hard disks 137GB, previously 160GB

[Guka]

I have two 160GB sata hard disks (Samsung and Hitachi). After a computer
crash both of them became 137GB (in bios and xp). I tried 3 different
motherboard's en one pci sata controller but the result is the same. All
motherboards recognise 500GB sata hard disks.

Can someone tell me what's going on ?



Guka

 

[Guka]

I have two 160GB sata hard disks (Samsung and Hitachi). After a computer
crash both of them became 137GB (in bios and xp). I tried 3 different
motherboard's en one pci sata controller but the result is the same. All
motherboards recognise 500GB sata hard disks.

Can someone tell me what's going on ?

Guka

Problem solved.
Factory capacity restored with Capacity Restore Tool.

It's still mystery for me what has caused wrong capacity report.


Guka

 

[GT]

I have two 160GB sata hard disks (Samsung and Hitachi). After a computer
crash both of them became 137GB (in bios and xp). I tried 3 different
motherboard's en one pci sata controller but the result is the same. All
motherboards recognise 500GB sata hard disks.

Can someone tell me what's going on ?

137GB was one of the limits hit with hard disk sizes. I think this one is a
Windows XP limit, so perhaps Windows has rolled back to a non-service packed
version, or critical files have been corrupted. Re-install SP2 on your XP.

If that doesn't work, then check the BIOS version - perhaps the crash was
CMOS related. Try flash updating your CMOS (check motherboard website).

 

[Guka]

137GB was one of the limits hit with hard disk sizes. I think this one is
a Windows XP limit, so perhaps Windows has rolled back to a non-service
packed version, or critical files have been corrupted. Re-install SP2 on
your XP.

If that doesn't work, then check the BIOS version - perhaps the crash was
CMOS related. Try flash updating your CMOS (check motherboard website).

I had the same problem with different XP's and also with Windows Server
2003. Also I could see only 137GB in BIOS (in 3 different pc's). So I don't
think it was related to OS. And also all the pc's could see other large
(160, 320, 500 gb) sata disks beside these 2 one's.

As you can read in my prevous post is the problem resolved with a capacity
restore tool.

 

[GT]

I had the same problem with different XP's and also with Windows Server
2003. Also I could see only 137GB in BIOS (in 3 different pc's). So I
don't think it was related to OS. And also all the pc's could see other
large (160, 320, 500 gb) sata disks beside these 2 one's.

As you can read in my prevous post is the problem resolved with a capacity
restore tool.

Bizarre! I have never heard of a 'capacity restore tool'. What caused the
drives to lose their capacity in the first place? Sounds like a nice Windows
bug to me!

 

[Guka]

Bizarre! I have never heard of a 'capacity restore tool'. What caused the

drives to lose their capacity in the first place? Sounds like a nice
Windows bug to me!

Ik had a defect ddr memory. This caused system crash (bsod). After that was
part of my data lost on the hard drives and the capacities was 137GB.

 

[VanguardLH]

...

Problem solved.
Factory capacity restored with Capacity Restore Tool.

It's still mystery for me what has caused wrong capacity report.

What is a "capacity restore tool"? Did it come with the hard drive?
Is this an program that usurps the MBR bootstrap area to load on
hardware bootup and before the OS loads? To the rest of us, that is
called a disk overlay manager. It compensates for an old BIOS that
only supports 28-bit addressing of 512-byte sectors for a maximum size
of 128GB (which many folks call the 137GB boundary in decimal); 2^28 *
512 = 128 GB. The disk overlay manager provides for 48-bit addressing
to get past the 128GB addressing limit in the old BIOS. Check if
there is a flash update to your old BIOS.

Alternatively, to eliminate problems with motherboards in some old
BIOSes that only supported 28-bit addressing, the hard drive's PCB
came with logic that would limit the size of the partition to only
128GB. You used a jumper to configure the drive for the max partition
size. You never mentioned model numbers of the 160GB SATA hard
drives.

You also never mentioned which operating system you are using. I
believe SP-2 for Windows XP eliminates the needs for the disk overlay
manager. Windows 2000 required a patch. Vista supports drives over
128GB in size. That is, even if the BIOS doesn't handle the large
drive (which means you will have problems using DOS-mode utilities),
the OS can handle them okay providing there isn't additional
restrictions enforced in hardware. However, you might still require a
partition manager to enlarge the partition. Depends on how the OS got
installed.

Is this what you referred to as the software:
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Restore-Tool/

What they refer to as "your BIOS does not support LBA48 mode" is
talking about 48-bit addressing support (for LBA mode). If so, it is
possible they installed a disk overlay manager but they leave it very
vague as to what actions their software will commit. That means you
don't know what it plans to do to "fix" the problem, and you are
blindly using the tool (the same way that many users blindly use
registry cleaners).

You never bothered to mention how the "drives" became ANYTHING. Your
system crashed. Okay. So was magic involved getting your system back
up? You did some type of restore. Maybe a fresh OS install. Maybe
you used a restore disk. Maybe you used a restore image in a hidden
partition (and you just wiped out that hidden partition by including
its space in the other partition that you enlarged). But then you
never did bother to provide any details, like the operating system,
either. Looks to me like user error when restoring your system by
whatever means you used.

 

[Guka]

...

What is a "capacity restore tool"? Did it come with the hard drive? Is
this an program that usurps the MBR bootstrap area to load on hardware
bootup and before the OS loads? To the rest of us, that is called a disk
overlay manager. It compensates for an old BIOS that only supports 28-bit
addressing of 512-byte sectors for a maximum size of 128GB (which many
folks call the 137GB boundary in decimal); 2^28 * 512 = 128 GB. The disk
overlay manager provides for 48-bit addressing to get past the 128GB
addressing limit in the old BIOS. Check if there is a flash update to
your old BIOS.

Alternatively, to eliminate problems with motherboards in some old BIOSes
that only supported 28-bit addressing, the hard drive's PCB came with
logic that would limit the size of the partition to only 128GB. You used
a jumper to configure the drive for the max partition size. You never
mentioned model numbers of the 160GB SATA hard drives.

You also never mentioned which operating system you are using. I believe
SP-2 for Windows XP eliminates the needs for the disk overlay manager.
Windows 2000 required a patch. Vista supports drives over 128GB in size.
That is, even if the BIOS doesn't handle the large drive (which means you
will have problems using DOS-mode utilities), the OS can handle them okay
providing there isn't additional restrictions enforced in hardware.
However, you might still require a partition manager to enlarge the
partition. Depends on how the OS got installed.

Is this what you referred to as the software:
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Restore-Tool/

What they refer to as "your BIOS does not support LBA48 mode" is talking
about 48-bit addressing support (for LBA mode). If so, it is possible
they installed a disk overlay manager but they leave it very vague as to
what actions their software will commit. That means you don't know what
it plans to do to "fix" the problem, and you are blindly using the tool
(the same way that many users blindly use registry cleaners).

You never bothered to mention how the "drives" became ANYTHING. Your
system crashed. Okay. So was magic involved getting your system back up?
You did some type of restore. Maybe a fresh OS install. Maybe you used a
restore disk. Maybe you used a restore image in a hidden partition (and
you just wiped out that hidden partition by including its space in the
other partition that you enlarged). But then you never did bother to
provide any details, like the operating system, either. Looks to me like
user error when restoring your system by whatever means you used.

You are right, that’s the software I used. And yes, I don’t know what it
does, but it did the job and my hd’s are now 160GB.
I never used any kind of restore. And I did not fresh install of os (my 3th
200gb ide disk was the system drive and it wasn’t affected by the crash
which was caused by a defect ddr memory). After the crash the pc was long
time busy with checking the drives and reindexing the files.
I do used Active Undelete to restore my data but at that time the hd’s were
already 137gb (128gb in windows).

All this happened couple of months (may be already half year) ago and until
know I used the hd’s as 128gb. Last I bought another hd, double backed up my
data and decided to try to recover the full capacity of my 160gb hd’s. So I
don’t remember every detail exactly but I think that second hd became 128gb
some days later after the pc crashed the same way.

Here are the pc’s and hd's that I used.

Hard disks (not a raid configuration):
Hitachi sata 160gb, HDS722516VLSA80
Samsung sata 160gb, SP1416C


System 1(that crashed):
Gigabyte ga-k8nf-9 (last bios)
Windows xp pro, sp2
athlon 64 x2 3800+

System 2(for test):
Asus p4p800-e deluxe (last bios)
Windows xp pro, sp2
pIV 3ghz

System 3(for test):
Asus p4p800-vm (last bios)
Windows Server 2003, sp1
pIV 3ghz

System 4(for test):
Asus p5w dh deluxe (last bios)
Windows xp pro, sp2
Windows vista ultimate
core 2 quad q6600

 

[kony]

What is a "capacity restore tool"? Did it come with the hard drive?
Is this an program that usurps the MBR bootstrap area to load on
hardware bootup and before the OS loads? To the rest of us, that is
called a disk overlay manager. It compensates for an old BIOS that
only supports 28-bit addressing of 512-byte sectors for a maximum size
of 128GB (which many folks call the 137GB boundary in decimal); 2^28 *
512 = 128 GB. The disk overlay manager provides for 48-bit addressing
to get past the 128GB addressing limit in the old BIOS. Check if
there is a flash update to your old BIOS.

Something is wrong with the OP's account of events or the
details. If these are SATA drives, any motherboard with
SATA controller integral has 48bit LBA support, as do all
SATA PCI cards. Therefore, either:

A) The bios did not report the capacity wrong, only windows
did. (Addressed below)

B) The drives are PATA, not SATA, as is the controller card
(PATA100 or older, PATA133 cards also support 48Bit LBA) and
all these systems are very very old. In this latter case, a
bios update for the motherboard would help.

Alternatively, to eliminate problems with motherboards in some old
BIOSes that only supported 28-bit addressing, the hard drive's PCB
came with logic that would limit the size of the partition to only
128GB. You used a jumper to configure the drive for the max partition
size. You never mentioned model numbers of the 160GB SATA hard
drives.

You also never mentioned which operating system you are using. I
believe SP-2 for Windows XP eliminates the needs for the disk overlay
manager. Windows 2000 required a patch.

WinXP needed SP1
Win2K needed SP3 or 4.

Either could have used the patch instead but these service
packs fixed so many issues it was as well to use them once
released.

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?j=F8rgen?=]

Bizarre! I have never heard of a 'capacity restore tool'.

http://support.ontrack.com/cgi-bin/ontrack.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=77

 

[DevilsPGD]

In message <[email protected]> kony

Something is wrong with the OP's account of events or the
details. If these are SATA drives, any motherboard with
SATA controller integral has 48bit LBA support, as do all
SATA PCI cards. Therefore, either:

A) The bios did not report the capacity wrong, only windows
did. (Addressed below)

B) The drives are PATA, not SATA, as is the controller card
(PATA100 or older, PATA133 cards also support 48Bit LBA) and
all these systems are very very old. In this latter case, a
bios update for the motherboard would help.

C) The SATA driver is emulating PATA, which emulates some of the
limitations too...

 

[kony]

In message <[email protected]> kony


C) The SATA driver is emulating PATA, which emulates some of the
limitations too...

Do you have an example of any SATA controller/driver in
emulation mode that didn't support 48bit LBA? One problem
with it being a driver is that the bios wouldn't report
wrong. One problem with it being the bios is any board new
enough to have SATA has 48bit LBA support in the bios.
Emulation mode should not change this unless there is a
pretty severe bios bug.

 

[DevilsPGD]

In message <[email protected]> kony

Do you have an example of any SATA controller/driver in
emulation mode that didn't support 48bit LBA? One problem
with it being a driver is that the bios wouldn't report
wrong. One problem with it being the bios is any board new
enough to have SATA has 48bit LBA support in the bios.
Emulation mode should not change this unless there is a
pretty severe bios bug.

One of my older Gigabyte boards did this... It was a combination of two
settings (emulation mode, limit drives to 137GB) working together for
backwards compatibility.

I suspect it was a feature rather then a bug.

 

[kony]

I suspect it was a feature rather then a bug.

LOL, aren't they all?

 

[VanguardLH]

You are right, that’s the software I used. And yes, I don’t know
what it does, but it did the job and my hd’s are now 160GB.
I never used any kind of restore. And I did not fresh install of os
(my 3th 200gb ide disk was the system drive and it wasn’t affected
by the crash which was caused by a defect ddr memory). After the
crash the pc was long time busy with checking the drives and
reindexing the files.
I do used Active Undelete to restore my data but at that time the
hd’s were already 137gb (128gb in windows).

All this happened couple of months (may be already half year) ago
and until know I used the hd’s as 128gb. Last I bought another hd,
double backed up my data and decided to try to recover the full
capacity of my 160gb hd’s. So I don’t remember every detail exactly
but I think that second hd became 128gb some days later after the pc
crashed the same way.

Here are the pc’s and hd's that I used.

Hard disks (not a raid configuration):
Hitachi sata 160gb, HDS722516VLSA80
Samsung sata 160gb, SP1416C


System 1(that crashed):
Gigabyte ga-k8nf-9 (last bios)
Windows xp pro, sp2
athlon 64 x2 3800+

System 2(for test):
Asus p4p800-e deluxe (last bios)
Windows xp pro, sp2
pIV 3ghz

System 3(for test):
Asus p4p800-vm (last bios)
Windows Server 2003, sp1
pIV 3ghz

System 4(for test):
Asus p5w dh deluxe (last bios)
Windows xp pro, sp2
Windows vista ultimate
core 2 quad q6600

For the Hitachi, I found
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/d7k250/d7k250jum.htm. I
mentions clipping the capacity (per partition) to 2GB or 32GB but not
to 128GB.

A search on "SP1416C" at Samsung's site had no matches. I went with
their HD160JJ 160GB SATA3 model whose online manual is at
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2m84o5. It doesn't mention any capacity
jumper settings, but it does mention switching from 3.0Gbps to 1.5Gpbs
using software (so they use a program to change settings).

As kony noted, you said they were SATA drives. I'm not sure all SATA
ports will always support 48-bit addressing. As I recall, the early
mobos that had a SATA controller was bridged to the PATA controller so
if the BIOS was limited to 28-bit addressing for PATA then maybe too
for SATA. It's been too long since I had one of those old early SATA
setups.

I don't think any of the mobos you mention would not support LBA and
48-bit addressing (I'll leave it up to you to read their manuals).
It's been like 7 years since I had any hosts that had an old BIOS that
only supported 28-bit addressing (and with no patch to the BIOS for
48-bit mode).

If I get you right, the drives crashed but the OS was on a different
drive so you did not need to do a reinstall of the OS. You replaced
the defective drives and they showed up as 128GB by default. Did you
actually do any partitioning yourself or did the drives just show up
that way from the manufacturer? That is, did you slide the new disks
in and just use whatever partitioning was already on them? If so, the
maker pre-partitioned for 128GB but you could've deleted that
partition and created a new one using the full capacity, or used a
partition manager to enlarge the 128GB to the 160GB size.

 

[Guka]

For the Hitachi, I found
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/d7k250/d7k250jum.htm. I mentions
clipping the capacity (per partition) to 2GB or 32GB but not to 128GB.

A search on "SP1416C" at Samsung's site had no matches. I went with their
HD160JJ 160GB SATA3 model whose online manual is at
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2m84o5. It doesn't mention any capacity jumper
settings, but it does mention switching from 3.0Gbps to 1.5Gpbs using
software (so they use a program to change settings).

As kony noted, you said they were SATA drives. I'm not sure all SATA
ports will always support 48-bit addressing. As I recall, the early mobos
that had a SATA controller was bridged to the PATA controller so if the
BIOS was limited to 28-bit addressing for PATA then maybe too for SATA.
It's been too long since I had one of those old early SATA setups.

I don't think any of the mobos you mention would not support LBA and
48-bit addressing (I'll leave it up to you to read their manuals). It's
been like 7 years since I had any hosts that had an old BIOS that only
supported 28-bit addressing (and with no patch to the BIOS for 48-bit
mode).

If I get you right, the drives crashed but the OS was on a different drive
so you did not need to do a reinstall of the OS. You replaced the
defective drives and they showed up as 128GB by default. Did you actually
do any partitioning yourself or did the drives just show up that way from
the manufacturer? That is, did you slide the new disks in and just use
whatever partitioning was already on them? If so, the maker
pre-partitioned for 128GB but you could've deleted that partition and
created a new one using the full capacity, or used a partition manager to
enlarge the 128GB to the 160GB size.

Both of my drives are SATA. And all motherboards recognised large SATA
drives (like 320/500 GB) beside these two.

I had made 4 partitions self and the total capacity of each drive was in
bios 160GB and in windows about 151GB. After the crash there were no
partition anymore. When I clicked on the drive in Disk Management Windows
asked me rather I want to format the it. At that point bios and windows
reported capacity of 137/128 GB. After using undelete software to recover my
data I formatted and made some partitions. The capacity has than always been
137/128GB on all pc’s / mobo’s until I used capacity restore tool. After
that both hd’s were reported 160/151GB in bios/windows.

 

[kony]

As kony noted, you said they were SATA drives. I'm not sure all SATA
ports will always support 48-bit addressing. As I recall, the early
mobos that had a SATA controller was bridged to the PATA controller so
if the BIOS was limited to 28-bit addressing for PATA then maybe too
for SATA. It's been too long since I had one of those old early SATA
setups.

Early SATA boards had a discrete SATA chip, sitting on the
PCI bus, with it's SATA/raid bios embedded into the
mainboard bios. It had no ties to PATA at all, it was the
same logically as having a PCI SATA card installed.

In other words, suppose somehow one could travel to the
future, grab up the SATA controller chips and bios, then
travel back in time to put one of those on a very old board
(486, Pentium 1 or 2 era, for example). If that could have
happened, even when the PATA through the motherboard
southbridge didn't support 48Bit LBA, the 48Bit LBA support
is present for the SATA drives because the SATA controller's
bios included it. This is essentially the same situation as
when one added a new ATA133 card to an older system to add
the 48Bit LBA support for drives connected to that PATA
controller card.

By the time these SATA solutions appeared, even a generation
before this (roughly 2002?), all boards had 48bit LBA
support. It might be possible the SATA controller bios had
some bugs, but as designed per the tech of the era,
everything was 48bit capable at that point, AFAIK.