May 4th, 2010, 12:53
May 4th, 2010, 13:29
May 4th, 2010, 13:32
May 4th, 2010, 16:05
xsoliman wrote:I would say the drive firmware etc has got corrupted/failed in a way that make the drive report as a simple 33million byte drive (32 true MB)
May 4th, 2010, 16:55
May 5th, 2010, 3:24
May 5th, 2010, 6:43
dobrevjetser wrote:Many people seem not to know belgium is closer to france than UK AND we speak french
Dobre
May 5th, 2010, 6:51
May 7th, 2010, 1:13
pct wrote:I have 2 HDDs Hitachi 1GB HDT721010SLA360 in PC under W7 and sudenly, one of them has lost partition: Windows ask me if I want to partition it! After several investigations:
1/ size reported is now 33MB instead of 1Tb
2/ I tried "Partion Find and Mount" avaib on this site and he's unable to find any partition (whatever the scan method used)
3/ I tried HDD Capacity Restore:
Reported Capacity : 33NB
Factory Capacity: 100,204MB
Capacity Difference: 100,171MB
I have not click on Restore Capacity yet: I would like to understand impact before writing anything on my drive
4/ I ran GetDataBack NTFS. Surprisingly, he also say it's a 33MB drive, but when clicking on the disk, it says there is a 936MB NTFS Partition. Then I run a full scan but it does not find any single file or directory it could recover !!!
May 10th, 2010, 22:44
May 15th, 2010, 13:38
fzabkar wrote:pct wrote:I have 2 HDDs Hitachi 1GB HDT721010SLA360 in PC under W7 and sudenly, one of them has lost partition: Windows ask me if I want to partition it! After several investigations:
1/ size reported is now 33MB instead of 1Tb
2/ I tried "Partion Find and Mount" avaib on this site and he's unable to find any partition (whatever the scan method used)
3/ I tried HDD Capacity Restore:
Reported Capacity : 33NB
Factory Capacity: 100,204MB
Capacity Difference: 100,171MB
I have not click on Restore Capacity yet: I would like to understand impact before writing anything on my drive
4/ I ran GetDataBack NTFS. Surprisingly, he also say it's a 33MB drive, but when clicking on the disk, it says there is a 936MB NTFS Partition. Then I run a full scan but it does not find any single file or directory it could recover !!!
Do you have a Gigabyte motherboard with Xpress Recovery BIOS?
If so, then the BIOS has truncated the drive after backing up a copy of itself to a small HPA (approximately 2000 sectors) at the top end of the drive.
GDB is detecting the correct partition size from the partition table in sector 0.
The reason the drive is reporting 33MB is that Gigabyte's BIOS has a bug that incorrectly adjusts the drive's capacity after creating the HPA. 1TB drives are reduced to 33MB, 1.5TB become 500GB, and 2TB become 1TB.
The solution is to use a tool such as HDAT2 or the HDD Capacity Restore Tool to remove the HPA (Host Protected Area).
I would also update the BIOS afterwards.
May 15th, 2010, 18:50
May 16th, 2010, 13:30
fzabkar wrote:Let me first say that I have not had an opportunity to investigate this bug for myself.
However, my understanding is that BIOS writes a copy of itself to the uppermost LBAs of the drive, and then hides this image by reducing the capacity of the drive by a corresponding amount.
This article explains the Host Protected Area:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area
I don't know how or when the BIOS decides to do the above, but I presume that your affected drive was somehow promoted to the first device in the boot order. Either you did this intentionally, or maybe the first drive disappeared as a consequence of some fault.
Removing the HPA should not damage your file system. However, if the BIOS did manage to write to the drive, then the BIOS image must now be somewhere within the user area. I would use a disc editor to examine some likely locations.
HxD - Freeware Hex Editor and Disk Editor:
http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/
For example, I would first examine the very last LBA on the drive. AIUI, in an NTFS volume this sector should contain a copy of the NTFS boot sector. Alternatively, depending on the OS, this copy may be in the middle of the volume. I'm assuming that partitions don't end on cylinder boundaries, in which case the above may not apply. In any case, you should be able to recognise BIOS code because the tail end of the image (last 16 bytes) will contain some uncompressed boot code, including a plain text BIOS ID.
BTW, the specs for your motherboard confirm the existance of an Xpress Recovery BIOS:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot ... GA-K8N-SLI
The latest BIOS version (F10E) is dated 2009/12/17:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Moth ... uctID=1928
Here are some text strings I have extracted from the K8NSLI.10E image file in the above distribution:
"Award BootBlock BIOS v1.0"
"Can not Find BIOS Image in Hard Drive or Diskette"
"6A61FG0I"
You could scan your drive for the above strings.
If you find them, then you should determine which files, if any, occupy the affected sectors.
Tip: How to determine which file occupies a particular sector:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/ATA-and-Se ... /m-p/35567
May 16th, 2010, 16:12
May 17th, 2010, 4:52
October 13th, 2010, 6:18
October 13th, 2010, 18:14
April 13th, 2011, 0:36
April 13th, 2011, 0:40
April 16th, 2011, 5:10
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