1.5TB hard drive showing as 500Gb

2

I have a Samsung 1500GB hard drive (HD155UI) that started life as a external hard drive. It was later removed from its enclosure and placed in a gaming computer. After this, it was removed from the gaming computer and placed in a different computer. In this last computer the drive showed up as RAW. Using drive recovery software, I was able to recover ~700GB of data from it.

After this, I formatted the drive at which point it showed a capacity of 465GB. There is no unallocated space. I've looked in the BIOS where it also shows up as 465GB.

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I've tried to convert the drive to GPT using diskpart. None of this has worked.

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Carel

Posted 2017-03-05T19:39:17.510

Reputation: 135

Must be software limitations. What are the OSes of all the mentioned machines? – ivan_pozdeev – 2017-03-05T19:50:27.383

Are there any RAIDs involved at the machine that didn't see the full capacity? – ivan_pozdeev – 2017-03-05T19:53:39.933

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/5b26c3bf-a4ae-4604-944d-cd1b53bfaecf/windows-7-doesnt-recognize-all-of-a-4-tb-drive?forum=w7itprogeneral – ivan_pozdeev – 2017-03-05T19:58:05.820

@ivan_pozdeev: hey, the drive has never been involved in any RAIDs. The screenshots in the question above are from Windows Server 2016 – Carel – 2017-03-05T20:33:40.890

@ivan_pozdeev; what really throws me is that the disk even shows the size of 465GB in the BIOS – Carel – 2017-03-05T20:35:27.927

According to the MS forum post, it's likely an old BIOS' limitation and/or you need to boot in UEFI mode. Can you update the BIOS? – ivan_pozdeev – 2017-03-05T20:53:26.230

@ivan_pozdeev: Would the BIOS limitation be for support of this specific hard drive? Cause as you can see, it detects a 4TB and 5TB hard drive just fine. Regardless, I will try updating the BIOS. – Carel – 2017-03-06T10:12:37.080

You never told us this machine detects other TB+ drives okay :) Other than that, the drive's internal metadata may have got botched as in http://superuser.com/questions/38047/seagate-1-5tb-hard-drive-shows-only-500gb-size?rq=1 , or some part of it failed - then you need some specialized tools like http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity/ and/or customer support. Does it show normal capacity in a machine that previously detected it fine?

– ivan_pozdeev – 2017-03-06T11:44:18.197

@ivan_pozdeev: sorry, I assumed that the other TB+ drives support would be apparent from the powershell snippet. I've since removed the drive and placed it back into the external enclosure and tried this in a few different machines. Still shows 465GB. You've provided links to some good sources of information that I will be trying. Thanks – Carel – 2017-03-07T13:07:49.067

You never said what exactly is shown in the output (what the command is and e.g. if it's even the specific machine), so I couldn't afford to draw any conclusions. (Btw you shouldn't post text as pictures and copy-paste it instead) – ivan_pozdeev – 2017-03-08T20:54:05.137

Answers

0

It's possible, but not certain, that the disk's Host Protected Area (HPA) feature has been activated. This feature enables a portion of a disk's space to be hidden from the OS. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Windows tools to check and manipulate HPA settings. If you're familiar with Linux, though, you can use the hdparm tool and its -N option. Pass -N no value to view the current settings:

$ sudo hdparm -N /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 max sectors   = 7814037168/7814037168, HPA is disabled

If this report, unlike my sample above, shows that HPA is enabled, you can pass the correct value to the tool, preceded by p, as in sudo hdparm -N p7814037168 /dev/sda, to disable the feature and regain all your disk's space. (The p tells hdparm to make the change permanent; if it's omitted, the change will be temporary, according to the hdparm man page.)

Rod Smith

Posted 2017-03-05T19:39:17.510

Reputation: 18 427

Asked: 2017-03-05T19:39:17.510

Viewed: 158 times

Active: 2017-03-12T23:07:55.063