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SATA Hard Drive Factory Full Capacity Restore - Vista 64Bit.

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caxtin   10-03-2009 at 06:36:39 PM

Western Digital SATA Hard Drive - 640GB Vista Home Premium - 64Bit Gateway desktop. Would someone know of any utility or method to restore a SATA hard drive's factory full capacity size? During partitioning my drive, it went from 595GB (640GB Drive) to only 32GB. Since it is a 64-Bit system, I can't find a utility to restore the drive's full capacity.

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Bronze Storage badge sub mesa   10-03-2009 at 06:55:26 PM
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Are you sure you didn't put jumpers on the drive where you shouldn't? I don't know if current generation HDDs still have them, but HDDs used to have a jumper to limit the capacity to 32GB to be compatible with legacy LBA standards.

However, you did not tell why you weren't able to create a larger partition. Does the disk get detected at being 32GB large, or 595GB?

------------------------------ ...man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.
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caxtin   10-03-2009 at 08:40:18 PM
- 0 +

No, no jumpers. I have had it the same way since I purchased the computer in February. I was partitioning the drive, and after restarting, I could not recover the rest.

Western Digital technical support could not help me. Such a shame that such a 'big' drive manufacturer cannot fix their own disk, not even with thier own utilities.

This ( http://hddguru.com/content/en/soft [...] tore-Tool/ ) is awesome, but it is for 32Bit (used it and it's great).

The BIOS and the disk manager detect it as only 32GB.

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TheDraac   10-03-2009 at 09:22:25 PM
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You say you used "their own" utilities.... Did you in fact use their Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Utility???
DL the ISO and burn it to a CD. Then boot from the CD.

If you did, does the utility show it as a 32GB or 640GB drive???

I find it odd that the BIOS even thinks its a 32GB drive. You usually need the jumpers on the drive set to have a drive recognized at that size. And I don't think your drive has that. Just jumpers for 3.0 Gb/s or 1.5 Gb/s and Spread Spectrum Clocking.

Anyway, have you read these links???

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wd [...] _topview=1

Wow that's a big link... anyway it talks about the 32GB limitation.

And this link....

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wd [...] ZT0x&p_li=

This link talks about using Data Lifeguard to set the full size. I believe if this helps, your gonna have to do a reinstall.

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caxtin   10-04-2009 at 12:34:34 AM
- 0 +

DRIVE FIXED!

ay, KUDOs to you TheDraac. I got the drive fixed. First I must have messed up the drive by using the Western Digital Lifeguard Tool on their own drive - ironic.

Now this was what happened. The links you sent me, the first one does not apply to me. The second one does, but I had to work around it. Using the Lifeguard Utility, I did what I had to and checked the BAs. My Native MAX LBA did not match my Current MAX LBA, and I did not know how to change it. I set, in the BIOS, the drive to LBA and the system got up to 137GB. Then I ran the Acronis WD (Western Digital) Edition (free) to check the integrity of the drive. It showed me the following partitions: 32GB, 137Gb and UNUSED 144GB. I opened my Easeus Partition Master to check the drive and found all the full size - it gave me more than the factory, it gave me 610GB instead of the 595GB for a 640GB drive.

Am so excited! Thanks for all your help here, I really appreciate all your help and time. You have a wonderful weekend.


Message edited by caxtin on 10-04-2009 at 12:36:38 AM
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apache_lives   10-04-2009 at 02:43:50 AM
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hmmmm sounds like a zero write/boot and nuke could have fixed that

------------------------------ Q6600@3510/1560 + TT BigTyphoon+Mod
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TheDraac   10-04-2009 at 06:55:34 AM
- 0 +

Good to hear you got that sorted.

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