1tb Hard Drive Reports 32mb raw

[nicklarsen]

Old system:
XP Pro
1tb system drive
1tb backup drive

New sytem:
Vista Ultimate 32
Q9450
Gigabyte DQ6 X38
4GB G.Skill DDR2-8000
Corsair HX620 with modded power cables ( like here (http://www.gam.net.au/pcmods/satapower/3.html) )
ATI X800SE
6 total hds in the system
2 x Pioneer 215 DVD/RW

Installed Vista to a new hd. Everything was smooth. However, when I put the old system drive in, and the other backup drive, the system drive was not recognized and asked to be formatted (reports as 32mb raw in disk management). So I tried it in an external on this computer, and another with xp, neither recognize it. Next time I restart, the backup drive does the same thing and reports 32mb raw.

Where should I start? If all fails, I'll send it to a data recovery center, but since I haven't touched the drives, and they are both in good health before and after, I was hoping there were steps to take to start recovery without damaging any data. Any help would be appreciated...

[nicklarsen]

No clue why, but it just recognized the backup drive. Here's what happened, and I'll post a summary if everything decides to work fine after this.

I Put the backup drive back in my system from the external enclosure. Rebooted a few times. Ran a quick test of Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test, which detected the drive and said it was ok, but made no changes. Checked bios settings and changed nothing. Rebooted again and the drive showed up at full capacity with all the data on it. That being said, I think my problem is solved, however, if anyone has any idea why this may have happened, I'd love to hear an explanation, because I don't think I did anything.

The old system drive is still however still reporting 32mb however.

[Bones]

I had a similar problem a few months ago, with a Western Digital Greenpower drive. The problem, I believe, has to do with the HPA (host protected area) setting of the hard drive, which some OEMs use to conceal the OS recovery area of a drive. Somehow, this gets read as 65100something blocks (which equates to roughly 32MB) by some controllers. The solution is to turn off HPA support on the drive. This is easy to do in Linux, and I don't know of any Windows utilities that can do this.

[nicklarsen]

Yeah, after tons of crap, and eventually getting the drive to load up in Knoppix, I got the stuff off I needed. So I'm just going to do some massive reformats, as the previous drive that didn't work was the system drive in a dell system, so a confused hpa could be it. Thanks for the advice