Editing harddrive CHS data in Windows 7

W

Whitebread

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 28, 2002
Messages
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I've got a 250 gig WD scorpio drive that was damaged during a botched backup with Norton Ghost. The controller is reporting a meager 54.49 gigs of available space on the unallocated disk. I assume this is due to LBA definitions (excuse me if I use the wrong vernacular, I'm just learning about this now) that have been changed to match that of the drive that was being backed up. I know the Linux fdisk command can perform the necessary operations, but I'd prefer to stay in a Windows environment. Does anyone know of a command or a program that can perform the necessary changes?

Thanks
 
The "controller" is reporting 54.59gb? What are you using to look at this? It's expected that the partition would be the size of the old one, but if the physical drive is reported as a different size, that points to something else. If that's the case, anyway, you just need a partition tool (including fdisk), but preferably one that can resize.
 
The size of the physical drive, fully unallocated, is being reported as 54.49 gigs, the same size as the drive that was being copied. WD diagnostic tools are useless from what I remember, although, I last used it in August of last year.
This isn't a partition issue, its something deeper. I made a Ubuntu live CD and planned on reading the necessary information and calling WD to compare it to the default values and see what's going on.
 
Sooooooooo.......
Windows utilities, the WD diagnosis software and the computer BIOS did not recognize the 190~ gigs of missing space but the disk utility in Ubuntu did........
Weird.
 
Is it possible that windows is using the bios to determine the disk config? I'd doubt it, but... still. Maybe re-scanning your drives in bios is worth a shot.

Also, windows also writes a signature to drives, although I'm not entirely sure how this works, just that it can be very annoying sometimes. If windows found the signature and decided that it was the same drive, that could be it. I've never had this problem, but I've also only restored/copied individual partitions and not the whole drive. If you were to zero-fill the drive and repartition it, that might do the trick.
 
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