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160 Gig Drive being recognized as 31 Gig

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tysona10

Technical User
Apr 29, 2006
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I have had a Hitachi 160 Gig hard drive for a while now and it had been working great for me but recently I had a problem of lossing data so in the proccess of trying to recover that data i must have done something to the drive but i can't figure it out. Not only in windows does it recognize as a 31 gig but also in tht bios. I trid KILLDISK but that didn't fix it. Does anybody have any ideas or suggestions? I really don't want to loose 130 gigs.
 
This happened to me a while back. That's an old limit on hard disk sizes, and indicates that Windows has not been updated to the proper level, or you've installed an old driver for the disk controller. If it's attached to a controller card, it's probably the driver.
 
Get your data on this drive backuped first.

Then use the mfg's utils to wipe the drive, and initialize it once again. This should start you off with a 'bare metal' condition.

I recommend this as from your post, it had been recognized as a 160 before(this will format out to about 149). If this is the case then you should have the correct stuff in you OS to support it.

Get the utils here:

Hitachi:

Hope this Helps

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all
 
tysona10,
Backup the data first as rvnguy has mentioned.

Look at the back of the drive and see if the 32gig drive limit jumper has be set. If so,remove it and see if the full size is detected in the bios.

 
Not sure if you tried this, but formatting the drive in FAT32 from the Windows XP setup disc will limit you to 32GB. It is recommended that you select NTFS unless you have a special need for FAT.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884
 
do search on 48bit large drive
check bios that it sees the disc as lba
if it is a2nd storage drive
turning of or set the drive channel to none may help
if you have disc manager like acronis or paragon check there for file system type
go back to author of software you used that foobarred the drive
it may be a simple flag corrupt partition or mbr thats the problem

O&O recovery and file scavenger are the best for recovery of lost data
Code:
M7L.com data recovery
 
The problem was my jumper settings. I had the wrong setting. Getting the full 160 now. Thanks everyone for you help
 
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