HDD GURU FORUMS

I am one of those who've fallen victim to Dell's preventing cloning of their laptop drives to larger drives (code in their Master Boot Record sets the drives HPA to the laptop's original drive size). The original drive has 73GB of apparent drive space available. When I cloned the drive to a 256GB SSD and booted, the boot failed and I was left with a 73GB SSD with truncated content.

That's when I learned what HPA is. Using HDAT2, I reset the drive size back to its original 256GB and I cleaned up the boot sectors so that it did not reset the HPA again. After power-cycling the drive, I am now left with 118.62GB! That is more than the 73GB that Dell left me with, but no matter what/how I use HDAT2 to restore the size to 256GB, that only lasts until the next power cycle.

Is there another setting that I might need to set to have the drive retain its full, factory setting?

Is there another tool that I can use (besides MHDD--which I haven't gotten to work) which might reset the HPA properly?

@fzabkar

Hi there,

I have a 'kind off' similer problem. My WD 3TB only shows 801Gb. Read the forums and the best advice given is to use:

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

The only thing is that this freeware app is no longer available

Do you know where I can find this application?

Many thanx

Ips

First check your HDD in Disk Manager and see if it show ~2800gb.
And then format your HDD with GPT with full capacity.

Ipacus wrote:@fzabkar

(...)
The only thing is that this freeware app is no longer available

Do you know where I can find this application?

Yes, i do keep a "backup" of this sort of tools on my forum just in case someday they "disapear" like this ...

Here : - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=51

But to be honest i think your drive most likely have other sort of problem not HPA related ....

ATATool - Windows ATA Disk Info and HPA/DCO Utility:
http://www.datasynergy.co.uk/products/atatool/

Data Synergy ATATool can be used to display and modify ATA disk information from a Microsoft Windows environment.

My WD 3TB only shows 801Gb.

This does not necessarily mean that the drive's capacity has been cut by a HPA. Instead it usually points to a 32-bit LBA limitation in BIOS or a driver. If the drive is in an external enclosure, then the enclosure's firmware is most likely affected by a 32-bit LBA limitation.

Or.. somebody created only a 800gb partition in it