WD HD 500gb drive shows it is 137gb

[john35]

I have a 500gb drive that I was installing Windows 7 on. I reduced the size of the partition and let Windows format the drive for install thinking I would partition the unused space later. Yes, the drive did read as 500gb before I started the install. After Windows was installed, the unused space has dissappeared. Everything tells me the drive is only 137gb: Windows disk manager, Ubuntu Disk Utility, hdparm, fdisk. None of them report the unused space that is on the disk.

I have deleted the partitions, replaced the GPT and the MBR using gdisk on Ubuntu.

Here is the current fdisk print out.

Disk /dev/sdg: 137.4 GB, 137437871104 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 16709 cylinders, total 268433342 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0001672d

The drive is a WD5000AADS.


hdparm -N gives this:

max sectors = 268433342/1(976773168?), HPA setting seems invalid (buggy kernel device driver?)

Any suggestions on how to reset the drive? I'm not ready to just put in random numbers to see what works with -N

[hpw333]

i can solve this problem easy online
pm me

[fzabkar]

Your drive's capacity appears to have been truncated by a HPA.

Explanation of Host Protected Area:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

Any of the following tools will remove the HPA.

HDD Capacity Restore Tool:
http://hddguru.com/software/2007.07.20- ... store-Tool

HDAT2/CBL Hard Disk Repair Utility:
http://www.hdat2.com
http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html
http://www.hdat2.com/files/cookbook_v11.pdf

HPARemove:
http://archive.today/0BLkn

MHDD:
http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

[john35]

Thanks for the info. It got me started in the right direction.

The HDD Capacity Restore tool doesn't appear to work with 64 bit operating systems.
MHDD has removed their HPA tools and directs to HDPARM which wasn't working to make changes. The screwed up disk wouldn't even let HDPARM do a dco-restore.

Some more searching sent me in another direction when someone suggested using disk manufacturers HDD tools. It also appears the HPA problem may have been caused by my Gigabyte motherboard.

I downloaded UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) which contains all the programs you mentioned and used one of the disk manufacturer programs on the disk. In this case I used PowerMax which told me the size of the disk and allowed me to easily set it to that size. Other manufacturer disk programs would probably do the same thing. I had tried a lot of things including deleting partitions before I found the easy fix. It's possible I could have made the change without losing partitions if I had found the solution of using SeaTools or PowerMax earlier.

Link to UBCD which contains lots of useful utilities including the ones I tried and what finally worked.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/