I bought a small lot of hard drives off ebay, as usual it was a scam. They are WD800 but came from a storage array and have been moded to show up as 40gb (37gb)

Does anyone know if WD offers a utility to fix this and restore the original 80GB ? Would a firmware update correct this or did the company use something more advanced to permanently kill half the disk. Currently all WD800BB shows up as 37.50gb no matter what system I put them in and the HD code it reports back is not the usual "WD800 IDE" but something like "WD800 modified" etc..

Thanks
John

Kind of sounds like refurbished WD HDD where one head has been disabled in the RAM or head map on this one to be able to keep the HDD running for some more time. Had a few refurbished ones in here and this is what I have seen on them.

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

I don't think they are rufurbed because the guy had an exact amount, like you would see in a storage array 12 in a rack or something, also if they are refurb they change the sticker to reflect it, these are fairly recent drives from 2006 and like I said the firmware or whatever you call it says "Modified".. and they also came with the metal brackets still attached that hold them in the storage array, they were used in some special array where either the size has to be 40 or they make them smaller possibly to speed it up.. beats me but I'm pretty sure they aren't refurbs that have been scaled down.

Then you have a choice on this one. You can get a tool that cost 10+ and fix this one with it and make them work again or you can get another tool that is a lot cheaper that can do the same thing. Maybe you can use MHDD on this one to try and resize them again. But normally in the FW you have to be able to read it and fix it but you can try with MHDD.

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

Thanks for that info. Do you know what the names of these tools are so I can beging looking them up.

Either way I will report back on what happens

Whats total LBA of drive and reported. Where are you seeing the 40gb?

_________________
Zero Alpha: zeroalpha.com.au
Find Cheap Donor Drives App: https://www.zeroalpha.com.au/donor-drive-app Updated February 2026

Try the hdd capacity restore tool.

http://hddguru.com/software/2007.07.20- ... tore-Tool/

If the drives are just limited in size, this will help.

Dobre

_________________
Murphy was an optimist

Datarecovery in Belgium, Holland, France and Germany
Datarecoverytools http://www.drtools.eu

Just wondered if the drives were simply HW clipped to 32 GB, but seems it is a more deeper modification (like Quantum LCT clipped at production for some IBM devices). Capacity restore works only if the size was cut down to 40GB by reconfiguring max. LBA. , if ALL the firmware was modified it's not a end-user thing (why not recycling these drives on Ebay again )

I was hoping it was jumped down to half size or limitied to 32gb as I've seen on many drives before. But that wasn't the case because I took all the jumpers off.

I got the info out of the apple disk utility. It said "37.5gb Mod" when it reported the drive info. I'll do some more digging this weekend and let you guys know what happens. I'm sure this was done by the company using the storage arrays or the company that sells the drives to be used in the arrays. I've seen this before but now with a box of disks that I paid for it makes sense to try to recover or repair.

JB

It depends : you need special HW tools to deal with the firmware and the know how. Maybe for a box of HDDs someone who do mass refurbishing can do it for you at low price per drive (I do it, but I am in Italy so it is not convenient) - put back firmware, and "recalibrate" drive (the factory procedure). At the end you should have a box of working WD800 , without investing on equipment.

I put it back in the mac to read the drive label, it says

WDC - ROM MODEL -- SABRE --

and the disk size is somewhere around 40,000,300 (37.3gb)

I'll try the utilities tonight and see what happens.

Aaaaaaah... Try to partition and format one... seems identified with factory alias instead of WD800xxxx . This usually means problems and maybe explain why 40G. See if you can store data on it.

Small lot of -SABRE- WD's800BB 80GB with 1 defective head isolated. I have alot of them here.