IDE Format problem

[torp74]

I have an old WD 160GB IDE drive that I want to use as an external. I used this drive on an older system bios that had a 32GB limitation, so I used a WD program to see all 160GB. I recently bought an external case for the drive, and have hooked it up, and all I can see is 32GB on the drive. I have erased all the partitions, and again all I see is 32GB. I tried to zero it out, and again, all I see is 32GB. Does anyone know of some way to correct this problem?

torp

 

[OV_HDFan]

You have to repartition and rewrite the Master boot record that is where the drive overlay is stored. also check because some drives have a jumper for 32GB limit.

 

[boomerang]

This link may provide some help too.

Data Lifeguard 11 was used to set the drive size. Now, the system BIOS shows it only as 33GB.

 

[torp74]

It appears that you just can't get there from here using the USB bus. I have tried everything from Dataguard to Boot&Nuke, but just can't erase the MBR with the drive connected over the USB bus. I am going to have to find a way to hook this IDE drive up to my SATA connection, and go from there. Ebay sells some adapters, so maybe I can find something there........

torp

 

[gabshere]

Delete the partition through Disk Management.

Then format it to FAT32 or NTFS using a program called swissknife V3

 

[TheForce]

I just ran into a very similar problem here.

I bought a new WD 320Gb laptop 2.5" SATA drive and intended to clone it while resizing partitions from the laptop's 120 Gb Sata drive. Well as usual, I screwed something up and it wouldn't boot. After checking in disk management and Partition Magic I find the drive is giving me only one partition at 110Gb and no data. I tried to reformat, repartition, delete partitions and now nothing will register over 118.53 Gb raw unallocated to NTFS formatted to 110 GB.

So, I'm looking for a way to uninitialize the drive so it will see the full size again.

I got a second drive, same brand and model and also a software Apricorn EZ GIG II and I'm now cloning it where the resizing and initialization is all automatic via the USB port. We'll see how that turns out. I'd still like to salvage the first drive, however and get it back to the full 320G size.

Any ideas? I looked at spinwrite but wasn't sure if that was the right tool for the job.

 

[TheForce]

Well, I spent the day working on this drive problem. Hopefully some of what I learned can be of benefit to others.

First of all I still don't understand what went wrong and I'm not out of the ball park yet, but making progress.

Lots of reading and no help from Western Digital although the tech was nice, his remedies were not on target.

I found a product (FREE) called Ultimate Boot CD for windows. I downloaded the zip of the ISO image and burned it to a CD. It is a huge collection of disk drive tools. After many tries and experiments I found one tool that worked and was able to revert my drive back to factory out of the box settings. Surprisingly, Western Digital didn't have anything like this for download. The tool I got success with is MHDD. But there are a few tricks to using these tools. The first one is to install the bad drive in the laptop, not the USB caddy. Then boot from the CD using F12 key at powerup. Then find the MHDD program in the CD and launch it. It helps if you have a basic understanding of DOS because this stuff all runs in DOS. Being an Old fart has some advantages.
The first thing to address in MHDD is to erase sector 0000 on the disk to dump the Master Boot record. Next using a dos command I reset the LBA number to the factory default and save it to the disk. A quick check of the drives parameters now shows the drive is ~320Gb raw size. Before the LBA was about 1/3 that value.

I pulled the drive out of the laptop and put it back into the USB caddy and reinstalled the original 120Gb drive.

Now here's where I believe I made my mistakes earlier. When I tried to clone and upgrade the drive to the new WD 320Gb drive. I didn't run the clone program from DOS. Even though the clone software claims to be windows and can run from windows. It doesn't work and created a corrupted clone that matched my partitions exactly from the original drive. I noticed that this time when I did the clone launching the software from a boot CD with it copied to the CD, I got a listing of the new partitions indicating it would default to appropriately larger partitions all totaling nearly 295Gb. It's working now so we'll see if the drive is cloned like it should be.

I must say that if you fool around with drive recovery, this CD is a nice thing to keep at your fingertips.

 

[Foxbat]

For drive cloning, I've been real happy with Acronis True Image Backup, at least for PCs. It also has some disk partitioning capabilities, but in the case of the MBR being munged by software to limit the drive size, I think Don's choice of the Ultimate Boot CD is the way to go.

 

[TheForce]

Update- Still no success! I've been through quite a bit of research on this with many professional consultants. Finally today I'm getting some answers that make sense of this whole issue. Bottom line is there is NO utility out there that will clone a Dell HDD without trouble. But there is a way according to one Dell reference but it is not simple. I have yet to try it as I just got word from an engineer at Apricorn.

Here's the problem. If your Dell laptop has Media Direct ver 1 or 2 not 3, it uses an area of the hard drive that is invisible to XP OS Dissk Management, that is invisible to all current disk cloning utilities and as such cannot be cloned. The section of the HDD is accessed only by pressing the Media Direct Button on the laptop and this allows the section of the HDD ( LBA sector 3) to function absent of windows. The unfortunate part of this is that when you attempt to clone a disk with this invisible partition it creates errors in the MBR for windows and also can cause the disk to appear no bigger than the original C drive partition. Once that happens the remedy is to use a Utility that can address forcing the MBR to pre init state and fix the boot sequence and disk size to full capacity in raw unallocated state. This is why all the paths were screwed up after the cloning. The only way to make a clone of the smaller drive to a larger drive is to first trash the Media Direct2 partition using a sector editor and setting all the data to zero. Of course once this is done you lose Media Direct Features on your laptop forever. Then you can make images of each of the remaining three partitions on the drive and clone those over manually to preformatted partitions. Well, Dell claims there is one other way where you do the same thing but use a special Media Direct 2 repair CD utility but I have to look into that. You create the new drive preformatted and set up a 2 Gig space reserved at the end of the drive for Media Direct2.

Ordinarily I wouldn't care but I found the use of Media Direct to be of convenience while traveling as it uses an IR remote control and makes life on the road easier for watching my programming.

I will say that Dell sure does have a great support center for their knowledge base. It just takes a ton of time to sift through it all and learn what to do about a problem. Most of their tech support are just not familiar with real tough problems.

BTW- Newer laptops have Media Direct ver 3 which is not a problem because it loads on the drive as a conventional partition in windows. I don't have that but as I understand, Media Direct 2 will play a DVD like turning on a light switch from off while MD 3 has to boot up first.