DiamondMax 200GB seen by windows as 32GB?

[stuke]

How can I get at my files on a DiamondMax 200GB drive (taken from my old machine) that is now seen by windows as 32GB?

I use XP Pro SP2, have a new system. Bios sees drive as being 200GB. I installed big_drive_enabler.exe, but it made no difference. The old system was less than a year old and also used XP pro SP2.
I dont want to format the drive using Maxblast 4, as that would wipe all my files.

Any suggestions???

 

[stuke]

In short: My 200GB (and a 250GB one)DiamondMax Plus 9 hard drives show as 32GB and I cant see all of my files. The drives have partitions. I have XP Pro SP2. How can I get my files from the drives or use them with the files on them?
It is not a jumper problem or anything stupid!

Full version:
I reciently built a new computer (motherboard, CPU, 2 SATA Raid 0, new DVD RW...). I had a lot of stuff on my old system (over 500GB) - far too much to backup - even to DVD. So I backed up my essentials, but left a lot of stuff on my 2 big Maxtor drives (a 200GB and a 250GB drive).

I presently have an 80GB hard drive and a 2 x 200GB raid 0 array. Windows XP Pro SP2 fully up to date.

When I inserted the 2 big drives into my new system, both appeared as 32GB drives. In the lower pain of the Disk Management console the drives appeared as 200 and 250.

I ran a program called big drive enabler (big_drive_enabler.exe), that I downloaded from the maxtor site, but there was no change after rebooting several times. I tried to use MaxBlast 4 for windows but it wanted to format the hard drive, and was of no use to me. The dos version was no use either. The Maxblast 4 tool also tried to say the drives were Fat16. They are both NTFS.

If I had known that the drives could not simply be plugged into a new system I would never have got them. It is not as if Maxtor ship the drives with these tools either!

Does anyone know how I can get my files from the 2 drives or enable them on my new system without reformatting them?

 

[rvnguy]

stuke,

I am confused....

When I inserted the 2 big drives into my new system, both appeared as 32GB drives. In the lower pain of the Disk Management console the drives appeared as 200 and 250.

You state that they appear as 32GB and also that Disk Management indicates 200 & 250.

As you are using 200GB RAID "0" I would assume that your system BIOS is set to use LBA, but it never hurts to check.

You might also try connecting only one of these drives at a time to see if you can access & save the files.

Hope this helps

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[fzia]

i am also having a similar problem, I have maxtor 250GB hard drive that i was using on my XP Pro SP1 just fine. During reinstalling of XP SP2 today i deleted both the partitions on my C: but NOT my maxtor 250GB. And now my system would only see my maxtor drive as 32GB and RAW File System. I have tried big drive enabler from maxtor but it doesnt help. If anyone finds the solution to this problem plz post, i have alot of valuable data on my hard drive and yes MaxBlast 4 want to format it but i dont want to do that.

Thanks
FZ

 

[stuke]

I am using a SATA Raid 0 stripe (F and an 80GB drive (C as system drives. I have 2 large storage drives of 200GB and 250GB.
When both are put onto the system they are both reccognised as 32GB drives. If either one is added to the system it appears as a 32GB drive.
The BIOS is 48bit LBA compliant and reccognises the drives as being 200GB and 250GB.
Windows is the problem - it sees the drives as both being 32GB and I can not access the data from them. I tried putting the drives into another XP Pro SP2 system, but again they were reccognised as being 32GB (big_drive_enabler.exe was also installed).

I think Maxtor has diddled everyone with a large drive, as they can not be taken out of one machine and put into another new machine without almost total loss of data!

Does anyone realise how much it costs to have a backup system that can backup 500GB data, because we are all responsible for backing up our data, but we cant use another identical hard drive (because when we put them in they appear as 32GB)???
I think it would take about 3 days to back up to tape. The media alone would cost over £200 and the drive might be about the same.

 

[cdogg]

stuke,
OK, so this is what you have, right?

- 1 80GB drive (system C
- 2 SATA drives striped in RAID 0 (F
- 2 Storage drives (are these IDE???)

If that's the case, then there should be no problem moving a non-system drive from one PC to another. If you didn't change the FAT tables, format it or anything like that, then it should work. I move drives of this size all the time and haven't had any trouble seeing the whole partition, and it's not a Maxtor thing either!

Also, the "big_drive_enabler" executable shouldn't be needed in a system that already supports 48-bit LBA and is running XP SP2. Are you absolutely sure you didn't run that before checking the drive size in Windows?

~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

 

[fzia]

I also remember that I saw my maxtor HD as only 32GB WHILE installing winXP SP2 , i wonder why?

 

[stuke]

The 200GB and 250GB storage drives are both IDE, and were never on a spanned drive or anything like that. Both drives had more than one partition. Now both drives appear to have on partition of 32GB. One drive has a folder called Windows and it did have an operating system (should still have I think). I remember that I had to initialise the drives in the Disk Management Console, create partitions and format. I have not had any problems with them until I took them out of the old system and tried to get them working on the new system.
The cables, jumpers, Bios and Operating system version are OK for sure.
Do you think that the 80GB drive that I have now might be preventing the drives being seen as 200GB and 250GB. The storage drives were put on the secondary IDE cable. The 80GB is on the Primary IDE as a Master.
I have tried both drives both as Master & Slave together and with a DVDRW, by themselves and also as a slave to the 80GB drive. No difference.
The drives are fairly new (6 and 9 months) and have not been mishandled at all.

 

[cdogg]

I cannot think of any reason why the drives worked fine in the old system but not the new, if you are sure that you did nothing to alter the file structure. Right now, it seems like the file allocation tables on the drives are hosed in some way.

Are they formatted in NTFS or FAT32?

~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

 

[stuke]

Both NTFS, although MaxBlast 4 said it was Fat16 for some reason in one place and NTFS somewhere else! Probably just bacause it is designed primarily to run in DOS.

I have just realised somehting that could (possibly) have some signifigance; the drive was initialized on an XP Pro system that had been upgraded from Windows 2000.

I know that XP does not support striping natively, but it might have handled the initilization and partitioning differently, as it would have retained 2000 capabilities being an upgraded system. What do you think?

 

[fzia]

stuke, i am not sure why you still have 32GB barrier. But i changed my jumper setting to slave and win recognized the right capacity except it wouldnt show anything in the drive and show RAW as its file sys. I tried a lot of utils to recover files but most of them failed. Then i tried this software called GetBackData for NTFS:

http://www.runtime.org/

and i am now able to recover data out of my hard drive with file structure intact!
maybe this might help you in some way

 

[garebo]

I wonder if the fdisk /mbr command (from dos)would come in handy here as it seems that the mbr may have been altered. It seems to me that it did help someone else with a similar problem lately.
Bear in mind that you might want to check this out first as i dont want to be responsible for you losing data.
Cdogg, what do you think of using the fdisk /mbr command here?


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[stuke]

fzia - I am giving GetDataBack for NTFS a go, and it seems to be working!
I have heaps of data to recover and it seems that I have to recover everything all at once to be able to get at it, but that will do. I can dump the rubbish later.

Thanks for the suggestion, its the best one yet by far.

 

[jlindenbaum]

I dunno if this was said already.

But as I have the other posts running I am mucking around with my HDD quite a bit.

I just read on the HDD Sticker for Jumper settings:

2Jumpers vertical on the far left 2 columns of pins= Limit size to 32GB. Did you fiddle around with your jumpers for the new system?

That might have caused it. Look up the jumper config for your Maxtor see if you by accident set the max level of space to 32GB.

I read that even if it is limited BIOS would recognize the full space as only after the MBR is loaded the size is limited. And since BIOS doesn't list partitions, that makes sense!

johannes

 

[garebo]

very good point to raise!

Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[alidabiri]

the problem with the 32 gig barrier lies in the bios. the bios have to be upgraded to recognize the full capacity of the drive. western digital handles it by running a utility at p.o.s.t. (power on self test). if you upgrade your bios, your problem will be solved. this is according to western digital and award bios web site.

 

[stuke]

jlindenbaum, its not a jumper issue!

I sort of got it sorted, well for one hard drive any way. The other is now formatted, all data lost.

I was able to use recovery software to sort the problem out on one drive, and recover most data. On the other drive this did not work, and neither did using a USB cadey, or a recovery card. Not totally sure how the drives were messed up but CONVINSED that it was the software from MAXTOR that screwed the drive up - I'm sure that their software messed with the filing system in some way (why else would an NTFS Formatted drive appear as FAT16 in the lower section of disk manager)?