Hello,

I have since a couple of years a 200GB Maxtor One Touch external drive. This drive is actually a Maxtor DiamondMax 200GB ATA133 HDD mounted in a box which have an IDE to USB2 and an IDE to Firewire interface.

I was wondering about upgrading the external drive with a new HDD and then I bought a 400GB Samsung HD400LD ATA133 HDD. When plugged directly to the system, the Samsung is recognized by both my BIOS (Gigabyte GA-8KNXP rev2.0 motherboard) and my OS (Windows XP SP2) with it's full 400GB capacity.

The problem was that when I plugged the Samsung in the external Maxtor box in place of the old 200GB HDD, my system recognized 136GB only out of the Samsung. And now when I plug back the Samsung directly in the system, it does show 136GB only.

The HUTIL202 tool provided by Samsung (or the hacked one provided by HDDGURU) shows that the native size of the Samsung drive is indeed 400GB, but it's effective size is 136GB. I tried to put the drive back to an effective size of 400GB but I failed.

So I have two questions:

1) How can I put the drive effective size back to it's full 400BG size?

2) Is there a way to prevent the Samsung to automatically switch from 400GB to 136GB when I put it in the Maxtor external box? (I recall here that the original HDD of this box was a 200GB drive, whose capacity is > 136GB).

Any help greatly appreciated.

I think u might have to install LBA48 utility driver for getting that 400 gb in windows xp or u can make 4 partitions from dos or any partitioning utility that can support big drives like smart fdisk or partition magic and the xp will show 4 partitions of 100 gb .

Hello Nuelan,

Rameez is correct you need to activate LBA48 to get past the 137GB Limit in Win XP.

Windows XP does not support 48-bit LBA support unless you are running Windows XP SP1. If you want to use 48-bit LBA support, you must apply Windows XP SP1 or later. Here is a article from MS on how to do this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013

or just use the manufaturing tool:
http://www.48bitlba.com/tools.htm

This is a known issue with the one touch cases. Pretty mean I think. Boo Maxtor.

You can get it back, but there is no way I know of to prevent it from happening again. So it looks like your housing is limited to whatever was in it before (not just size but also brand and maybe even model).

I had the same problem and had success using hdat2 to restore the max lba to 48bit (from 28bit) of my 'aftermarket' drive.

Here is a doc that will help. Good luck.

http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html

qtonic

Hi,

I've got the same problem with my new IDE SAMSUNG HD400LD. It is set to 32gb instead of 400gb. First idea, I suppose it was a problem with my pc and xp wich not recognize more than my current 160gb HD. But I think HUTIL and wrong jumper settings make this problem instead.

Anyway, so now, HUTIL 2.0x recognize native size as 32gb even if I set LBA to correct one (781 422 768) HUTIL return an error on low format. Even if 48bit mode is set, and my other PC and XP recognize RAID 0 array disk with 500gb, my other 320gb HD and my USB 400gb disk... no way to set back native size to 400gb !!!

I guess it is not an XP problem, because HUTIL run on DOS disk 3"1/2

Need help please... tools or something magic ^^

Eternity57, you may find this one useful: http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory ... -capacity/

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Dmitry