HDD missing space

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epicjas0n

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 5, 2009
Messages
261
Hey guys, I'm having a problem with an old HDD. A few years ago, my brother tried to reformat his Samsung SP1203N hard drive. He messed up and the hard drive partitioned into 13 partitions (2gb each). Each of those drives had corrupted/bad inaccessible files. I recently went into Windows computer management to see if I could fix it. I deleted all of the partitions and put all the space into one partition. All I could put together was about 32GB. I'm still missing almost 90GB. I also tried various jumper settings. Can anyone help me fix it or is the hard drive messed up?

 
I'll say what I usually say to those in need of partioning help. That is to try out GpartEd. Burn yourself a live CD. I don't know for sure that it will show more than disk managment but you might get lucky. Beyond that my personal experience is that all the space is available somehow you just need to figure out how.

Did you ever determine the root cause for the previously corrupted data? Was there a bad cable or motherboard prior to this setup? One piece of software that has been helpful to me in analyzing these situations is Spinrite (www.grc.com/spinrite) however it is not free and i'm not certain it will actually fix your issue.

I can see that your bios supports drives bigger than 32gb but here is what samsung says about this issue
http://origin.samsung.com/au/products/harddiskdrive/support/faqs/faqs_20030909_0000013351.htm

I can't get to the manual to verify the jumper settings but if it is printed on the hard drive and there is no critical data on it I would take the following steps. Set the Drive to master or slave whatever it is on its chain, triple check this setting.
Boot into Gparted
Delete all partitions on the drive
reboot back into gparted
see if you can see more than 32gb of unpartioned space
if no, I would:
try a different cable,
update mobo bios
try different jumper settings (at random, last resort),
and a different motherboard if you have one.

This definatley has to do with the old 32gb limit.

other forum posts about similar problem (with a seagate drive)
http://www.techsupportforum.com/har...-support/34298-stuck-32gb-capacity-limit.html
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In doing more research you may be able to utilize samsungs uitliites to remove a 'soft cap' if you will from the drive. make sure you triple check the jumpers beforehand but

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/Support_DiskManager.html
this doesn't look too in depth but it is worth a shot.
 
I'll try gparted after work today. The HDD came with my brother's Sony Vaio. It messed up when he tried to reformat his computer. I don't think my mobo or cables are causing the problem since my other 60GB HDD works fine. I could try putting the affected HDD back into the Vaio and try fixing it there. Thanks for the suggestions.
 
Sounds like to me the 32GB jumper is probably installed.

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Unless your machine is like a decade old (since its running Vista, we can rule that out), you should check that jumper. You don't want that extra jumper in there.
 
thanks but it's not the jumper. I tried the "general config" slave and cable select modes but it's still showing only 32gb. I'm at work right now but I'll try setting it as the master drive and removing my other HDDs later as well as doing everything else you mentioned earlier. I also just found a samsung utility that will let me recover the native size of the HDD (like the seagate thing). It looks promising. Thanks again for the help
 
The_Engineer said:
awesome, I sure hope it works out.
Click to expand...

FINALLY! I think my brother and I finally got it fixed (after over an hour's worth of work :p). We used hdat2 which is a better version of that Samsung utility. Hdat2 allowed us to recover the missing ~90GB. We then fixed the paritions (combined 32gb and 90gb) and reformatted the drive and now it's fixed. Thanks for that link to the seagate problem.
 
next time just DBAN the drive after a back-up, and you'll get the whole drive back and no partitions to fiddle with.
 
I hear DBAN is a good utility too although i've never used it. That really should go into my toolkit (DBAN= Darik's Boot and Nuke)

Glad to hear its up and running!
 
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