Hi all,

To give you a background about what’s happening:

I have a Windows XP SP3 desktop machine.
I have recently purchased a Western Digital WD20EARS 2 TB SATA hard drive a few months ago. I connected it through one of the SATA cables and everything was working fine.
One day, the hard drive failed and Windows was not able to detect it in My Computer. In the Disk Manager it said '931GB Unallocated'

In order to recover my data I then proceeded to remove it from my system, fit it into an encloser and then connect it via USB to my new ASUS laptop running Windows 7. When I plugged it in it said that I needed to format the drive.
I used a software called Recovery Pro to retrieve all data on my drive. Fortunately I was able to recover all my data and save it to one of the drives on my laptop. Apparently my partition table was screwed.

After that was done I then connected it back to my desktop and now my BIOS only detects that drive as I TB. Have a look at the screens below:

http://i55.tinypic.com/27zyj61.jpg

http://i55.tinypic.com/27zx1rk.jpg

In Disk Manager when I tried to format it only recognises it as 1 TB. So I decided to go ahead and format it as NTFS. Right now I have a newly formatted drive with only 1 TB.

http://i56.tinypic.com/2929mxc.jpg

I have no idea why this happened. When I first started off the system was able to detect it as a 2 TB drive. It seems like after my hard drive crash a TB of space has gone AWOL.

Now I have been reading up on these forums and apparently I will need to use some sort of tool that will restore the capacity of the drive to its factory capacity?

This is the tool right? http://hddguru.com/software/2007.07.20- ... tore-Tool/

Is there anything I need to do after that?

How safe will this hard drive be in the future and will this type of issue come up again? I have only used this device for a couple of months.

Cheers,

Stanley

Your HD's symptoms are consistent with a bug in Gigabyte's Xpress Recovery BIOS.

See this thread for an explanation and solution:
lost-partition-hitachi-1gb-hdt721010sla360-t15662.html

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Cheers dude, I have read on other forums about the same problem.

I will give it a go.

All is ok now. I was able to recover the capacity using HDD capacity recovery tool.

However, I'm finding it difficult to upgrade my BIOs. I went to the Gigabyte download centre and the site did a scan of my motherboard and after that it only came up with two components to update - Realtek Audio Drivers and my LAN driver. There was no mention of the BIOS.

I decided to manually search for the driver by model number and I donwnloaded an .exe file off some driver site. When I tried to run it I got an error in the command prompt. I was wondering if Gigabyte have addressed this bug of truncating the capacity of a HDD in a hotfix or something. I really do not want to go through all this again if it happens..

I can't answer your questions. I haven't seen this bug firsthand, so I rely completely on feedback. However, it appears that once the BIOS has copied itself to the drive, this copy remains in place. Therefore, if the drive is ever re-examined by the BIOS, the existence of the copy should prevent the problem from recurring. This means that the copy must be outside the user partitions, beyond the last logical cylinder. This in turn suggests that BIOS must be file-system-aware. If I'm correct, then this would beg the question, if the BIOS can correctly copy itself to the uppermost LBAs, then why does it incorrectly truncate the drive?

If you would be prepared to examine your disc with a hex editor, you can search for text strings that appear in your BIOS image. This will tell you where the BIOS copy was written.

You can use HxD.

HxD - Freeware Hex Editor and Disk Editor:
http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

Launch HxD. Go to Extras -> Open disk, tick the Open as Readonly box, select your Physical disk, and click OK.

Type Ctrl-End. You will now be at the end of the physical drive.

Select Search -> Find, choose the Backward radio button, Datatype = Text-string, and enter the search text in the "Search for" box.

You could search for the following strings, or parts thereof.

"Award BootBlock BIOS v1.0"

"Can not Find BIOS Image in Hard Drive or Diskette"

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.