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HDD Capacity Restorer saved my drive
http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22848
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Author:  DavidPierson [ May 5th, 2012, 8:59 ]
Post subject:  HDD Capacity Restorer saved my drive

Just wanted to thank you for the HDD Capacity Restorer program.

I had the task of cleaning a Seagate 750GB drive that had a lawyers information on it and decided to use Secure Erase. I ran the DOS version from a Bootable USB. I've used it a couple of times before.
I had to get around the BIOS locking out the ATA Security; this time I just powered down the drive after the USB booted and powered it back up again. Love those SATA power plugs.

But then I hit something new, Secure Erase complained about HDA / DCO areas on the disk. This was new to me. Did a bit of reading and said "No" to erase them and SecureErase basically said "no erase for you". So I tried again saying "Yes" and SecureErase said "sorry I tried but it failed". So I tried "Yes" again and it worked and 3.5 hours later it finished.

It had claimed that the HDA/DCO area was some ridiculously large number of sectors, it looked larger than the entire Googleplex, and that was probably a clue it was confused.

So after all that and taking it to my XP machine, Disk Management said the disk was 128GB - when it had been 750GB just a few hours earlier.

After some panicking, I found a reference to your program on this page : http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/DCO_and_HPA
and it did the trick beautifully. Thanks!

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