Hard Disk shows wrong size
I originally had 2-300GB(RAID 1 setup) drives in my machine. I copied their contents using True Image onto an external drive. I then replaced the 2 drives with 640GB(RAID 1 Setup again) drives and imaged them with the data. These drives now show up as 1-300GB drive - I want it to be 640GB, their full capacity. In the BIOS they show as 640Gb drives. If I try to format them it tells me that it will only be formatted for 300GB.
How to fix? Please.
Thanks Mark,
Unfortunately I did not do that at the beginning. I now have a 3 disk setup with C: the operating system on 1 disk (300GB Velociraptor), and D: 2-640GBs in RAID 1, except they read at 298GB because of the above problem.
Is there a way forward?
There should be. If the restore worked once then you could do it again, correct?
Break the array, remove the D: array disks and use a utility to clean the disks. Then set up the array again and repeat the restore but this time only restore the partition without restoring Track 0 and MBR, and resize the partition to fill the disk.
Thanks Mark - I'll do it!
I had a similar problem and screwed up my MBR which now shows a lower disk size than the actual physical drive. The problem with Mark's solution is that the damage is already done to the MBR. Therefore redoing the restore the right way won't affect the MBR, which will still be incorrect.
Is there a way to correct the MBR to its original state with the correct disk size shown? I have tried various repair utilities but have not found a way to fix the MBR yet. Any ideas would be appreciated.
Robin Alexander,
Can you post some specifics on your problem? There isn't very much to go on.
Original size of drive? Current size?
Where are you seeing the incorrect size? Where are you seeing the correct size?
How did the drive get screwed up?
Screenshots of what Disk Management and DD show may also be helpful.
The MBR doesn't store the "size" of the drive. It stores the booting code and the partition table.
Robin:
Is your PC a Dell by any chance, and if so, does it contain a MediaDirect partition?
Thanks for getting back to me. My Dell Inspiron E1405 probably has a media direct partition because it has a Media Direct button on the front of the unit. I have never tried it so cannot know for sure.
I got in trouble when I ordered a 320G drive to replace the 80G drive that came with the computer. I used Acronis True Image Home to clone my 80G drive to the 320, which I had placed in a USB adaptor box. I had understood from the Acronis messages that it would expand the partitions proportionally when cloning to the larger drive. Instead, the new 320 drive now shows its capacity as the same as the old smaller drive. This shows up in Explorer Properties, any partition manager I have tried to throw at it. I even wiped it and installed Windows XP on it as a new install with the drive in the laptop itself and in every way it shows the same small size. I assumed the MBR was overwritten by the MBR from the old drive and therefore assumed that the drive size is one piece of information stored there, but you're saying that's not the case.
So is there a way to recover the lost space on the new 320G drive or is it toast? Thanks for the help!
Robin:
Yes, you can recover the lost space on the drive. The issue with Dell Media Direct is that it uses a special reserved area of the disk called a Host Protected Area that is inaccessible to most disk tools.
To fix this, start with the following article: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/9303. One of the replies by forum MVP GroverH has several references to tools that can be used to restore the disk to its full size.
The one that I've seen people use successfully in the past is this article by forum member BrianK:
http://forum.acronis.com/sites/default/files/forum/2009/08/3426/gh_acro…
The procedure for Dell Media Direct PCs starts on page 12.
All of the methods described will result in the loss of the Media Direct function, but it seems that you don't use it anyway.
Thanks for all the tips. Much appreciated. I've been working on this all afternoon and am having trouble getting HDD Capacity Restore Tool to work. It isn't designed to work with USB so the new drive has to be in the machine. Since it's in use, of course can't run Restore then either. So managed to get the new drive hooked up in my desktop by using a SATA cable and the power from the USB box. Went into setup and enabled the disk; diskmgmt recognized it fine and still reported the smaller size as expected. The shock was that when I ran HDD Capacity Restore Tool, it said it could find no disks on the machine! Then I was stuck. Have no idea what to do about that. The drive is a WD so the Seagate utility probably won't work and the Hitachi tool says it works on Hitachi drives so I'm nervous about running it on the WD drive. (Western Digital) I think it's time for a drink and give it a rest for a while.
If you have any idea of how to get HDD Capacity Restore Tool working, would be great. Also, if I overwrite the Dell MBR with a generic one as suggested on page 12 of the BrianK article and reclone, will that recover the space? My guess is not, but I'm not sure.
Had no idea installing a new disk would be this much of a challenge!
Robin:
Yes, you should be able to replace the MBR on the original disk with a generic one and reclone, provided that you also zero the third sector on the original disk first (LBA3). The following is the best reference available for getting around this problem:
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm
See the last couple of paragraphs of the article.
Thank you; you've been most kind. I'll have to dig thorugh the approaches proposed and decide which to try first. If I could ask one more question (and this is the last, really): I'd like to try to zero the LBA 3 sector. Just want to make sure I understand how to find it. Is that the 3rd sector on the drive? If not, how would I find the LBA and its 3rd sector?
That's it. If I can't get it from all you've given me, I'll give up and return the drive:)
Robin:
To zero LBA3 you will need a sector editor. On a standard Windows installation, the first sector of the disk contains data (some tools call this "sector 0" )and then all of the other sectors contain zeros until you get to sector 63. So you would look with a sector editor for the third or fourth sector on the disk and see if it contains something other than zero. After you find this sector, replace all 256 bytes in the sector with zeros.
In Brian K's articles he recommends downloading "Roadkill's sector editor" as a free tool to directly edit sectors on the disk. http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=24
Thanks much, Mark. I finally got it. I zeroed the 4th sector (sector 3) and then used Magic Boot Disk as recommended by Brian and I finally had gobs of free space!
But... it was only for awhile. The Dell blue bar of death came back during a backup operation, and while I was able to use Magic Boot Disk to get the space back again, I concluded my life was going to be a lot more complicated and frustrating with the new drive and Dell's weird Media Direct feature (I sometimes wonder what these people are thinking - don't they ever expect anyone to upgrade a disk?) and that I'd just better live with the old drive and be more discriminating about what I load on it. I'm currently wiping the new drive to get it ready to return to Dell. Thanks for all your help and of the others who create these useful utilities. Next year perhaps time to buy another laptop, which I'm sure will have its own ideosynchrasies!
Formatting the hard disk is one of the solutions to fix hard disk shows the wrong size issue. But you'd better recover data from the hard disk first in case of data loss problems. You can try Bitwar Data Recovery to get back the files from the hard disk, then you can use command prompt or format using disk management to fix this issue.
1. Windows Disk Management helps in managing disks and partitions for the computer, and it also can be used to repair the errors in the USB drives.
2. Press Win logo key + R and type diskmgmt.msc to open the Disk Management. On this page, you will be able to see partitions, local hard drive, and the affected USB.
3. Select your USB by clicking right on it then choose the option Format followed by a click on file system format to being formatting.
4. Right-click on the USB drive and choose the option New Simple Volume.
5. Choosing this will let you recreate a new partition for the USB drive. After this, follow the onscreen instructions and click on the Next button.