How can I correct a disk drive showing the wrong capacity

1

I've been given a Buffalo Ministation (HD-PC320U2/BK-EU), it's a 320GB USB2 drive, but whenever I plug it into any machine (I've tried a Mac, Linux and even Windows as a last resort) it reports that it's a 2.2TB drive.

Is there anyway to restore the capacity to what it should be?

I'm unable to perform any disk operations on it as I always get a message along the lines of unable to write to last block. I have tried dd to overwrite the partition table, fdisk etc.

Has anyone ever had anything like this happen before, I always assumed that the information like that wasn't accessible through normal tools like fdisk, parted, dd etc. I always thought it was a firmware thing, am I wrong, are there tools that will allow me to correct this?

Buffalo don't provide any through their site from what I can see.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

HuggieRich

Posted 2014-09-17T12:46:50.567

Reputation: 71

Have you tried removing the HDD from the enclosure and connect directly via SATA? TestDisk may be able to fix the partition table for you.

– Andrew Morton – 2014-09-17T14:01:45.560

Thanks Andrew, I have tried testdisk, but not with the drive out of the enclosure, I don't have a way of plugging it in as I only have old PATA connectors for my PC or SATA->USB. I've been doing some more reading and it looks as though it may have had the SET MAX ADDRESS value set too high. The problem is without it out of the enclosure I can't get hdparm to work on it.

– HuggieRich – 2014-09-17T14:33:51.793

Answers

-1

I would try a few things:

- Firmware upgrade
- Delete all partitions
- Rewrite MBR
- Recreate partitions using GPT

If you plug the disk on you MOBO and the BIOS still shows 2TB hard drive then maybe someone changed his logic board trying to fix/recover the data on it. If that's the case then there's nothing you can do :) throw the hard disk away and put a new one inside the case.

I hope it helps.

Solrac

Posted 2014-09-17T12:46:50.567

Reputation: 99

Asked: 2014-09-17T12:46:50.567

Viewed: 5 028 times

Active: 2018-05-04T11:29:50.883