

Bud · January 1, 2010 at 5:54 pm

Seagate 250 GB drive, after messing around with formatting it only showed 37GB, Seagate and most other google sites showed no workable ways to fix it. Your program fixed it immediatly. Windows 7 Pro.
Thanks so much
Bud

Jon Breen · January 8, 2010 at 3:09 pm

Wow, I thought I had lost almost a terabyte of information the other day – my 1TB hard disk was showing up as only 32MB in Windows 7!
Windows kept saying that the drive had not been formatted and did I want to format it now? As a computer engineer I had an inkling that I might be able to get my data back and did not format it. After a little Google search of “hard disk only shows 32MB” I found HDD Capacity Restore.
I downloaded the program and ran it on a different computer (with my HDD attached) and then restored the capacity of my hard disk – all data is still there! Great program and I will recommend it to all my collegues if they ever encounter the same issues!

jeff · January 11, 2010 at 9:11 am

So I had a pair of WD10EADS 1tb drives that I recently moved to a new PC. One is correctly detecting at 1tb, and the other at 32mb. This is an especially big problem as they were part of an extended drive, so at this point neither will operate.

On the PC i moved them to (with W7), the application does not see any drives. So, as suggested, I tried it on another (which happens to be a Vista box). There the app can see it. The first time I try to run it, it shows the drive at 1TB, but off by 1mb. Then I run the app, and it says “Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform” I noticed it was removed from the device manager successfully, so I try running the app again. This time it appears at 33mb, but I get the same error message.

So now I’ve tried it on two PCs with different results, neither positive. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Frank · January 12, 2010 at 9:19 am

I’m running into a problem is there anyone that can help me. I cloned my laptop hard drive onto my new hard drive and now it shows the same hard drive space of 80gb instead of 500gb. I tried using this program but it wont let me because Device is currently being used and cannot be removed from the system. The read some of the comment and it said to remove the hard drive onto a Desktop computer. I on the other hand dont have a desktop computer. Is there another other way to fix this. or if i were to put it onto a desktop do i need any kind of special tools?

mike · January 14, 2010 at 9:49 pm

I’m trying to reset the capacity of an external connected via USB 2.0 with this capacity restore tool.

I have a 160GB maxtor that is only being recognized as a 32 gb drive. The restore tool is not detecting the external drive.

Does anyone have any suggestions? thanks

Edwin Cuadros · January 22, 2010 at 3:48 pm

Mike you can try this: open the plastic case, extract the fisical disk and connect it directly to the board of a PC, it should work, post here if you have more questions, good luke!, (english isn’t my native lenguage). — ecrosys

Edwin Cuadros · January 22, 2010 at 3:55 pm

Frank, you need a good software to make this things well, Ghost (symantec) can clon from low size hd to high size hd, and using the full space of last one…, if you like to do it from windows can use Partition Magic to resize the current partition and use the full space of your hard drive, post here if you have more questions, good luck!, (English isn’t my native language). — ecrosys

mike · January 23, 2010 at 11:15 pm

Edwin,

Thanks for the help. I now have the drive inside a case and I’m getting new problems.
THE CRT detects the drive and says it is 163 GB meanwhile windows still says it is 31.4.
When I select the problem drive on the opening screen I get a pop up saying…
Quote:
This operation will determine factory capacity of the drive .
If the device is detected in the system, it will now be removed from the device manager.
This is needed to avoid conflicts with the operating system.
detected in the system, it will now be removed from the device manager.
This is needed to avoid conflicts with the operating system.
This is needed to avoid conflicts with the operating system.

Then I select “OK”, the other option is “cancel.”

Quote:
device is currently in use please remove it from the device manager manually

So I uninstall it I disable it, everything requires a restart and the drive is auto detected again and I’m back where I started.

mike · January 23, 2010 at 11:17 pm

Then I select “OK”, the other option is “cancel.”
Quote:
device is currently in use and cannot be removed from the system. please remove it manually from the device manager and try again.

So I tried to uninstall it, disable it, everything requires a restart and the drive is auto detected again and I’m back where I started.

I’m looking for help here… http://forum.hddguru.com/restoring-drive-max-capacity-part-t14618.html

mike · January 23, 2010 at 11:18 pm

sorry about any confusion had some problem with cut and paste

Craig Thorpe · January 25, 2010 at 11:36 pm

Thank you so much – I have a Maxtor 22 1TB drive that has already had the firmware fail – I thought it had gone again, yet your software has restored it once again.

So, I say Thank You, once more!

Dedge · January 27, 2010 at 12:11 am

I have had a HDD fail Bios sees it but says 0GB capacity no other program sees it or say fail.
i need to recover my files from this before i send it back to seagate.
will this repair this or any ideas on what to do

Ben · January 27, 2010 at 11:12 am

An hour ago I rebooted my system and was met by the horrible sinking feeling in my stomach that only comes with catastrophic data loss. My 1tb hitachi drive was now 32mb and windows wanted to format it. An hour of google searching a some grey hair later i found your program, and it worked like magic. Really, I need a better phase than that, because ‘works like magic’ usually takes about a day and this took five minutes! You have earned yourselves some massive geek good karma, thank you so much!

Harry Harms · January 27, 2010 at 3:56 pm

I have a 1.5Tb Samsung HDD, that only shows up as 465Gb. When running HDD Capacity Restore, it says; Uninstall the HDD in the device manager. After doing this, the PC has to be restarted for the uninstall to be completed. After shut down and restart, the HDD is automatically reinstalled by Plug&Play. so nothing accomplished. Then I disabled Plug&Play, uninstalled the HDD and did a required restart. But now the window of HDD Capacity Restore is empty and does not show any drive at all (I have 2 internal drives). I am running in circles with this. Anyone have any suggestions?

andy · January 27, 2010 at 6:15 pm

Trying to restore capacity to a laptop hard drive. I have plugged it into my desktop, HDD Capacity Restore sees the HD, but I get the following error message: ” More than one device detected on the channel with the selected device. The device has to be single on a channel” I understand that theHD needs to be on its own channel, but I am not sure how to accomplish this. Any advice? Thanks.

Dale · February 2, 2010 at 11:26 pm

I was searching for a couple of days why my drive was not showing the capacity of 120GB and just showing 31GB. .It was driving me nuts. Then I ran across this site.I ran your HDD Capacity Restore Tool and it worked great!!! I was able to finally install Windows 7.Thank You !!

Nikolov · February 9, 2010 at 11:45 pm

Hi my WD WDC10EADS 1TB HDD showed up only 32 MB after a restart.After a search i met your soft.Previously my os was win 7 Ultimate 64 but your soft ignored working then i uninstalled win7 and reinstalled a 32 bit XP.then soft restored my HDD capacity back.
But it was showed unallocated HDD and my 2 partitions got lost.
Now, is it possible recover my partitions and data back? and if yes what shoud i do?

warning: when on win7 accidentally i formatted that 32 MB area once.Does this change the situation.
Thanks in advance

jerrimy · February 9, 2010 at 11:48 pm

seem im getting the same error as Andy, any help would be be great thanks

yogi · February 16, 2010 at 4:32 pm

hey…i was trying to partition my xternal hard drive 1 tb samsung…n it was in fat 32 format…nw i am only remaining with 18 gb…rest all is vanished and i don even see them newhr…plzzzz help me guys hw to get rest 980 gb bak????m using vista…is dis software gonna help me??? if not whr hw wht m i supposed 2 do….plzzz lemme no asap….tc

Brian · February 19, 2010 at 9:43 pm

Thanks so much for your utility! Works great for me, my WD1001FALS was displaying 32MB and is up to the right size after using your app.

vld · February 23, 2010 at 3:26 pm

Thanks a lot for this, when I tried to replace an old 80GB HDD in my DELL laptop with WD2500 and it shrank to 80GB as well and caused me a big headache. With this utility I have my 250GB WD back, coooool!!!

OzzY · February 25, 2010 at 10:48 pm

Thanks :)) U make me happy
Worked for me also with 1 TB WD1001fals problem :)

trv · March 2, 2010 at 3:20 pm

Your the man.

After hours of trying to re-size my wd6400aaks drive with ftool (wouldn’t let me go back to max capacity)
I gave google a try and found your brilliant program.
Installed it on my WHS plugged the drives in to a sil3114, started HDD Capacity Restore.
Magic happened.

Cheers thanks a lot.

Joe C · March 8, 2010 at 8:05 pm

Dmitry,

It’s amazing how fast and easy this was.

I was also bitten by the “cloning Dell laptop” nightmare. Went from 60gb to 250gb in about 5 seconds.
I wasted too much time thanks to Dell, before I found your program. They should pay YOU for helping their customers!!

Thank you very much!!

P.Ray · March 9, 2010 at 5:11 am

I have a 1tb external that shows my pc that it has data and yet I cannot access it, all folders show 32…please help.. The tool did not see my drive!

ahmed allam · March 10, 2010 at 8:02 pm

thanx so much i have a hard disk with 1000 gb it was only recognized by the mother board as 33mb and after i used your software it fixed thanx so much again

Brad · March 20, 2010 at 5:21 pm

worked a treat on my hitachi deskstar 164gb ide drive that was reporting 33gb, thank-you!

Colin · April 11, 2010 at 12:07 pm

Tried the programme on an 80Gb Seagate drive that has an “Ontrack” Dynamic Drive Overlay installed. Capacity is shown as 31.5Gb. Unfortunately it didn’t work. Any suggestions as to how I can get rid of the DDO? I have tried all the usual suggestion ie reformating etc

CJ · April 24, 2010 at 2:20 am

Thanks for the help! My Harddisk is now at 1TB instead of 33MB!

Orgy · April 24, 2010 at 6:21 am

This worked a treat on my samsung HD103UI when it showed 1TB as 33MB, had some probs with 64bit windows but if you install the program and run it straight away you don’t get the driver error. I had nearly filled my HD when this stupid problem happened and this program fixed it in 20sec after days of trying to find a solution. No data lost, everything is perfect, only problem is that I had to put the drive into a computer as the program does not run via USB to external case. AWESOME!!! Thanks so much

Varun · April 25, 2010 at 4:14 am

I have HP Pavilion DV4 laptop.Its having two operating Systems viz Vista Home Premium SP2 ( 32 bit ) and Windows 7 Enterprise ( 32 bit ).In both the OS i installed the HDD capacity restore.This software is unable to detect HDD in both OS !!! I have Hitachi 320 GB HDD.After installing i shut down laptop then started again laptop then used the software for first time in both the OS.

Kindly tell me what to do ?

Crusader · April 30, 2010 at 3:51 pm

Got a brand new Samsung HD103SJ that was showing as 128GB instead of the 1TB it should be. Tried it in several computers with several operating systems (including Partition Commander) and still couldn’t get it to show more than 128GB. Was about to RMA it when I came across this utility, and it worked perfectly in a matter of seconds. The drive now registers the full 1TB size. I’ll definitely add this to my permanent collection of useful utilities. Thanks!

MrMike · May 11, 2010 at 9:35 am

I had a WD800jb 80gig HDD with bios suddenly showing only33 gig. Win98 saw 80gig but I could not access most of the drive.
After a couple weeks of searching I found your program here and in minutes I had all 80 gigs back & lost nothing.
You are awwwsome THANKS SOOO MUCH
Mike

Con Hacon · May 12, 2010 at 4:56 pm

Recently upgraded a Sony HXD-770 DVD recorder with a 500GB hard drive The old one was a 160GB, but had its capacity reduced to 120GB. Sony HXD-870 recorder is sold with 160GB capacity. They must use the same drive, but make it report only 120GB when in a HXD-770, and when in a PC. Used your program reset to full capacity, Thanks!

LdVader · May 23, 2010 at 12:05 pm

I have a Hitatchi 1Tb SATA HD that shows up in Win XP SP3 32bit as only 32mg Unformatted. Ran your program with no success because drive is not detected. Checked bios settings with no options to change between NORM,COMP,or LEGCY. Only options are Auto and Large. This is my only SATA drive, so it’s by itself on it’s own channel. OP is on IDE HD. Could you help?

LdVader · May 23, 2010 at 8:52 pm

I have a Hitatchi 1TB SATA HD on an XP SP3 32bit that only shows as a 32mb drive. I have no options in my bios to change to NORM,COMPAT,or LEGCY. Only options I have is either AUTO or LARGE. Jumpers are set to factory default. Drive is on it’s own channel as master. OS is on a separate drive and IDE channel. My 1TB will not show up in your porgram. Any ideas or suggestions?

Rick · May 24, 2010 at 4:24 am

I have a gigabyte ga-965pdq6 and this has happened to me 3 times. I’ve RMA’d 3 WD Caviar Black TB drives.

I found this thread after roaching the 3rd one. I downloaded the program to restore the drive’s capacity, but it does not see any of the drives.( I have 2 WD 1TB drives on matrix raid6.1 in raid 1.)

I have already updated the BIOS to the most current for my MB.

ldvader · May 25, 2010 at 8:58 am

I have a Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 1Tb Sata HD. After a power outage, the drive now shows up in both the BIOS and OS as only 32mb. I have alot of irreplacable data on it. My system is running Win XP SP3 32bit. Primary HD is on an IDE channel. My Hitachi is on it’s own SATA channel by itself. Mainboard is GA-K8NF-9(rev.2.0) nForce4(-4X) chipset.

I tried to download the HDD Capacity Restore Tool, but the program doesn’t see my SATA drive. I can’t find any settings in my BIOS which will allow me to change my SATA config to “Norm”,”Compat”,or “Legcy”. The only option I have is either Auto, or LARGE. Both settings have the same results.

What can I do to get the program to see my HD?
Can anyone help?

P.S. Sorry about the muliple posts. I check back for a relply and my post keep disappearing.

khaled sallam · May 25, 2010 at 11:18 am

thanks alot this utility is very good
my WD HDD green 1TB was 33MB now 1TB
thanks again for the help>>>>>>>>

JPJ · May 26, 2010 at 5:55 am

Thank you very much for this utility. My 1TB Western Digital hard drive had lots of irreplaceble data on it when it suddenly lost the capacity (down to 32MB). This was a secondary hdd with only data on it. When this happenned it showed as a 32MB unformatted drive in My Computer.
After running your utility the drive not only was restored back to it’s original size, but all the data was still on there – just as if nothing happend. Thank you, you have saved me from a major disaster.

Larry Craig · May 31, 2010 at 3:40 pm

Hi, just found this site and was wondering if you have or are planning to have a 64 bit version of this software in the future as many systems are now running this version now.

Many thanks in advance.

Jeka · June 25, 2010 at 4:17 pm

working 1tb WD back to me from 33mb RAW

Sohaib · July 15, 2010 at 6:02 pm

Hey the tool is showing me the original capacity to be -2 Bytes. Some people have also had the same problem but you did not reply to them. Please tell me what problem it could be. Your help will be much appreciated.
Thank You

zAm · July 18, 2010 at 7:12 am

Hello, I’ve a western digital hard drive 1.0 TB Model # WD10EADS .. i’ve a problem that in BIOS the hard drive model shows UNKNOWN & SIZE 0 MB . can i try this software ? the hard drive has a EXT3 Partition & Data on it … does it harms my data or not ? please help me , i really badly want to backup my data as soon as possible . Thanks

Zack · July 27, 2010 at 1:22 pm

Thank you sooo much!!!
Your program just saved my life, literally.
Losing 1.5TB data would be too devastating for me.
Once again, thank you so very much!

Vasiliy, Ukraine · August 2, 2010 at 11:49 am

Добрый день!
Новый жесткий диск SAMSUNG HD502HI (500 Гб) был “уменьшен” при помощи утилиты от SAMSUNG: ES Tool и стал объёмом 80 Гб. Поддержка 48-битности также была отключена.
Сделано было по глупости.
Теперь нужно восстановить исходный размер диска.
Но фирменной утилитой производителя диска восстановить ничего не получается:
1. Восстановление NATIVE SIZE завершается сообщением об ошибке что “операция прервана пользователем” (хотя я даже к компьютеру не подходил) либо что “истекло время ожидания”.
2. Поддержка 48-битности также не включается – пишет ошибка и всё “Error”.
Сегодня, рискну воспользоваться Вашей программой HDD Capacity Restore Tool и очень надеюсь что она не испортит жёсткий диск. Завтра отпишусь о результатах.

Vasiliy, Ukraine · August 3, 2010 at 8:16 am

К сожалению, Ваша программа не помогла восстановить изначальный размер жёсткого диска SAMSUNG HD502HI (500 Гб).
Подключал в 2-х вариантах:
1. На IDE – системный диск с Windows XP Pro SP-3 в положении MASTER, на SATA – в положении SLAVE восстанавливаемый диск SAMSUNG HD502HI.
1. На SATA-1 – системный диск с Windows XP Pro SP-3 в положении MASTER, на SATA-2 – в положении CABLE SELECT восстанавливаемый диск SAMSUNG HD502HI.
Программа “увидела” диски и их размеры и предложила восстановить исходный размер, но при запуске выдала ошибки и ничего не произошло.
Но есть и хорошие новости.
При помощи программы MHDD удалось восстановить начальные настройки жёсткого диска (подключение жёстких дисков из первого варианта), выбрав в программе команду “CONFIG” и согласившись на все изменения.
Данная программа MHDD была выпущена Вами и помогла мне решить данную проблему, поэтому спасибо Вам большое!
Будьте всегда здоровым и в хорошем настроении!

Gabriel Ramuglia · August 7, 2010 at 5:26 pm

Hi.

For those who cannot run this because they are running 64 bit windows, but you do have a copy of linux handy (even a live cd like knoppix should work), hdparm version 8.0 and higher will work for this.

download the hdparm tar.gz file from sourceforge to your linux machine.

tar –ungzip -xf hdparm(version).tar.gz
cd hdparm(version)
make

if receive errors, you may need to “yum install gcc gcc-c++” to get a compiler going. if you still have errors, your linux kernel may be too out of date for the program

now, from the same directory:
./hdparm -N /dev/(hard drive device)

this will show you if you’ve got that damn HPA going on. it will also show you the true maximum number of sectors. then you can run:

./hdparm -Np### /dev/(hard drive device)

where ### is the maximum number of sectors as we found out previously. This will set your drive back to normal size.

(hard drive device) may be sda, sdb, sdc, hda, hdb, hdc, etc, depending whether the drive is sata or ide, and depending which disk it is on the system.

Stuart · August 9, 2010 at 9:23 pm

If I had a Tableau T5 with an IDE to SATA controller connected to it, and a SATA drive connected to that, and then wanted to use this software to detect the HPA and DCO areas, would it work?

Now clearly with a write blocker, no changes to the HPA or DCO would be possible, but I am curious about how it would react.

Stuart

Danny · August 10, 2010 at 6:59 pm

How to set my harddrive sinlge on a channel. This question is asked several times, but i have not found an answer for this problem. Who can help me? THANKS!!!
My harddrive has a sata connection

Lobo · August 14, 2010 at 6:27 am

Wonderful tool, after several hours of failing to restore data on my HDD I found this tool and it was like one click, power off, reboot and there it was. Working HDD with no data loss. Thank you so much.

Mike · August 25, 2010 at 8:49 pm

Thank you!!!

Your tool saved my WD1001FALS and my WD15EADS (total value about $200), plus all the files on one of the disks. I lost the files on the other disk because I tried other tools on it before I discovered yours.

Many thanks again!!!

Mac from Poland · August 28, 2010 at 10:34 am

I think you are talking here about 2 different things:

1. recovering factory HDD capacity hoping to get more space than it is on the HDD’s label ;)
– this program “HDD Capacity Restore Tool’ is really good

2. recovering HDD capacity lost due to usage of the disk
– if your HDD shows less capacity then it should show as left for usage, then there are 2 things you can do to force the disk to show true free capacity.

a) run software named Total Commander 7.5. In menu there is button named Configuration/ Options/ Display – here click onto Show hidden/system files (for expert only!). If you click on it make Apply.

Note: This action shows hidden files that you probably deleted in the past and those files take capacity off your HDD.

Open your HDD in Total Commander by clicking onto name of the drive. If you see on your HDD folder named RECYCLER then enter it and delete as many files as you can. Probably you will not be able to delete the file named “log” but it makes no problem; it has small capacity.

PS. Deleting the files from folder RECYCLER is safe because it is kind of HDD’s trash basket. In this folder you may find the files you deleted in the past; just click on the random one to find out what I mean.

PS2. These tips worked for me in 100%.

Secondly, one tip: each disc before usage should be formatted in deep level,- it may take even few hours depending on the HDD capacity you format. This kind of format can help even to fix the disc in some cases.

Mac from Poland

Richard from Oz · August 29, 2010 at 8:37 am

Brilliant! Thank you this saved my 1.5TB WD EARS drive when WD and Gigabyte were both useless.

Bill Sheff · August 29, 2010 at 9:42 pm

I have downloaded your HD Capacity Restore 3 times. I tried to use it on Win& and Vista macines without success. It keeps telling me I have a driver error, and the next screen opens up and shows only one HD. I have at least three HD hooked up using USB. The one drive I want to recover was originally 200GB, but while I was reformating it we lost power and when I reformatted it only 132 GB is shown.

Do you have any suggestions on how to install the program so it sees the drives hooked up via USB, and help me figure out how to get rid of the ‘driver error’ problem.

I hope you can help me. Thanks

Bill Sheff

Bryan S · August 31, 2010 at 5:02 am

Can I use MHDD to remove the Dynamic Drive Overlya from an old Maxtor HD without losing he data? Any suggestions on how to proceed? Thanks.

Matthew G · August 31, 2010 at 8:19 am

Hey I’ve been going through hell trying to get my new 2.5 500g Seagate HD to work on my laptop. I brought this cloning program with attachment hardware to transfer all my info to my new hd, but what I didn’t know was that cloning only transfers the original amount for my first hd which is only 60g. Now my 500g hd looks like 60g. I finally found your program but for some reason when I go to reset vaules on the new hd it keeps me from completing. I’ve scanned to new hd for errors clean as can be. I’ve even used the seagate disc wizard program and even that won’t allow me to reset the hd capacity. Really confused but I know I’m really close, PLEASE HELP!!!!!

mac · August 31, 2010 at 12:53 pm

Does anybody knows how to fix “Raw Read Data Erros” or what software to use for fixing ? thanks

Jim S · September 10, 2010 at 11:24 pm

I have an old Gateway laptop 4525GZ with an IDE WD250 HDD (I installed) that shows up as 127GB.

I’ve read many postings, showing a similar problem that I have. I can’t use your application while the drive is in my laptop, so here are my questions:

What is the best/easiest way to back this drive up before I pull it out and start messing with it?

Will an interface on a desktop fit this 2.5 drive? I’ve got an old PC that probably has an IDE interface.

S · September 12, 2010 at 4:54 am

I’ve got a TB of data that’s been “lost” to this missing capacity problem; the problem is I’m on Windows 7 x64 and this tool isn’t working for me… is there any chance of a 64 bit version of this program being released?

fat80y · September 17, 2010 at 11:14 am

thx bro workd 1st go !!!
wooot

fat80y · September 17, 2010 at 11:16 am

oh it was :
1 TB seagate showing as 32mb
only a small change !
xp 32bit

pppumkine · September 20, 2010 at 6:02 am

I attempted to launch Ghost 2003 to image a drive. The ghost software hung after the reboot when trying to launch in the single-user mode. I attempted to launch it several times – same result. After eventually getting my PC to reboot into Windows XP (SP3), I found the following damage:
1. The boot disk (160 GB IDE) would not boot properly (something appears to be wrong with the boot track). I attempted to fix with repair console (fixboot and fixmbr), but there is still a problem, but no data lost from this drive.
2. My 1 TB SATA drive had been resized to something ridiculously small (8 MB?). Windows reports it as RAW drive, and disk manager says it has no free space. Data recovery software cannot access the area which contains my data. I tried to reset the reported capacity with CapacityRestore.exe. It sees the true factory capacity, but gives an error when attempting to reset to factory capacity. I prefer not to do a low level format – I want to try to recover data!

jmf · September 22, 2010 at 12:17 pm

what’s the purpose of the affhdd.sys driver ?

Anonymous · October 4, 2010 at 4:47 pm

this does not work with Windows 7

Greatfull · October 6, 2010 at 10:12 am

I have HDD Western Digital WD1001FALS, capacity – 1Tb. After adding another hard drive and cleaning PC with vacuum cleaner, capacity was changed to 33Mb. BIOS and Windows XP found it as non-formatted drive with capacity 33Mb, file system – raw.
Your programm help me to restore the real capacity back. And the main – there is no change to the information!!! I restore it all!
Thank you very much!!!
БОЛЬШОЕ ВАМ ЧЕЛОВЕЧЕСКОЕ СПАСИБО, ДМИТРИЙ!

Phil Sullivan · October 7, 2010 at 3:47 am

Fucking amazing software. Thought my hdd was dead until this fixed the problem in a fucking minute! Thanks!

Jonathan · October 7, 2010 at 10:41 pm

Great utility. I had a clone your old HDD issue where the new HDD got all confused about how big it actually was. Mucked around with MBRs and so on for ages. Then I ran across this page and tried the HDD capacity restore. successful first time! Thank you very much. I got 500Gb back. Well done that man.

Peter · October 9, 2010 at 4:10 pm

Nice tool. It saved my data on a Samsung HD103UJ.

After some partition operations (on another!! harddisks in my PC) my backup drive was unaccessible and had a size of 32MB. (Windows said this is a “RAW partition”.)

I tried the original Samsung ES-Tool under DOS. This program can theoretically restore the factory size, but it FAILED. (“Sector1 ID not found” or similar.)
Yes… the __tool from the manufacturer__ was not able to correct this issue.

My luck was, that I don’t manipulated this 32MB partition. (Because the trial versions of the recovery tools doesn’t support “write”.)

So, I tried this Atola tool, and it worked by me and saved my important data.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!

Peter · October 9, 2010 at 4:19 pm

I tried Acronis TI 2009 and DriveImage XML. I think the first program made this problem. (Of course i’m not sure.) Several sources reported never corrected bugs in TrueImage.

Anonymous · October 10, 2010 at 5:20 pm

Hi

I’ve just trashed Vista on my laptop, hope your tools will help
I’m assuming some sort of floppy disk image will allow boot up tools to be accessed.

Patrick

marcio · October 10, 2010 at 11:33 pm

vou testar tenho um Hd samsung que recohece apenas 31Gb mais nativamente ele é 80Gb, já verifiquei o jumper e está correto…

I have a test that will recognize only samsung Hd 31GB 80GB it is more natively, and I’ve checked the jumper is correct …

Randall · October 18, 2010 at 6:03 pm

I could not get this program to work for me; I could not get my HD’s to show up on the list when I ran the program, no matter what BIOS settings I tweaked.

But…I would like to pass on a tip that did help me.
My hard drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 250GB that was only reporting the infamous 30GB or so.

I found a tool on the Hitachi website called “Feature Tool”.
http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/
I used it to change the drive capacity to “maximum capacity”, and now I can see the lost area as an unallocated section of the HD! Still need to alter the partitions, but it’s a start!

Mkronik · October 25, 2010 at 8:57 pm

Hello,
I can’t believe it.
I have a WD caviar green of 1Tb, and it has only worked for a week. After that, it has become of 32Mb.
All systems (bios, windows,linux etc) only could see that 32Mb.
But, ZAS! thanks to this marvelous application I have recover all the missing space.
Thank you very much for this magic application !!!!!!

Carl Wittig · November 8, 2010 at 6:25 pm

Thank You So Much !!!!
I Have A Dell Inspiron E1705 Laptop And I Replaced The Factory 60G HD With A 250G.
I Used Norton Ghost 14 To Back Up Old Drive. I Installed The New Drive, And When
Ghost Tried To Restore Onto The New Drive, The Software Just Locked Up.
After A Few Tries At The Restore, I Gave Up And Decided To Installed A Fresh Copy Of Windows.
I Stopped The OS Install When I Noticed The New Drive Was Now Only 60G Not 250G.
I Used Every Tool I Could Locate To Try And Fix This Problem To No Avail.
I Took A Chance And Installed Windows On The 60G Partition, Figuring I Could Fix
The Problem With The OS Installed. This Tool Worked Perfectly!
I Used A Desktop Computer Running Winxp Pro, And After A Few Reboots To Get
My New Laptop HD Connected On A Separate SATA Channel From The Boot Drive
As Per The Instructions In The Program. I Then Had To Disable The Laptop Hard Drive In Device Manager
Also As Per The Instructions In The Program. I Ran This Tool And Presto The Additional Space Showed
Up! Then I Used Partition Magic On My Desktop To Make The Entire Drive As 1 250G Partition. I
Returned The New Drive To My Laptop, And All Is Working Well.
Thanks Again For Such A Great Tool !!!

Serge · November 9, 2010 at 11:39 am

VERY VERY BIG THANKS!!!!

Your program is best solution!
Hitachi support is SUXX

Colin · November 10, 2010 at 10:30 pm

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?

Evan · November 14, 2010 at 2:01 pm

HUGE THANKS FOR THE TOOL!

For those with the “device is in use” problem just go to Device Manager and remove/uninstall the affected HDD. Close the tool and then re-run it as administrator since I found that not explicitly selected “Run as Administrator” caused the information in the tool to be all jibberish. After that just try and run it again and all should work and then power off.

Note that I had to power off again manually for it to be properly detected since it was reading 1TB RAW instead of NTFS

Confirmed and works with Windows Vista 32bit and HDD works when shoved back into my original Windows 7 machine which couldnt run the tool.

Tim · November 16, 2010 at 4:01 am

Also having the WD Caviar Green 1TB –> 32MB problem. Downloaded tool, but will not run on Win 7/64. Error appears “Error opening driver”. No other information or useful tips… click OK, and then all drives show as a set of garbage characters and are “Security: Locked, Maximum”. Not sure how to proceed… is there a new version forthcoming? Tnx!

Overlord · November 16, 2010 at 5:31 am

Same problem as Colin

I am using Win XP and have tried uninstalling the drive… same error

Overlord · November 16, 2010 at 5:48 am

After going crazy tring to get the program to work about a month ago… I tried 1 last time before I was going to format the drive and it WORKED!!! So happy now :D

Vince · November 20, 2010 at 5:04 pm

Thanks! I was losing my nerves with WD Caviar Green and this great tool solved all problems.

hard drive restore · November 21, 2010 at 10:53 pm

It doesn’t work with my western digital external hard drive. can some one help me?

Eric · November 22, 2010 at 7:55 pm

Thank you so much. I have now been able to restore my 160GB WD HDD to its full capacity.

Cemal · November 23, 2010 at 2:43 pm

I am looking actually the very opposite! I have 3 bricks of 750GB Seagate 7200.12 series HDDs. I made a RAID 0 set with them. But the total capacity reached 57GB more of the 2TB limit. Not only partitioning problems, here god bless WDC’s latest Acronis HDD tool, which supports over the 2TB limit + Raid 0 + divided 2 or more partitions on greater than 2TB partitions, but this time I have more specific issues with Windows XP.

–> I DON’T WANT TO USE THAT 57GB ON WINDOWS XP, I WANT TO DISMISS (DO NOT WANT TO SHOW) 19GB FROM EACH HDD! HOW CAN I DO THAT? <–

Can anyone help me, how to hide desired much of capacity for each HDD for not to pass the 2TB limit! This is something like a 32GB or 128GB capacity jumper setting with software this time.

Thanks for all readers…

Vladik · November 26, 2010 at 11:17 pm

Man, thank you so much for the tool and the information! Worked like a charm. Thanks again!

pantsonfire · November 27, 2010 at 8:30 pm

Thank you so much for all of this info and the Capacity Restore tool! I just spent about a day trying to figure out why my brand spanking new WD1001FALS (Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB) was showing up in my BIOS and in XP as a mere 32MB drive. I thought it was a BIOS error for most of the day since my mobo is pretty old (but the BIOS has been updated) and I was really hoping the problem wasn’t a defective HDD.

I am so happy and relieved that this has been resolved prior any expensive/unnecessary upgrading or me hulking-out on my computer. Again, thank you so much!!!

salim · November 28, 2010 at 7:03 am

VERY VERY BIG THANKS!!!!

thegrandmaster · December 13, 2010 at 12:04 pm

hey man, the software can only detect my internal drive and not my external i-omega 1tb which i need to restore the capacity of??? can u help me with this pls… i seriously need to restore the capacity and restore and recover the data from the drive..

thanx in advance 4 the help….!!!!

juan tamad · December 17, 2010 at 1:52 am

Hello DP,

When i burned estool and the lba mode is disable/off i cannot turn it on it says “busy not clear” i have a samsung hd161hj..

Paul B. · December 21, 2010 at 6:48 pm

Dmitri, there is a great need for a utility like this. After much searching, this is the first site that actually described and dealt with the protected partition/table problem.

My problem is that at the moment I only have two laptops to work with. So the disk drive in question is tethered to the other machine via USB, and HDDCR does not load the USB drivers.

The only possibility that I can see it to find a desktop with which to work, on somehow to get HDDCR onto a boot disk and work from the optical drive.

Thanks,
p.

Paul · December 27, 2010 at 6:17 pm

Hello,

First of all I think this is a genius of a tool, and well done to all those who have succeeded with it.

I just get the message that there is no error to fix. The manufacturers setting is 1000 GB and so is the actual capacity. I’m reading 931.51MB unallocated still. Any advice for me please?

Thanks
Paul

Kræz · January 28, 2011 at 12:09 am

For a samsung drive in a Windows 7 64 bit setup, I was unable to this program.
However I found a solution by following the steps recomended here: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1069572&p=-1#bottom

memhiss · February 10, 2011 at 3:28 am

I have a WD 1Tb wd10eacs. Today, my computer detected only 33Mb’s and asked to format the drive!
With this guide I recovered the drive and all of my data was intact (50Gb’s of photos).

Saved my life!

Thanks!

Herson · February 10, 2011 at 4:14 pm

Tools is simple bur powerful ,, thanks it works on my 1TB wd..

Paul · February 16, 2011 at 10:11 am

When I click on Restore Capacity I get the following message : Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered. Please try run this program on another platform.

cn · March 12, 2011 at 10:25 am

thanks

Crash · April 7, 2011 at 11:40 pm

Hi,
I have a vaio laptop which came with a stock 500gb harddrive.
Not sure why the laptop is only seeing 288gb now.
Everytime I try to factory install it, it keeps saying “error can not restore from this disk” or something.
What happened to the other 200gb storage??
Is this tool free to download and will it restore my 288gb hdd back to 500gb???

Anonymous · April 13, 2011 at 1:16 pm

hi guys,
i am having the same problem as some other guys up here, who dont get a clear answer. i get the message “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”\

i dont even know what this means. could some one please help me, i have some impotant stuff in this hard drive and i cannot lose. HELP PLEASE!!

Zak · April 13, 2011 at 1:20 pm

hi guys,

i am having the trouble with my 1tb samsung showing up as 32mb, like some other guys up here, whom dont get really clear solution. when i use the HD capacity restore tool the following message shows up.

“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”.

i have some very important stuff in that hard drive and i just cant loose it all. could someone PLEASE HELP!!!!

TT · April 24, 2011 at 8:32 am

This tool is amazing!! My 1T disk only showed 32mb in bios and system suddenly, today i restored capacity by this tool, IT’S DONE!!! My date all safe and sound also!!! Thanks!!!!!!

ben · May 3, 2011 at 5:33 pm

Thank’s a lot. Nice program. My WD10EALS only showed 32MB, and now it shows 1TB, all data are safe also :D

Condor0086 · May 4, 2011 at 2:39 am

Thank’s!!, I have problems with a Samsung 1TB only showed 30 MB (after a data-destructive test), with this utility it’s 1TB again :) (Desktop PC, HD internal-secondary, Win XP SP3, I first disable the HD in the device manager to allow the utility to work).

epacor · May 5, 2011 at 7:19 am

Thanks Heaps.
My new WD10EARS only showed 32MB and this tool restored it to 1T easily.
Seems many people have had similar problem from my Google searching.

Alexander · May 9, 2011 at 1:25 pm

Thanks, worked very well. I had the problem with my GigaByte motherboard with an outdated BIOS. Accidentially attempting to boot from the Caviar Green 1TB drive I had bought “nuked” the drive and made it only show 33MB.

I didn’t get my data back by using this problem, but that’s no problem, just glad to have it work.

Lynx · May 23, 2011 at 7:42 pm

Thanks. And I had the problem with my GigaByte motherboard and with the Caviar Green 1TB drive. It only show 33MB.

Charles · June 9, 2011 at 11:39 pm

Hi

I have a Hp Laptop, 120G SATA HD and 2Gb Ram. I wanted to repartition it to install it a linux OS. I partitioned it in 100G NTFS and 20G ext3 with a Partition Magic 8. Then I decided to free space to the NTFS partition to give it some more to the recovery partition HP installs on each laptop has around 1.5G. Then I used a Bootable Active Partitioner and did exactly what I mentioned before. I resized the 100G partition to 85G. Then I created with the rest of 15G a new partition. I didn’t format it but after creation it turned in to a FAT32 by itself, the n I tried to deleted and it didn´t . Then I decided to deleted the 85G NTFS in order to make it both just one again. The Active Partitioner didn’t read the HD again. I tried to boot it with partition magic 8 again but it says there was no installed HD. I checked it with Win98SE’s Fdisk and it only showed the ext3 partition, I mean there was 85G lost. I reinstalled the whole system with an Original HP’s manufactures CD. When it was done I could tell the HD was only 115G. I mean, even though it recovered that lost partition, 6G were still lost.

My questions are the following :

Can I get those 6G back again with HDD Capacity Restore Too l?
How can I do it with just a single HD ?
I read above that it’s possible to remove it and attach it to a desk top . Can I do this ? How ?

Have in mind it’s the laptop’s is a sata one and I have two sata ports in my desktop´s main board.

NeoRegis · June 17, 2011 at 11:54 am

Hi,
I have a Samsung HD103UJ 1TB, that was only reporting 33mb in the BIOS. I have “WIN 7 x64” and I have VirtualBox with “XP sp3 x86”.

My question is whether this program “HDD Capacity Restore” working on a virtual machine?

Glenn Allen · June 23, 2011 at 4:01 am

Thanks program worked well on a Windows Vista hard drive that we put in an old motherboard and it set 1TB to 33Mb. Ran the program and restored to 1Tb and all back to normal.
Thanks, heaps

Pierre · July 6, 2011 at 5:24 am

Hello thank you for the site, its the only place on the web that seems useful to fix my problem, but its still above my head. I am running win XP, I just bought a Samsung HD 103sj terabyte hard drive and its showing up as a 127 gig hard drive. I tried running the program but it tells me that the device is currently in use and cannot be removed. Someone on here said to remove/uninstall my hard drive through device manager? This is my c-drive, windows is running on it, if I uninstall it, how will I get anywhere? I don’t understand. Does the program need to be on a different hard drive and it can’t be on my c-drive for it to work?

Pierre · July 6, 2011 at 8:59 pm

Still have not resolved my problem, but I just found out that if my hard drives file system is formatted as FAT32 it would prevent my computer from reading my hard drive as a terabyte and that I need to switch or reformat my hard drive to NTFS, does that seem to makes sense to anyone out there? I have a compact evo w6000 and just tried to install a samsung HD 103 sj terabyte drive that reads as 127 gig.

Dan · July 11, 2011 at 10:26 pm

I just tried the tool but because it’s my C: drive (in a laptop) it’s constantly in use and cannot be removed from Windows for the restore tool to work. So I’m still stuck.

Dan · July 16, 2011 at 3:45 pm

Not at all impressed. It seems to be very picky and appears to work in very simple situations. One drive on one channel. Drive can’t be locked which is normal but can’t unlock drive on laptop, Doesn’t recognize USB drives – must be connected to system bus. I’m glad it works for those of you with simple problems that could be fixed by other means but this tool doesn’t work when other tools don’t.

Jarrod · July 17, 2011 at 4:03 pm

I can’t run this tool on Win7 x64. :(

question · August 7, 2011 at 6:38 pm

So I was wondering….
I have an older computer (not super old) with a bios that probably doesn’t support over 137 gig drives (that’s what it shows up as in my computer). But a drive that I want to use that is bigger than that. Can I use your tool to restore capacity? Or… do I need to update bios (if I can) and THEN use the tool if it shows up as 137 gigs ?

Senthikumar · August 19, 2011 at 3:52 pm

Very good tool.. I have used it to restore my 40gb harddrive which showed only 20gb in the bios… it works well and now i get back the full 40gb capacity… thanks….

sdazzell · August 19, 2011 at 10:11 pm

Hi, the issue of a WD 1Tb drive shrinking to 32Mb happened to me a few days ago and the usual panic of losing data stepped in until I discovered your tool. However, the 1st thing is that though the BIOS and windows reported 32mb, your tool reported the original size less 1mb (drive difference). I applied your tool, shutdown for a few mins and restarted. The Bios now reads 1000Gb but windows still reads 32mb and no data to be seen. I ran the tool again and it reported that the drive’s full capacity is available but disk management says otherwise. Please help.

joseph · August 24, 2011 at 4:05 am

9YuZIp http://wnbUj5n0mXqpcvm27Hms.biz

John Riel Manatiga · August 26, 2011 at 4:41 am

thanks a lot….it suites my problem about HDD error:-)

N · September 3, 2011 at 2:08 pm

I’m a developer/computer scientist and I deeply appreciate your job as it literally saved my life.

Thank you and God bless you.

David Thomas · September 6, 2011 at 10:09 pm

Hi there, I’ve just taken a 120GB drive out of my defunct Compaq 6630 laptop put it into a caddy, but have a problem: my desktop running on 7 sees the new drive as Vista (F:) but with only 6GB, and none of my old files I thought were there.. Have tried to run your HDD Capacity Restore as I thought maybe I was only getting access to a protected partition, but get message ‘error opening driver’. Any suggestions how to resolve? Many many thanks in advance, David

Russell · September 20, 2011 at 10:39 pm

This program is magical. It runs within Windows, yet did something no other program I tried could; It actually restored my hard drive’s factory capacity. For anyone with this problem, I suggest trying this first. It was so easy, just one click. You can read more about my experience here:

http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f16/solved-seagate-barracuda-32gb-limit-599363-3.html

The two pages before that explain my futile attempts at doing it with other programs.

cat ram · September 23, 2011 at 6:25 pm

HDD Capacity Restore Tool works.Thanks.It restore back my Hitachi MK5065GSX 500gb from 32gb. limit capacity.Thanks

ordinary man · October 14, 2011 at 9:45 pm

Thank You! It helped me with my Seegate 1T!

Yuri Abelev · October 16, 2011 at 11:55 pm

Just Finished using this tool.
About the problem:
For some reason, brand new WD 1TB HD was 32Mb capacity only.
After installation of HDD Capacity Restore Tool, it detects that the Hard Drive is not original capacity and fixed it.
Many Thanks!

Dan Reilly · November 11, 2011 at 4:51 am

Thank you so much
i messed up my 80GB seagate IDE harddrive today and found your tool after using it i got an error message
said please remove from device manger only i did serveral times and finally my hard drive was set to it max HD settings to 80GB
just want to say Thanks alot very happy and keep up the work

Thanks
Dan

Domingo · November 25, 2011 at 1:50 pm

Hello. I bout a Samsung 1TB HD103UJ a year ago and have worked fine so long until I tried to format and suddently became a 132GB disk. tried to use Samsung Estool.exe to recover original size with no success. My system has Windows 7 and motherboard AsRock AM2NF3-VSTA
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=AM2NF3-VSTA.
Can anybody help me? Thanks

Ralph Posmontier · November 29, 2011 at 6:59 am

I had 2 – 160 gig laptop drives that suddenly decided to become 60 gig drives. It was driving me CRAZY. Your utility worked perfectly. THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Anonymous · December 14, 2011 at 12:15 am

Thank you. You saved my day. 60+ % of drive space was missing.

Bruce · December 21, 2011 at 2:04 am

Ugh. I am having hell trying to just use this program. The disk I want to fix is always “in use by the operating system” no matter what services or programs I disable. I disable in XP device manager, and I must reboot, then XP just auto-reinstalls the driver for the disk and I get “In use” again. Tried in safe mode but can’t use the program in safe mode. I tried installing xp to another machine but it only has 1 IDE channel, so I am stuck yet again.

I have tried for 8 hours just to get your damn program to be able to work! Ugh! Isn’t there a way to run this program as a standalone .exe or in safe mode?!

Doug · January 2, 2012 at 3:11 pm

Hi

Just recovered a samsung story station 2 hard drive. Bought it as a 2 TB drive but it has only been 930 GB for the last year and a half. 2 mins with your software and it is 2TB again. You are a bloody legend whose face should be printed on money.

Doug

ROBERT BOKOR · January 11, 2012 at 12:28 am

I wanted to thank you VERY MUCH for your posted free HDD Capacity Restore program.

Drive worked perfectly for 5 years until last week. I spent at least 20-30 hours on my own and with various tech supports, no one had the correct answer. Even Western Digital support had no tool to restore my drive to the original size!

However, knowing it was a size reporting issue rather than corruption helped me word my Google Search and voila, I found your software. It was simple and solved the problem!

Is there somewhere I can donate something as a thank you? In performing a back up I received many error messages in my log: Failed to copy source: Cannot copy file (23): Data error (cyclic redundancy check). The ones I checked so far are all mp3 files and when I go to play the original…continued…

Note in

Scott G · January 16, 2012 at 6:39 am

Installed your program, but when I start it, all it says is “Please select the drive,” but there is nothing to select? Help!

Richardd · January 29, 2012 at 6:39 pm

HI,
Cloned a Dell 60g laptop drive onto a 120g drive. now the new drive reads as 58g. Installed the new drive in dell desktop. The software sees the new drive and the boot drive. When I select the “new” drive, not the boot drive, it says that it is in use and manually remove from device manager. This does not work, as you need to reboot and xp re-installs the drive. I tried re-powering the drive, live without success. Any more suggestions?
Thanks,
Richard

Bugman7410 · February 6, 2012 at 7:28 am

If it reports you to manually remove from devise manager, go into devise manager and remove drivers there. Or do as i did and close program and reopen and click on devise again. It removed it for me. And yes it really works!! Thank you!! I recovered a 120gb and 320gb westeren digital both reported 32gb

rudy · February 20, 2012 at 6:56 am

thanks… free sofware..!
i have problem with my hardisk capacity, my hardisk 250 G but free capacity 0 byte

123 · March 27, 2012 at 12:49 am

Why version for Win 7 64bit cannot be developped? Nowadays almost everybody using this OS.

Werner · April 9, 2012 at 12:49 pm

Any updates on the ‘error opening driver’ bug on the 64-bit Windows OSs?

John · April 18, 2012 at 6:26 am

I tried the HHD tool and it work fine. I left the hard drive in the laptop and boot from dvd/cd drive. The program loaded and I selected the change drive capicity and it work. Next, the new drive created a partition that was using the lost space. You have to go to adminstration tools/disk management and extend the partition to the primary drive. E-mail me for further instruction.

Ion serban · May 1, 2012 at 5:34 pm

I downloaded a free Click Cleaner program in my brother’s laptop without knowing properely how to do it and what was it exactely supposed to happen, then the laptop stoped ,then I turned it on and on a black screan appeared “press F11”, which I actually did without knoing what thats mean, but later started some factory settings in proces which (alarmed) it couldn’t be stoped at all even if I pressed the stop buton or tryed to unplug the laptop.
It just kept continuing its process. So , in the end it reinstaled the Vista windows, but what is worse is that there are no programs anymore and all my brother’s very important informations from hard disks dissapeared completely, the hard disks being totally erased.
Is there something that could be done in order to fix this problem and recover everything he lost ?
With all due respect.
Serban

Niper · May 9, 2012 at 3:21 pm

THANKS!

Your program solved my problem with Samsung HM250JI 250GB HDD showing only 128GB on Xp Pro SP3.

All genius things are like this, very simple and effective!

afshin · May 13, 2012 at 10:09 am

hi
thanks
I used your tool
but there was a small problem:

it make 6 ntfs partition to 1 raw partition ba 9800 Gig size

can i restore my data and my partitions?

afshin · May 13, 2012 at 10:17 am

hi
thanks
I used your tool
but there was a small problem:

it make 6 ntfs partition to 1 raw partition ba 9800 Gig size

can i restore my data and my partitions?
[email protected]

Burn Xbox 360 Games · May 16, 2012 at 4:04 am

Is there any way to clean the bad sectors in my hard drive? Thanks for this info!

shamim · May 22, 2012 at 9:38 pm

my hdd 160 gb samsung 0 bite

ampinto · May 30, 2012 at 8:57 am

My 3TB Seagate GoFlex Home disk was no longer recognise by his adapter base. Due to some external manipulations, he report a lost of some 120MB from his original capacity. After running your software, the drive his OK and everything runs perfectly.
Thanks for this great tools.

Alzoo · July 23, 2012 at 5:18 pm

Hi,

Just want to double check that this software will work on a Seagate 7200.12 ST31000524AS which has the same issue. the only reason I ask is that this blog post dates from 2007 and we’re now in 2012.

many thanks
Alex

Alzoo · July 24, 2012 at 4:36 pm

I tried running this on a windows 7 64Bit, it ran, however stated it was missing a driver and showed the driver on each sata channel.

Can anyone confirm if this works with Win 7 or 64bit for that matter.

thanks again.

Alex

Yarda · July 31, 2012 at 9:53 pm

Thank you very much … My new HDD Seagate Barracuda 1000 gigabytes only had 32 megabytes!
After a long search the Internet I found your program and everything is OK..thank you very much…..

jack · August 16, 2012 at 3:20 am

Hi …. thanks for your great job and help …… i have a 1TB Western Digital HDD and it suddenly turned a 31 MB partition , however i did a stupid action as i formatted this new small partition ….. will that affect the work of the program? do i have to do something else? or will it work perfectly
also will the recovered hard disk come back with the same partitions as it were before this whole thing happened ?
Thanx alot …. and have a nice day

Gary · September 4, 2012 at 12:22 pm

I can say it runs fine on Windows Server 2008 R1 x32 (Vista base).
Fixed my 2TB WD2002FAEX (WD Black) which was reporting 1TB.
Now it is back to a 2TB drive and running fine.
Suggest an update to support 64 bit soon as it is getting hard to find 32 bit machines these days.
Thanks, great product.

Andreas E. · September 16, 2012 at 2:22 am

To add something to the helpful comment of Gabriel R. (August 7, 2010 5:26 pm)

I even had cases when this hdparm option FAILED.
There is still one way out to restore your hard drive to factory settings.
If possible by any way, PLEASE MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR DATA FIRST.

Then do this:
# hdparm –yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing –dco-restore /devsd[whatever]
(could be /dev/sdb, or /dev/sdc etc, it depends on your setup)

Use-case: my Samsung HD400LD. I was stupid enough in assuming it could be made faster (from UDMA/100 to UDMA/133) by using Samsung’s HUTIL! I ended up with a drive unusable on native controller (worked fine on external PCI card). This was the only way out, because HUTIL did no longer recognize my drive.

Brett G · November 3, 2012 at 2:17 am

i’ve installed the tool & opened it.

select drive –

Channel #1, slave: WDC WD10EACS-00D6B0
……………………..Serial: WD-WCAU41863976 size: 33 MB

ok i click on/select it & i get a pop up

“more than one device is detected on the channel with the selected device
the device has to be single on the channel”

Brett G · November 3, 2012 at 2:21 am

i have a new WD 1T HDD installed.
it’s saying 19.2MB Free of 28.9MB ?

i tried formating & disc clean up in my properties but will not change
i have norton partition magic 8.0 but its incompatible with W7 Ultimate 32bit

how can i re-format it to get my full 1T

Wizard Prang · November 20, 2012 at 5:06 am

Thanks! this utility saved a HD full of data. I had plugged it into another machine to restore a Ghost image… sadly the machine had a Gigabyte motherboard. You know the rest.

Thanks again!

Fuji · December 8, 2012 at 12:07 am

Does it work on ssd’s?

Fuji · December 8, 2012 at 1:23 am

I have a samsung 830 256GB ssd. I migrated my partions from my 100GB hdd. 4 partions. 2 were dells hidden restore partions and the 2 others were active OS and a storage partions. I used Norton ghost to migrate them. Everything was ok at this point. Disk manager showed the 4 partions i migrated plus the unallocated space left.

I then restored the OS back to using Dell restore function,which was Norton Ghost using the hidden partions. After the restore was done eveything woeked except my ssd capacity went from 238GB to the 100GB. Exactly the same as the old hhd.

Disk manager shows the 4 partions i copied but now it doesnt show any unallocated space. So i basically have a 100GB ssd now. My compter runs XP media edition 2005. Sp2. Showed the full capacity before i restored it.

Does this program work on ssd?

Jason · December 31, 2012 at 4:34 pm

Great Tool – I had a Toshiba laptop hard drive mk5076GSx 500GB hard drive that only showed up as 50gb – this happened after installing the drive into a laptop that couldn’t accept the full size – somehow this truncated the drive into only being detected and using 50GB… somehow this set the max address to a small number of sectors….

On my XP Dell desktop this tool wouldn’t run because it said that it was sharing a sata channel with the OS drive… so I grabbed a server from work (with SAS drives), installed windows 7 on it, connected the single sata port to the toshiba drive and the power from a different workstation to the toshiba sata power connector (server didn’t have a separate sata power connector) and then ran the program with compatibility and “runas” administrator – then finally this awesome tool restored my drives capacity to 500GB….

THANK YOU!!!!

Robert · January 12, 2013 at 12:53 am

You my friend are a saviour! 1TB HDD recovered after showing 32mb in a matter of minutes!! I have bookmarked this page and do all I can to support.

Thank you Again!

Workaround · January 14, 2013 at 7:20 am

For those of you with Win7 (32 or 64 bit) you can download the SeaTools for DOS from Seagate support downloads and burn an ISO CD, boot to CD and rund Advanced Features. Select “Set Capacity to MAX Native”, then reboot as normal.
I only used that method because I don’t have an older version of Windows that is 32bit.
I hope either method works for you.
Good Luck

Geoff · January 25, 2013 at 8:44 pm

This tool worked great! Thanks Dmitry.

SivaRamaKrishna · March 16, 2013 at 8:07 am

thanks a lot sir for providing this tool.

Alex · April 17, 2013 at 8:31 am

Спасибо чуваки. Восстановил все фотки с гакнувшего харда. А уже хотел его на помойку выкинуть. Круто!

subham karmakar · April 22, 2013 at 1:20 pm

thank you it,s better then any hard disk repair software

tiger jinkuchi · April 28, 2013 at 11:47 pm

I have harddisk drive wd5000bmvv.
They are 500Gb but report to pc 120Gb.
I want to restore capacity to 500Gb
I think it about DCO (Device Configuration Overlay).

This model have only usb interface. no SATA.

program name MHDD does not support usb.
How can I do?

saved my life · May 11, 2013 at 11:05 pm

you really saved my life.
all my files are back, 10q so much.

PERICOPALOTII · May 14, 2013 at 9:00 am

i have 2 partitions:
Local Disk(C) == normal total capacity: 29.2 GB
free space: 2.19 GB
=================================================

Local Disk(D) == problem Now:
total capacity: 5.00 GB
free space: 1.83 GB

BEfoRE the PRobem:
total capacity: 45+ GB
free space: 3+ GB

===========================================================
Intel(R) 82501GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) serial ATA Storage Controller – 27CO

Channel #0, master: Hitachi HDS721680PLA380
Serial: PVG804ZLR7E68V Size: 80 GB
Security: Not locked

———————————————————————————————————–
IT SHOWS correct disk CAPACITY

&

IT pop up a message:
More than one device is detected on the channel with the selected device
The device has to be single on a channel

————————————————————————————————————
HEEEEELP PLEEEESE!!!!!!!

Terry Hinde · July 31, 2013 at 1:05 am

Many thanks for this nice piece of software – it really saved the day.
I’d just installed a WD blue 1TB drive and formatted and partitioned and copied data to it, and it seemed fine.
However a couple of days later I powered on and saw a generic volume in Explorer and got the Windows ‘drive is not formatted ….; message.
What the hey …. re-booted and went into the bios setup and it showed the drive as 32mb. Hmmm.
Tried various bios options but it wouldn’t recognise it other than 32mb, so I thought where’s the bin.
Did a bit of searching on the net and found your tool, ran it, and now everything seems fine as it’s back to 1TB and Windows (both XP and 7) seem fine with it.
I’m still a bit apprehensive as to whether the problem will re-occur, so I won’t load anything critical on it for a few weeks until I’m happy it’s ok.
Very nice piece of software.
Many thanks for it.
Regards, Terry

PH · August 6, 2013 at 3:19 am

Hi. I´ve experienced something similar that Terry told last post. I have almost 500 Gb in a Samsung 1 TB HD and it was ok, but my PC was broken and I´ve plugged both HDs (system ans the 1 TB) into another PC (both are Gygabyte motherboards) but it recognizes only 32 MB. I´ve put the HD in a external case and tested in lots machines but all PCs says that is 32MB and needs to be formated (all XP and W 8). May I use this tool without any data loss?

Lee · August 12, 2013 at 7:15 pm

I have just used the HDD Capacity Restore Tool after trying to put an extra SATA drive into my machine (which didn’t turn out too well at all) but apparently my p35ds3r motherboard doesn’t accept more than two (?). It worked brilliantly and did exactly what I hoped it would, I lost no data at all and all my files were still there and working as normal, it really made my day to be honest, fiddling round with drives and your PC when it goes wrong can take ages to fix and this took no time to get around to fixing the issue I had.

Thank you very much for the download and it’s a bloody awesome tool. If I could rep or donate I would.

Aside from that, if anyone can help me find out if I can actually have more than two SATA drives in my PC (motherboard p35ds3r) then that would probably just make my month.

Brilliant tool and such an easy fix for a perplexing issue. Thanks again!

Lee.

Larry · August 12, 2013 at 10:57 pm

This program really saved my sanity :) I made the mistake of trying to replace a 40gb drive with a 250gb to install XP on. Needless to say it was a huge mistake, and afterwards my 250gb drive showed up as 31GB in the BIOS of my controller card, and writing zeroes to the drive didn’t help. After I zeroed my drive a second time, I used the tool and YAY! the controller card BIOS said 232GB.
I ended up pulling the drive out and hooking it up as a USB HDD to get Disk Management to “see” the unallocated space. A final format and all 250gb were restored to the drive, and said HDD is now being used as a internal storage drive for a PVR :) Thank You!!

Conrad · August 26, 2013 at 5:58 am

Glad to hear of this app, but cannot seem to make it work.

My aging Dell Inspiron 1505 came with a stock 40 GB HDD and swapping out a 160 GB, using (Acronis?) Disck Clone, I believe, gave me just a clone of the 40 GB and now the 160 GB HDD looks to BIOS as the old 40 GB drive.

I understand DELL, in its usual love of going proprietary, messes with simple disk cloning (DSR), so running this app while in the DELL does not seem to work. I also tried running it as an external drive from a SATA USB dock, which would not recognize the drive. So I have now tried running the app from another notebook (an HP) with the stunted 160 GB HDD from an external SATA dock. Still not recognized.

I readabove, how another user had success in removing the drive and running it again as administrator.

Not sure how to even get there. A little help?

andrea · October 3, 2013 at 6:45 pm

hola! tengo una maquina Atola Disk Recycler, despues de un tiempo de uso tratando de reparar unas unidades de hdd, hoy la iba a utilizar y no me detecta los discos conectados, por lo que desinstale el software y lo volvi a instalar pero ahora no me aparece ni la maquina con las unidades para hacer procesos, como me puedo contactar con alguien para que me ayuden con este caso.
la ventana del software aparece en blanco.

saludos!!!

Winnie · October 29, 2013 at 7:54 pm

Hello !
Tool work fine, i manage get my 1TB WD disk back , but sadly it deleted all my data from it !
I tried press format when it was 32MB only i don’t know did i screw it at that point but i guess i did.
So after PC recognized disc i had to format it again to restore it’s full capacity , but as i said earlier all my data was gone :(

Oh well back to downloading XD !

Claudiu · November 2, 2013 at 12:52 am

My 1TB Hard Disk show only 32mb. After i run this tool, my HDD restored to normal capacity. No data loss. Work perfect!! Thanks.

boycancel08 · November 30, 2013 at 2:33 am

how to recover the 1TB of my HD,,? what i did was to make a recovery drive on my laptop and my HD was still plugged and suddenly when i opened my HD it is named RECOVERY (D:) and it shows 31.9gb, 10gb of it is used.. how to recovery my 1tb..? please help

tnx in advance

Mark · November 30, 2013 at 3:50 pm

Thank-you for providing such an excellent tool that helped me save all my Hard Drive files !!!

Peter · February 3, 2014 at 10:27 am

Hi Dmitry,

Just tried your tool because I’ve been having trouble getting windows to format at anything but 31.4GB for an 80GB drive that I purchased. Found out old bios doesn’t like anything above 32GB and without updating BIOS, tried to install it as a USB device. Windows still wanted to format at 31.4GB.
Tried it on another machine. BIOS recognised it at 80GB and installed fine. But still windows wanted to format at 31.4GB. I’ve done everything (besides formatting it). Your program even said it was at full capacity!

So I formatted it at 31.4GB. Low and behold afterwards when I tried to reformat it, it came up with 74.5GB. Seems problem solved – but I’m gonna keep your program just in case I get a weird drive again.

This might help others if they’re having similar problems.

Cheers

Pete

Manos · February 7, 2014 at 6:24 pm

Still no new version for Windows 7 64 bit?

Antonio · February 11, 2014 at 11:04 pm

The Program said Hitachi HDP725050GLAT80 is Factory Capacity: 33.820 MB
But is realy a 500GB HD
Wath can i do?

salim · March 5, 2014 at 6:15 pm

Hi
Thanks a lot
It was wonderful.It works Great.
I had 1 TB Caviar Green Western Digital Hard disk,it was 60% full of data,after a system restart had disk capacity changed to 32 MB,this program Rescued me,It works Great.
Thanks

john · March 20, 2014 at 5:02 pm

Thanks !
It works Great on 1 TB Caviar Black Western Digital Hard disk,raid 0 full of data, after plugin them in another motherboard had disk capacity changed to 32 MB. it worked in windows 7 32bit if in bios the sata was set do ide.
remade the raid without initialization and scanned for lost files and recovered

ade azhar · June 6, 2014 at 5:19 pm

dear sir,
I am interested in products that can repair, data recovery, diagnostic HDD, but how do I order it atola Bandura and atola insight forensic ethernet? how and when to Indonesia in total I have to pay?
Thank you for your attention,
ade Azhar

Paresh · July 6, 2014 at 6:21 am

Hi ,

I have 1 tb Hdd , its formated my mistake . But I stop formate in half stage.
So no try to open HDD is only display formate option finally i formated it fully But its now its propertios only 32 mb .
So its possible to recover it 1tb ? How ?
Plz help me I lost my data.

Dave V · July 25, 2014 at 7:55 am

Brilliant. I have a 200 GB Seagate ST3200822A. I / it / PC did something and the capacity went down to 32 GB and even with HDAT2 I couldn’t recover the original capacity. Last night, Last search, Last chance I find your recover tool. Full capacity restored and the drive gets a new lease of life! Thanks

prasad · August 1, 2014 at 8:02 am

Hi,

I have a hard disk of 350 gb and installed windows 7 ultimate as OS and was working fine. one day my system is not switching on and checked in BIOS it show my hard disk space as 0Gb.. please help me out to fix the issue. i have important documents in dat HDD.

Joe · August 8, 2014 at 10:51 pm

Hi,

I have a new 1T portable USB disk. I used it as a recover drive and its capacity becomes only 32G.
I then did a format. It is still shown 32G and never back to 1T.
Please help me to restore the capacity.
Thanks!

Brian · August 11, 2014 at 8:23 pm

my 1T Samsung hard drive is not show on hard drive list when the windows is running, but in bios is being show 1000gb.please help

Arj · August 16, 2014 at 6:44 pm

my os is windows 8.Hdd restore capasity tool is not openning.

shahid asghar · August 24, 2014 at 4:52 am

sir my partition was 90gb but now it shows only 30gb i have formated my partition but results are same and during ckdisk it says that file130 to file138 are unreadable kindly give me solution to my problem thanks

krishna · August 30, 2014 at 8:00 pm

i have 1TB hard disk and t is showing total space as 930GB .and if i use this tool to recover any space will be erase total data on the disks or not.please help me to solve my problem.and my hard disk drives are in MBR file system format so because of this i can’t install windows 8.1 please give me a software(FREEWARE) link to download to convert MBR drives into GPT file type.thank u in advance

LULU · September 4, 2014 at 9:20 am

sir. how can fix my another partion? coz when i go to the my computer. only one show local disk only my op system . but me second local disc can show but if i go to the disk management my second local disc is there.. how ? and how to restore my files in my second local disk ? plllsss help……..

LULU · September 4, 2014 at 9:37 am

sir. how can fix my another partion? coz when i go to the my computer. only one show local disk only my op system . but me second local disc cant show but if i go to the disk management my second local disc is there.. how ? and how to restore my files in my second local disk ? plllsss help……..

==my first post wrong here the real

gerchwin julies · September 5, 2014 at 2:15 pm

Thanx guys this programme works like a bomb.I had a WD500gb that showed 40gb after installing this awesome tool in less than 5mins it worked after countless programmes and months of frustration thanx guys!!!!!!!!!!

John H. · September 16, 2014 at 2:55 am

I need to restore a wd 500 Gb HD to its capacity. It was originally on Dell Inspiron 6400 with and was limited to 120 Gb, but it still unchanged despite being installed on a HP DC 7900 with Win 7 prof 64 bit. Please confirm if your program will work with Win 7/64. Thanks.

Anonymous · October 22, 2014 at 9:13 pm

i had wd 160 gb hard drive to my laptop hcl core 2 du but unforturnatly its showing 0 mb and every thing un supported eg . lba . not supported
help ne

buddhi · November 8, 2014 at 1:53 pm

i hav 920 gb harddisk and when i stored factory backup in my harddisk it reduced its capacity to 31gb and your software is not running what to do?????

manish · December 1, 2014 at 1:28 pm

dell 3541 windows 8.1 64 bit laptop,hard disk got compressed while making factory backup from 500gb to 33 gb..this software doesnt run on my laptop what to do

Ashry · December 8, 2014 at 11:40 pm

Is it worth much that I upgrade my laptop or will buy a brand new? Need expert suggestion!

Steven · February 12, 2022 at 6:47 pm

When I tried to download tool, it would not download until I right click ‘ open in new window ‘ . Th file that downloaded is a 308 byte executable file. Is this correct ? Thankyou.

Haluk Coskun · April 25, 2022 at 12:38 am

The link hdd-tools.com/products/cr/download/crsetup.exe is dead.

Richard Spindler’s Weblog » Blog Archive » Don’t buy 1TB disks, kids · June 4, 2008 at 6:03 pm

[…] able to fix the 33mb vs. 1tb problem with my WD HDD, using the HDD Capacity Restore tool linked in this article. Data was not damaged, everything still there after the […]

ex-RAID drive return to normal size? · June 8, 2009 at 2:46 pm

[…] Could be worth a try if the RAID controller has rewritten the capacity tags on the drive: Atola Technology Archive Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity […]

Solução para o problema com o disco rígido SATA HD103UJ de 1TB (1000GB) da Samsung, aparecendo 33mb ou 7.87GB | Blog do Jaison · August 12, 2009 at 6:00 pm

[…] maioria do pessoal devolvendo o HD para o vendedor), cheguei ao utilitário pelo Dmitry Postigan, o HDD Restore Capacity, que não funcionou para mim… ele falava que o disco estava com algum problema e não podia […]

Azuki Panda » Samsung Spinpoint 1 TB Failure · October 22, 2009 at 8:21 am

[…] the drive. Along with that response there was the suggestion to look into this tool that would restore hard drive capacity. I used the tool but it didn’t work and gave the following error: Hard drive is not […]

Computer Repair Yellow Pages · October 12, 2010 at 7:58 am

[…] Download HDD Capacity Restore v1.2 Capacity restore… […]

What Went Wrong My new 1TB HDD is only showing 288GB that I can use | Computers and digital electronic Q & A · December 30, 2010 at 12:30 pm

[…] Try this utilityhttp://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-… […]

Anonymous · June 9, 2011 at 11:26 am

[…] […]

Windows Xp Hardeschijf Crash - Pagina 4 · June 25, 2011 at 11:40 pm

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Your Questions About Ata Drives Notebooks · October 11, 2011 at 4:11 am

[…] you could install a SATA card to use the SATA hard drive.Powered by Yahoo! AnswersRelated BlogsKen asks…Can an ATA-6 notebook hard drive be used to replace an EIDE drive?Going from an EIDE 40GB…ebook hard drive be used to replace an EIDE drive?Going from an EIDE 40GB drive to ATA-6 160GB.admin […]

Automatic Voice Alarm Notification System · October 16, 2011 at 2:12 pm

BlueNet device…

[…]Atola Technology » Archive » Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity[…]…

Your Questions About Xbox 360 4gb With Kinect | XBOX 360 & Stuff · October 19, 2011 at 10:20 am

[…] It actually gives instructions on the hard-drive papers. After you buy it.Powered by Yahoo! AnswersKen asks…I bought the Xbox 360 kinect 4GB 3 days ago at target, is it possible to exchange it for …content">I bought the Xbox 360 kinect 4GB 3 days ago at target, is it possible to exchange it for a […]

Can I change HDD cylinders value? · February 9, 2012 at 6:05 am

[…] solution uses the Atola Technology HDD Restore Capacity Tool to fix the firmware – use with caution! Answered by […]

Anonymous · July 9, 2012 at 10:00 pm

[…] ersten Ergebnisseite der google-Suche habe ich diesen Thread gefunden, in dem auf der ersten Seite diese Seite mit einem "HDD Capacity Restore Tool" verlinkt ist. Methode: ich habe mir das erste […]

Fixing the 1TB Hard Disk Reporting as 32MB via 64-bit Windows 8 | omg0sh~ · December 17, 2012 at 6:58 pm

[…] the most probable issue for my situation could be that the Gigabyte motherboard’s bug of accidentally adjusting the HDD’s Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) while trying to create a H… during the failure. It is no wonder both my BIOS and Operating System (OS) now report a wrong size […]

schijf geef niet juist volume - Pagina 2 · April 14, 2013 at 9:27 pm

[…] zijn met de nodige hardware. Misschien is dat met deze schijven ook gebeurt. Kijk hier even naar; Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity » Official Atola Technology Blog Met citaat […]

USB Drive Not Showing Full Size | Click & Find Answer ! · April 19, 2013 at 12:39 pm

[…] the drive firmware known as the LBA48, HPA and DCO records becomes corrupted.This solution uses the Atola Technology HDD Restore Capacity Tool to fix the firmware – use with caution as it can brick the disk!If the disk is still under […]

restoring hard drive | Win Phone Pro · July 10, 2013 at 6:09 pm

[…] Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity » Official Atola Technology … […]

Notas | ¡¿Un disco de 33Mb?¡ · August 29, 2014 at 12:27 pm

[…] una máquina con WinXP 32 bits, pueden bajar el programa “HDD Capacity Restore Tool” (http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity/) y tratar de solucionarlo mediante esa herramienta. Para aquellos que ya no cuentan con esa […]

Can I change HDD cylinders value? · January 20, 2023 at 7:15 pm

[…] solution uses the Atola Technology HDD Restore Capacity Tool to fix the firmware – use with […]

harddrive problem (usb external) · February 11, 2023 at 2:48 am

[…] solution uses the Atola Technology HDD Restore Capacity Tool to fix the firmware – use with […]

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