1Tb HDD detected as 32Mb

[Phaz]

Hello, my Seagate 1Tb hard drive is being reported by windows as 32 megabytes.
Disk manager cannot find any unallocated storage and the drive other wise has been fine.
Any idea on what has gone wrong with this drive and if there's any chance i can recover any files without resorting to a professional recovery facility?

 

[fzabkar]

I'm guessing that you have a Gigabyte motherboard with an Xpress Recovery BIOS. If so, then a bug in the BIOS has incorrectly truncated the drive after writing a backup of itself to a HPA.

See this thread for an explanation and solution:
http://forum.hddguru.com/lost-partition-hitachi-1gb-hdt721010sla360-t15662.html

 

[Phaz]

solved the issue last night using a program called Hard drive capacity restore, successfully recovered all files, but i'm just wondering will this drive be okay to continue normal use?

and yes, i do have a gigabyte mobo with a Xpress Recovery BIOS

 

[Phaz]

Best answer selected by Phaz.

 

[fzabkar]

I have never experienced the problem for myself. However, I would apply the latest BIOS update. My understanding is that, once the BIOS writes to the drive, it won't touch it again as long as it sees the backup copy. My only concern would be whether the backup was written to the end of the drive, past the end of the last partition, or at the 32MB point. If the latter, then I would expect to see file corruption. If I were you, I would use a disc editor to search the drive for BIOS related text strings, as described in the referenced thread. Start at the end of the drive and search backwards.

You could use either of the following freeware tools:

HxD - Freeware Hex Editor and Disk Editor:
http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd

DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery):
http://softdm.com/download.html

 

[thetrivialstuff]

I'm guessing that you have a Gigabyte motherboard with an Xpress Recovery BIOS. If so, then a bug in the BIOS has incorrectly truncated the drive after writing a backup of itself to a HPA.

See this thread for an explanation and solution:
http://forum.hddguru.com/lost-partition-hitachi-1gb-hdt721010sla360-t15662.html

Yikes. That's really scary -- a BIOS that'll just write to a drive of its own volition, clobber existing data, and modify the HPA?!

Does this Xpress Recovery thing need to be turned on explicitly, or does it ship from the factory with that setting enabled?

I fortunately don't have any affected motherboards at the moment, but I'm wondering if I should blacklist Gigabyte / post an advisory at work for the other techs in case we run into this in the field.

~Felix.

 

[fzabkar]

I don't have any firsthand experience, but ISTM that the BIOS does its thing without the user's intervention or knowledge. I believe you can also explicitly access this feature from the motherboard CD.