I bought a Seagate 200gb 7200rpm internal hard drive to upgrade my current 60gb hard drive. I cloned the 60gb hard drive on to the new one using a USB internal hard drive enclosure and Acronis True Image. Everything seemed fine in Disc Management. But when I booted up the new hard drive, I got a BSOD. I swapped the old hard drive in, booted up, and *voila*! My 200gb hard drive is now recognized as a 60gb hard drive, and all the data was wiped. I tried formatting it, but the size remains firm at 60gb.

Note that I'm using a Dell XPS M1710 with MediaDirect v2.0.

From what I've figured out through crawling through forums for a week, the situation was created because MediaDirect is hidden in an HPA. There is hidden code in LBA-0 that checks for and assigns this HPA into LBA-3, and if it's not there, it resets the drive. I've found someone with the exact same problem who gave a rough solution, but he has been unable to contact me for the details. Thus, I've been winging it with little to no knowledge of what any of this stuff means. It's been very educational

Here's the link to the forum where he (gavwright) details his solution to the problem.
http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportfor ... ing&page=2

His instructions make sense enough, but I've hit two snags. The first is that I cannot for the life of me find a download for PARemove.exe. If anyone can help me with that, I could probably start moving forward with this.

The second is that the programs he mentioned (Magic Boot Disc, MHDD, HDAT2) come in ISO format to be burned on a CD. The problem is that I must not be doing this correctly. I've burned them through Roxio using the "Make Disc Bootable" option, selecting the ISO to be burned, and burning it. Is there a step I'm missing? Whenever I try to boot with one of these (hit F12 on boot-up, select Boot from CD-ROM option), I either freeze on a black screen (cursor blinking in the upper left), boot to Windows anyway, or get the message "No Operating System found." I'm guessing I missed a step, as I doubt all the ISOs are messed up.

Thanks to anyone who can help me. I know I could've just returned the HD by know and let Seagate deal with it, but I'm determined to fix this problem myself and learn quite a bit along the way.

Cheers,
Alex

I guess this is what you need (tool included):
http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory ... -capacity/

_________________
Dmitry

Thank you so much! I'm going to use this right now.

BTW, I loved the last reason given for the possible cause of the hard drive capacity shrinking:
"There was Magic involved."

Thanks a ton!

Curses, I spoke too soon. I'm using a laptop and don't have access to a desktop with S-ATA attachments.