Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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!

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!!!!

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

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!!!!

japs · October 18, 2007 at 2:03 pm

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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 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?

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!!

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…

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

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

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

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…

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!

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

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.

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 18, 2008 at 9:01 am

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

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>

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 :)

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 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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

zaher · June 29, 2008 at 12:28 pm

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

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!

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!!!!

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!

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!!

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?

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 ????

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!

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.

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!

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 :(

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.

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?

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 9:48 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!

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 9:30 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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!!!!!!

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.

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 +++++

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

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?

[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….

[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….

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!!!

Fedon · November 17, 2008 at 11:20 pm

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

Regards,

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!

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

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?

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

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’.

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 .

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

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

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.

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!

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?

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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…

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.

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!!!

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.

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.

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!!!

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

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 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.

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
..

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?!

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!

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 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

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

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

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!

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

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

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!

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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…

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?

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

Dsarvadi · September 22, 2009 at 4:42 am

Got a variant for 64 bit systems?

Andrey · September 22, 2009 at 9:19 pm

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

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!

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.

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!!!!!

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

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

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.

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.

corpz · December 14, 2009 at 9:36 pm

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

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.

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

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

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 3:55 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 11:17 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

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!

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!

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.

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

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

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!!!

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.

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!

Brad · March 20, 2010 at 5:21 pm

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

CJ · April 24, 2010 at 2:20 am

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

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 ?

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

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?

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.

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>>>>>>>>

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.

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

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 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!

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

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.

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

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

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!!!!!

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.

fat80y · September 17, 2010 at 11:14 am

thx bro workd 1st go !!!
wooot

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!

Anonymous · October 4, 2010 at 4:47 pm

this does not work with Windows 7

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!

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!!!

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

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!

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 !!!

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?

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 5:48 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

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?

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…

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!!!

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….!!!!

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.

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

Herson · February 10, 2011 at 4:14 pm

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

cn · March 12, 2011 at 10:25 am

thanks

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!!

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!!!!!!

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).

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 ?

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

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

Anonymous · December 14, 2011 at 12:15 am

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

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

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!

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

123 · March 27, 2012 at 12:49 am

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

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.

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 10:17 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]

shamim · May 22, 2012 at 9:38 pm

my hdd 160 gb samsung 0 bite

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

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…..

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.

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”

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 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?

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!

Geoff · January 25, 2013 at 8:44 pm

This tool worked great! Thanks Dmitry.

Alex · April 17, 2013 at 8:31 am

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

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?

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!!!!!!!

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?

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!!

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!!!

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.

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 !!!

Manos · February 7, 2014 at 6:24 pm

Still no new version for Windows 7 64 bit?

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

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

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

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!

Arj · August 16, 2014 at 6:44 pm

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

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 9:37 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

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.

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?????

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!

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

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