Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[SavageNoble]

So I bought this drive a few months ago (Febuary, I think?) and haven't had any problems with it until today when I did a fresh reforatting on it, but before the format could be completed I had a power failure. When I later looked at the drive it didn't appear to have been formatted at all, so I tried to format the drive again and it failed.

So, I opened up the Disk Management tool in Win 7 and manually deleted the existing partition volume there. That worked, but the trouble is, Windows now thinks the drive's maximum capacity is 31.50 GB.

I've tried reinstalling the drive, then I used SeaTools for Windows utility to check the drive, and it passed all tests, finally I ran CHKDSK on the drive. No matter what I do Windows doesn't recognize the drives full capacity.

Can anyone help me resolve this problem? I've never had an issue like this, it's kind of driving me crazy.

[Cantbecanit · Accepted solution]

There is a function in Seatools DOS to reset the drive size, read the help files before you start though so you know what you are looking for and what to instruct. hth.

[fzabkar]

See Q2:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_Capacity_FAQ.html

[Cantbecanit]

The solution is to use a utility such as HDAT2, HDD Capacity Restore Tool, or SeaTools to restore the drive's full factory capacity.

Cheers Franc, where you been lately?

[myforum]

The easiest way is to download Seagate DiscWizard for windows from here:

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/discwizard/#

and install it on your computer. 

Then, launch Seagate DiscWizard for windows and choose "Add New Disc" option. This will prepare (format) your drive as a new drive. It would take less than 5 minutes!

You'll recover full capacity when this process is done! Quick and simple!

Hope this helps.

[fzabkar]

Sorry, SavageNoble. I think I was a bit too hasty. I saw 31MB, not 32GB. AIUI, that's not a symptom of the Gigabyte BIOS bug. Instead, if that's the capacity that BIOS is reporting, then it appears your drive has some other problem. Is BIOS still reporting the correct model number? Can you get SMART data from the drive?

[fzabkar]

Cantbecanit, I'd contact you privately, but the last Lithium software update has broken my access to this forum (and WD's). Anyway, my apologies to the OP for hijacking this thread, but this was the last straw for me. I've been battling with Lithium's abyssmally slow, bloated, Javascript infested UI for the past two years, but now I'm giving up. Back in the early 90s, I used to access Seagate's BBS via a 2400bps dialup modem on a 286 running DOS. Now I need an 10GHz octuple-core CPU, a 10Mbps broadband connection, and the latest version of Internet Exploder. And all of this just to exchange a few sentences of plain text.

BTW, here is Google's plain text cached version of a recent thread:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-...

The above page downloads and renders in a split second. IMHO that's the way things should be.

Here is how I've been accessing Seagate's forums for the past two years:
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/rss/board?board.id=ata_drives

That's the kind of annoyance-free interface that I would like to see.

[SavageNoble]

I've yet to try anything that's been suggested, but if you're sure you need the SMART data I'll go ahead and provide it before doing anything.

This is from AIDA64, hopefully it's actually what you're asking for:

And yes, the BIOS is reporting the correct model number.

[Cantbecanit]

Yeah I hear ya Franc, it is a bit slow, especially when your typing goes back to the first letter halfway through a sentence as well, the first attempt may be to do what MyForum suggests, but as you say the problem could be deeper than that, seatools will reset the HDD back to it's original size though as long as the drive isn't broken.

[SavageNoble]

Okay, using SeaTools for DOS fixed my problem.

Thanks for all the help, everyone!