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Not your usual capacity reporting problem

E

easymoneyrasta

n00b
Joined
Nov 13, 2004
Messages
3
My 40GB Seagate drive is only reporting ~38.5GB capacity in the BIOS and
both Windows XP and Linux. In binary terms, it should show as 37.25GB but
is actually showing 35.80GB.

This drive used to be my main system drive, but is now being used as a
secondary drive (primary slave). I have wiped the MBR and sector 0 from
the drive, before using Seagate Disk Manager to perform a zero-fill of the
entire drive, ready to install additional OS's.

When I use Disk Manager to 'update MBR' on this drive, the drive reverts
(after reboot) to showing its full capacity in the BIOS, Disk Manager, and
both Windows/Linux.
When this correct capacity is reported, the BIOS (which does have LBA
enabled) reports the CHS values as 19158/16/255; Seagate Disk Tools reports
this as 4865/255/63. If this situation remained, everything would be
fine...

Some actions which I have not been able to determine cause the drive to
revert to the 38.5GB (35.80GiB) state, but one action that I do know
causes this is simply formatting a disk (any disk, even a floppy) in
Windows. Often though, just rebooting seems to cause the drive to revert
to the smaller capacity. It can always be fixed temporarily by using Disk
Tools to update the MBR, but I need it to be fixed permanently before
writing a new partition table and formatting the drive.

This is just doing my nut!! :confused: Can anyone please help?
 
Thanks Tsar... ;)

Some very interesting reading there - I tried reverting the drive back to it's proper capacity using the Disk Tools 'rewrite MBR' function (that's Seagate's own boot-from-floppy util), then did another zero-fill, and so-far, so-good. That's only one Windows and Linux reboot apiece so far, so I'll give it a few more days before assuming it's sorted...

My suspicion is that the smaller capacity is due to a hidden area on the disk used for OS restore (the PC came with Win XP Home installed and no CD) - I feel my HD is being held to ransom by an unscrupulous vendor who have little interest in technical issues... The moral being don't buy a PC from Time (I did once...). I am pretty confident my disk does not have any bad sectors on it (call it a hunch).

In terms of solving the actual problem, I shall post here again when I have any progress - I will give it a couple of days, as I say...
 
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