HDD GURU FORUMS

hi there

i made a cloning with acronis and everything worked will. only the the fact that i have now on my new 120gb-harddisk only 60gb left. as well as the bios as also mhdd shows 58gb. how may i solve that with mhdd?

rgds urs

an addition to my problem. in mhdd i see the available lba is 114'270'345 what is eaual to the 58gb. but if i start config i can set as maximum lba of 234'441'648 what is equal to the 120gb. unfortunately i get an device error when i go through the config-process.

rgds urs

I had this also happen as this other guy too
http://forum.hddguru.com/shot-myself-in ... t6750.html


I've tried Mhdd,but that doesn't uncut the NHPA.
I've tried HDAT2,but that doesn't work either.
It does however show that the drive is hiding 60 gigs of space in the HPA. Which is why the 100 gig hd shows as 40 gig. I also used acronis to image a 40 gig to a 100.

Do you happen to have a dell laptop with the directmedia button on your lappy? I've notice after googling that people that have dells with this particular feature run into the same problem.

My theory is somehow when you image the original drive,the hpa gets imaged over. It has been said that HPA doesn't get transfer do to it being hidden. I'm thinking it does though.
It's either being imaged over and then when you put that harddrive back into the computer,the hpa see the unallocated space an takes it.
Either that or somehow the firmware is getting rewritten on the drive?

Thus you harddrive is stuck at whatever the original size of the image.

Normally when you image a hd,you're able to add the unallocated space to your main parition. Thus giving you the full size.

I thinking it's a combo of Imaging,HPA and the way Dell sets up the partition.

I think I had the exact same situation happen to me.

I was trying to image/clone 1 partition, out of 4, from a 100 GB drive to a smaller 60 GB drive. I used an older software package called EZ Gig II by Apricorn, which I believe is just a version of Acronis software.

The 100 GB drive was not a factory drive from Dell (laptop is Dell Inspiron E1705) so does not have MediaDirect on it. But 60 GB hard drive was the original factory drive. 100 GB = Seagate 7200.1 Momentus. 60 GB = Toshiba 5400 rpm.

The 100 GB drive was in the laptop. The 60 GB drive was connected via external USB. I booted off the EZ Gig II CD. The CD booted and tried to load, but said that both drives had to be internal.

Fair enough. It was worth a try. I reboot computer and get BSOD error. What the hell!

In the BIOS, the drive now shows as 60 GB, when it was/is a 100 GB drive. It looks like the exact LBA settings from the 60 GB drive were transferred to the 100 GB drive, so now the 100 GB is a 60 GB as far as the BIOS and OS are concerned.

I was able to recover all data up to 60 GB using data recovery tools, but not between 60 GB and 100 GB. There is still some data on this section that I need.

I used the commands "config" and "NHPA" in the wonderful package MHDD, but neither command works. MHDD does see the maximum LBA address as 195317567 (100 GB), but is unable to reset it from the smaller size of 114270346 (60 GB).

I know this LBA setting is stored on the drive itself. Why can't MHDD reset it? I don't believe there is anything wrong with the heads or platters. But when the LBA is set to 60 GB, no software is able to read past this limit. I know my data is just sitting there perfectly fine.

BigD

Update:

I used the equally cool software package HDAT2 to set the LBA mode from 48 bit to 28 bit and suddenly the drive showed as 100 GB and I was able to recover all my data with Runtime Software's GetDataBack (also great software).

See the relevant section in the HDAT2 FAQ: http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html

Also see the note at the bottom of this page: http://www.drivesolutions.com/cgi-bin/shop/bstore.cgi?command=listitems&kind=accessory&pos=&type=itemid&itemid=a8

At this point I don't know if it's a Seagate problem or an Acronis problem or a Dell MediaDirect HPA problem or a combination. My best guess is that Acronis software messed up the LBA setting and Seagate wasn't allowing software such as MHDD or HDAT2 to reset the LBA properly. Changing the LBA Mode to 28 bit solved the problem for me.

BigD

Thanks for the update.
I'm going to try this also and let you know the results.


Here some info on HPA 28/48. It mentions seagate hd also.
Which is weird cause I used 2 seagate 100 gig hds

hi bigd (and rest that have the same problem)

big tipp! i did it and have received back my full space. thanks for the help! here the linke for the great software:

http://www.hdat2.com/download.html

rgds udu

ps i love forums and user that help each others

I had Same Issue!!! Thanks Guys for the Info... Acronis can be a crappy program at times!!!! I ran The Program HDAT2 and then just choose Max Size. It keep the LBA at 48 Bit. I would think that would be better than 28 bit.

Thanks for the answers

Thanks everyone! This thread helped me get my fully drive capacity back on a Maxtor (Seagate?) HDD

Let me explain how I stuffed up and what I eventually did to put things right in a bit of detail, as the extra info might help someone?

1. I had tried to replace the duff Maxtor 200 GB ATA/133 HDD (with severe head probs) in a Maxtor "1-Touch" case with a band new Maxtor STM332060A 320 GB PATA drive.

2. I connected the "1-Touch" case to a PC running XP MCE via USB and it maide all sorts of funny noises, so I quickly shut down, removed the drive and connected it directly via IDE cable as the only drive.

3. After booting the PC with Partition Commander CD, the drive mis-reported its capacity as 131071 MB.

4. I tried using SeaTools Desktop v3.0 (2 floppies) and SeaTools for DOS v2.136 (1 floppy) but neither could set the capacity of the drive back to native maximum. It seems that Maxtor drives are perhaps really OEM'd Seagate?

5, I then tried lots of methods to try and get the proper capacity back, including zeroing out LBA-3 using Roadkil's Sector Editor, then trying to reset the Native Max Capacity back to what it should be with various DOS boot CD tools, including the Hiitachi Feature Tool v2.13 and the HDDGURU Magic Boot Disk v2.0, but nothing would let me change it, the command always failed.

4. After finding this thread and trying HDAT2 v4.53 booted from CD, with the info in this thread, I finally managed to set the capacity right using the 48/28 bit LBA trick. When first viewed, its seems that the drive was reporting it had a 48-bit LBA but was acting as having a 28-bit one. When I first tried to change the LBA to 28-bit, the command failed, so I experimented with other stuff including using F7 Restore all on the 48-bit Address feature set.

5. After powering down and restarting HDAT2, I could successfully change the LBA to 28-bit from the Set Max Address item using L to set LBA mode.

6. After rebooting again, HDAT2 now shows the correct drive capacity of 320.07 GB in Device Infformation and under Set Max Address screen, even though it is properly using 48-bits LBA mode, not the the 28-bit set prior to the reboot. So now the problem has been resolved and both the Native area and User area have 625142448 sectors as it should be.

Thanks again for putting me on the right track!

I had the same problem and followed the steps of changing 28bit/48bit trick. Somehow I used the permanent option when changing 48bit to 28bit. Now I can't change maximum address from 128 GB to 500GB. Is there any way to change it back? Or it's going to be permanent? Thanks a lot. Any suggestion will be appreciated.