Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity

Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog
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July 19th, 2007
This article is a complete guide on recovering your hard drives factory capacity. At the end of this article there is a link to our program that recovers factory capacity of any hard drive. My hard drive has mysteriously became smaller! How can I restore its full capacity? There are several common reasons of why your hard drive might lose some megabytes or even gigabytes: Your Operating System does not support LBA48 addressing mode You are mixing binary and decimal gigabytes Your motherboard has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the BIOS binaries Your PC/Laptop manufacturer has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the Operating System installation files (needed for automatic restore functionality) You have used some software that sets HPA (Host Protected Area), messes with DCO (Device Configuration Overlay), or switches off LBA48 support You have misplaced a jumper on the drive There was Magic involved Now I will go through these things one-by-one and provide some more details.
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity

hard drives Dmitry Postrigan
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Operating System does not support LBA-48 addressing mode

point of writing about them.
Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME will not support big drives (>137GB) even if you install all hotfixes. There are ways to get around this problem, but since these Operating Systems are rather rare nowadays, I do not see the
Windows 2000, 2003 and XP do not support big drives by default; you will have to install the latest service pack in order to get big drives working properly on these OS. Windows Vista does not have any issue with big drives.
Binary and decimal gigabytes

279 GB hard drive.
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Hard drive manufacturers use decimal gigabytes while operating systems use binary gigabytes. One decimal gigabyte contains 1 000 000 000 bytes (1000 x 1000 x 1000), whereas one binary gigabyte contains 1 073 741 824 bytes (1024 x 1024 x 1024) thats more than a 7% difference! So, your 300 GB hard drive will show up in Windows as a
Motherboard creates HPA
Motherboard can create a so-called Host protected area on your hard drive to store its data. Usually this area is not bigger than 10 megabytes, so there is nothing to worry about.
PC/Laptop manufacturer creates HPA
Manufacturer of your PC can create a Host protected area on your hard drive to store an image of the original operating system and programs. This area is used when you want to restore the original state of your desktop PC or laptop without using CD/DVD disks. Usually this area is quite large (8-20 GB).
http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity/[7/10/2013 8:18:28 PM]
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog In this case, to restore the original capacity of the hard drive with the HDD Capacity Restore tool that we include in this article, you may need to remove the hard drive out of its original PC/laptop and temporary attach it to another PC. This is needed because most BIOSes will disable HPA/DCO operations to ensure that nothing can reset or damage that hidden area.
Software that has the ability to control HPA and DCO

support, Security commands support and others.
For example, MHDD. This software allows you to set a Host protected area on your hard drive, so the hard drive will report less capacity to both BIOS and Operating System. MHDD can also access DCO (Device Configuration Overlay), and that allows you to not only change hard drives capacity, but also switch some hard drive functions, such as LBA48
Some manufacturers (for example, Dell and HP) use DCO to reduce capacity for marketing needs. Example: they need to ship 1000000 computers with 40GB hard drives, but they only have 80GB drives in stock. They will use their own DCO tools to lock capacity to 40GB.
Jumper settings that limit hard drive capacity

gigabytes.
Most hard drives have a special jumper setting that allows you to limit their capacity to either 32 or 128 (137)
Magic cases
These include things like HDD firmware bugs (believe me, there are plenty of them). Also, sometimes a damaged Master Boot Record may cause the BIOS and/or the Operating System to misdetect the true hard drive capacity. In this case you would need to use a zero-fill tool. Sometimes a very broken hard drive may report wrong capacity. In this case there is nothing you can do about that.
Solutions. Restoring factory capacity

2. Check your OS, does it have all updates installed? any partition.
1. Check jumpers. Consult with manufacturers instructions and set jumpers to the proper position.
3. Check disk partitions. Run Windows Disk Management console and see if there is any free space that is not used by
4. If steps 13 did not help, then we have a very cool tool that analyzes your hard drives LBA48, HPA and DCO status and recovers factory settings (see below).
HDD Capacity Restore Tool
Weve came up with a freeware tool that handles LBA48 mode setting as well as HPA and DCO features. It does everything automatically: it extracts the factory capacity; then it restores the factory LBA48, HPA and DCO settings.
Download HDD Capacity Restore Tool. Supported OS: 32-bit versions of Windows XP/Vista/2003 All you have to do is to run it and click Restore Capacity. The program will do the rest. Update May 24, 2008: Many people ask if this this tool formats the hard drive and/or erases the data. No, it does not perform any kind of formatting; furthermore it does not read from or write to the user data area at all (including partition tables, boot records, etc). It only alters HDD firmware (HPA and DCO settings). I strongly recommend to re-power your computer before running this tool. That means, completely power off your computer; then power on, start Windows and run the tool. If the tool fails to restore the original capacity, then the most common reason is that your motherboard is blocking HPA and DCO commands. You can check that by running BIOS Setup and looking for things like DCO or HPA. If nothing helps, try on another computer. If you are brave enough, you can also try the following: run the program, select your hard drive, and then when you see the Restore Capacity button, re-power your hard drive by detaching and reattaching its power cable. Warning: you are doing this at your own risk! After the program finishes working (320 seconds), you will need to power off your PC, then wait 1020 seconds and then power on. I believe Ive covered everything. If I am missing anything, you are very welcome to leave a comment :) Good luck!
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498 Comments
Well, on my system it detects the PATA drive and the SATA controllers (nForce4), but not the SATA drives.
Comment by Ouroborus on July 26, 2007 5:26 am
Ouroborus, If HDD Capacity Restore does not see hard drives attached to S-ATA ports, then first of all Id try to go into BIOS setup and locate S-ATA settings. There has to be a way to switch S-ATA ports into Normal or Compatible or Legacy mode (as opposed
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog to Native). This should resolve the issue. Dmitry
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on July 26, 2007 5:13 pm
how do i use it on my laptop where i only have one hard drive? will it be possible to use usb mass storage devices in the future?
Comment by pedro on August 2, 2007 2:28 pm
pedro: Sorry, you will have to remove the hard drive from the laptop and attach it to a desktop PC. USB mass storage is not going to be supported since it simply does not allow the protocol that we are using to access the hard drive. Dmitry
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on August 2, 2007 2:37 pm
Hi, just looking around your site and tried this program one of my drives says locked with ATA password what is that all about?
Comment by Leonard on August 3, 2007 1:03 pm
Leonard: Please have a look: http://blog.atola.com/hdd-security-system/ Dmitry

Wonderful! I had a stack of WD400s showing 20Gig and I knew better theyre all 40Gs now thanks to this wonderful utility. yaaaayyy!!!
Comment by DetroitGeek on August 11, 2007 5:14 pm
I was always led to believe that the reason a drive is set at the capacity you buy (200gig), was because this is the reliable test size for the drive. In other words it was not reliable enough durning tests at more that the 200gig size. Therefor it gets set at 200gig and sold at that. Also i have tried this type of restoration before using ghost, and found the drive to become very unstable in saving data. Especially getting windows delayed write errors the higher up the drive as you fill it. (back to my first paragraph). Just my comments good tool though. Great site.
Comment by Steve on August 15, 2007 11:32 am
Steve: This software wont be able to give you more gigabytes than you see on the HDD sticker. It just allows you to restore that capacity in case other software or PC distributor reduced it. Thanks
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on August 15, 2007 11:48 am
Hi Dmitry Have a SCSI drive MAP3367NP which formats to 4.3gb, should be 36.7gb. Tried your program, however it only sees the IDE
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog drives not the SCSI. How can I access the SCSI? Thanks
Comment by Bill Diachuk on August 20, 2007 1:36 am
Hello Bill, I am not a big SCSI guru, but SCSI hard drives have the possibility to reduce the capacity when they are being low-level formatted. You may try to find a software that does SCSI formatting or use your SCSI card BIOS to format the drive.
Thanks for making and releasing this! I was removing the evil Dynamic Drive Overlay from a 120 GB IDE drive by zero-ing out the first sectors of the hard drive. That seemed to get rid of DDO, yet the BIOS still said the drive was only ~32 GB. This tool allowed me to reset the drive to its full capacity, sans DDO. One side note: The tool requires that the drive youre resetting be on its own IDE channel. In my case I was using a dual drive system with both drives on the primary channel, so I had to move the drive in question to be Master on the secondary channel for the tool to work its magic.
Comment by Keith on August 27, 2007 6:41 pm
Hello Dimitry, I have a 250GB hard disk drive installed with 2 partititions. I took it and installed it in another pc but instead of 250GB bios and windows recognize only 33GB. Ive tried your programm but with no luck since also that recognizes only the 33GB. Is there a chance that I did something wrong? Stratos
Comment by Stratos on September 7, 2007 8:28 pm
Hello, From your description I can be 99% sure that youve set 32-GB clip mode with HDD jumpers. Thanks
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on September 8, 2007 12:18 pm
The wise man has spoken!!!! Youwere 1000% correct.That was exactly what I did and as soon as I choose the 16-GB clip mode everything returned to normal.Im a happy man with my 250GB hard disk drive ready for new adventures and this thanks to your advise. Thank you
Comment by Stratos on September 9, 2007 1:36 am
Thank you !!!!! I cloned a Dell 40GB to a brand new WD800. and all I got were two 40Gb drives!!!!!! I run your program and within 10 seconds it was 80Gb back. It`s a pity i didn`t find it sooner spent a horrible week Once aganin thank you Sincerely From Argentina.
Comment by Canella on September 10, 2007 5:19 pm
I have a 160GB drive that was previously full of all my data, but is now appearing unformatted to windows XP SP2, and as 33GB to the BIOS. Capacity limit jumpers arent set on the drive, and some recovery software has been able to find the 149GB [formatted capacity of the drive] partition, but not restore it (it cant restore 149GB of data into 33GB of space)
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog Will this tool restore the drive to full capacity without damaging the existing data on the drive?
Comment by David on September 12, 2007 5:17 pm
David, The best way to find out is to run the program. It wont harm the data since it does not access the user data area at all. Thanks
Thank you very very good

Comment by ellia on September 13, 2007 2:21 pm
Thank you! My previously useless hard drive [mysteriously reporting to windows as 33GB unformatted instead of 160GB 80% full of stuff] has been resuscitated in two clicks by this program. I spent two weeks trying to recover the data with half a dozen programs, and purchased partition recovery software, only to find this simple program could fix my drive. One point though, an error initially suggested I should try it on another platform, and check the BIOS for HPA settings. This was not necessary but the error dialogue in the next version of the software should ask users to check that the drive is a) on its own channel and b) set as master on that channel, by jumper if necessary (Cable Select wasnt working) Brilliance!
Comment by David on September 14, 2007 11:31 am
I have a Western Digital 250 Gig drive that when originally installed, I think on XP with Service packs 1&2, automatically shifted to 137. Ive been using it, but am heading into a large editing job, and while I could just go buy a big drive I hate wasting the left over part. Thing is that my OS is on this drive, and using your tool it says I must disconnect this from computer. Right now I am doing a copy of the whole C disk, OS, programs and all so I can do this, but before I commit to this can you let me know if on disconnecting the OS disk from the system then your program will not work? Or?? Thanks.
Comment by jon jost on September 23, 2007 6:46 am
Hello Jon, You would have to attach this hard drive to a computer that already has a hard drive to boot from. Unfortunately, you cannot uninstall a hard drive your PC boots from Once you have this drive secondary on another PC, the program should work as advertised :) Thanks Dmitry
I had two 160GB sata hard disks (Samsung and Hitachi). After a computer crash both of them became 137GB (in bios and xp). I tried 3 different motherboards en one pci sata controller but the result was the same. After using HDD Capacity Restore Tool I could restor the factory capacity of my hard disks. My thanks go to Dmitry Postrigan.
Comment by Nicol on September 28, 2007 3:51 pm
Messed up my Toshiba 2.5, 60gb using some hard disk utilies. XP detected it as only 32gb. Couldnt get HD Capacity Restore Tool to work on USB so mounted the Toshiba on my desktop as its 2nd HD. After running your program, whoalah!!! The Toshiba
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog back to its original 60gb :-) THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!! More power to you!!!!
Comment by Japorms on October 1, 2007 10:24 pm
I tried the program I got a message More than one device detected on the channel with the selected device. The device has to be single on a channel I am on XP trying to fix a samsung 160gb drive showing on your program as Master IDE controller Channel#0,slave 33gb. Of course I only have one HD controller. Any suggestions ? thanks
Comment by Abe on October 3, 2007 3:49 pm
Hello, You can try to set the hard drive as Master, that might help. Make sure that there is no other device attached to the same cable (like another hard drive or a CD/DVD drive). Thanks
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on October 3, 2007 4:26 pm
Hi Dimitry I need some help with my disk a Maxtor 250GB SATA2, under Win-XP + P4 it shows 120 GB capacity? I instaled Service pack 1-2 and even 3, no luck? Then I downloaded and ran your Capacity restore tool, and it showed the correct HD capacity difference so far so good! Then when I clicked this warning poped up? Device is in use and cant be removed. Please Remove Manualy in Device Manager and try again! I dont fully understand do I go to system-hardware-device manager and uninstall the hard disk driver or actualize it, what do I do from their? what do they mean by remove manualy? Please help me, Thanks Ed
Comment by Ed on October 10, 2007 9:22 pm
i have a Sata WD Raptor 150GB that is reported only as 137GB and a WD 40GB pata connected too. When i try to restore the Raptors capacity i get an error saying the device is currently in use and that i should try to remove it from the device manager. But thats not possible since this is my main drive. The other one is blank . What should i do? thank you
Comment by Billy on October 10, 2007 10:46 pm
And something else too. Since my WD Raptor is has 2 partitions (C,D), where will the 13 GB be attached ? to the first or to the second one?what will happen to my data? plz be as analytical as you can because i am totally new to this one thanx for your help
Comment by Billy on October 10, 2007 10:51 pm
Ed: It seems that the drive you are trying to recover is your boot drive. Unfortunately, this tool wont work in this case. You would have to boot from another source (another hard drive for example). Thanks
Billy: Please see my answer to Ed; the same applies to your case.
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog 13 GB wont get attached to any partition. You will have to run Windows Disk Manager and create a new 13 GB partition. No data will be affected by this operation, but I cannot provide any guarantee. You should always backup important data. Dmitry
any chance to be able to add a optional raid controller driver to see my raid drives? Also the sata factor. anyways, keep up the good work!!!!
Comment by Squeezin on October 14, 2007 5:43 pm
Sorry, but RAID controllers are not going to be supported in the near future (long story). Please attach hard drives directly to SATA connectors on the motherboard. Thanks
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on October 16, 2007 1:52 am
is there free tool inverse (oposite) to Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity to reduce hdd capacity
Comment by japs on October 18, 2007 2:03 pm
Of course! Here you go: http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

WHEN I START HDD CAPACITY RESTORE. I JUST GET A BOX THAT SAYS PLEASE SELECT THE DRIVE WITH NOTHING ELSE IN THE BOX TO SELECT!!!! WHAT IS MY PROBLEM??? THANKS
Comment by CDG on October 23, 2007 9:29 pm
Can you elaborate on the affhdd.sys driver? Trying to make this work in a WinPE environment without any luck. Noticed there are no entries in the registry, so I assume it is all contained in the executable. Any chance on making the app more portable? Thanks
Comment by blawson on October 24, 2007 5:31 am
You saved me !! My new 2.5 disk had a problem during a ghost and only 110 GO appeared after. I was looking for a program able to help me and i tested at least 10 of them during one week before finding this blog. After some problem to connect the disk to a desktop (thanks to sate-esata), my disk recovered its full capacity of 250 GO ! Thanks again
Comment by Lo on October 25, 2007 12:31 pm
blawson, CDG: Guys, this tool works only under 32-bit Windows 2000/XP/2003. Please make sure you are using the proper OS.
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog IN REF TO I JUST GET A BOX THAT SAYS PLEASE SELECT THE DRIVE PROBLEM I AM RUNNING WINDOWS XP HOME EDITION 2002.ALSO HAVE A SEAGATE BARRACUDA 7200.7 MOD. ST380013AS FIRMWARE 8.12 80 GIG SATA DRIVE THAT IS NOT WORKING WILL NOT SHOW UP ON BOOT SCREEN {SET-UP}.THIS HAPPENED AFTER TRYING TO RESTORE FROM A GHOST BACKUP.I ABORTED THE PROCESS BEFORE COMPLETION AND SINCE THEN, ON BOOT-UP IT SOUNDS LIKE IT IS SEARCHING.IT WAS WORKING FINE BEFORE. IS THERE ANY KIND OF FACTORY JUMPER OR A FIRMWARE UTILITY OR SOMETHING TO RESET THIS DRIVE? THE PROBLEM TO ME DOESNT SEEM TO BE OF A PHYSICAL ORIGIN SINCE I HAD NO PROBLEMS BEFORE THIS HAPPENED.ANY HELP WOULD BE APPRECIATED.
Comment by CDG on October 25, 2007 8:21 pm
Hello guys, i`m looking for an utility for repairing HDD bad blocks, 0. sector, HDD bios settings etc Anybody can help me??? Thanks a lot!
Comment by Gabor on October 29, 2007 12:32 am
Gabor: You can try MHDD for that purpose: http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/ Please make sure youve read the doc before running the tool. If you get any issues with MHDD, I suggest to post in hddguru forums: http://forum.hddguru.com/ Thanks
THX! My 1 TB WD10EACS HDD is now OK One week they functioned without problems Then they had only 32 MB Many programs did not succeed
Comment by MrDumdidum on November 2, 2007 1:32 am
I have 160GB hard disk with 4 partitions and VISTA is installed on the primary drive (C:) which has a capacity of 30 GB. There are few other softwares installed. I did a CTRL+A and checked the properties in that drive which showed 12 GB is used (~18 free) but when I checked the properties on the drive it showed only 8 GB is free. Could you please let me know what could have occupied that 10 GB? Thanks in advance.
Comment by Sunil on November 6, 2007 11:41 pm
Hi, I have a Sata hdd 320G installed win xp and serivce pack 2, on drive. file system is ntfs. when i go to properties he only detecs 127G . With disk manager he says c/ (c:) partition basic ntfs healthy(system) 128,00GB 94.89GB But underneath it says disk1 c/ (c:) 298.09GB ntfs healty(system). Can this be resolved?
Comment by johan verbist on November 9, 2007 6:23 pm
HI, I have a common problem. I had a seagate 250g hard drive on an older computer which required a DDO to recognize the full 250g. The computer died and I am trying to install the hard drive on a different computer. I had a problem loading win xp that is related to the DDO. I tried everything, including zeroing out the entire drive (took 24 hrs0 and the damn DDO is still there. How do I set this hard drive up in as a second drive on another computer in order to use your program and restore the full capacity? What does it mean to install it on its own IDE channel? Once I put it on its own IDE channel, can I boot from the primamry drive and run your program on this drive?
Thanks
Comment by mikey on November 13, 2007 1:46 pm
mikey: I am not sure what is DDO, but you are correct, you would need to install it on its own channel, and you can boot from the primary hard drive without issues.
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on November 13, 2007 3:55 pm
hi! Its very nice of you and the tool is very useful I have translate this article into chinese and post it on my website(http://www.shannon-dd.com/content/view/344/60/ ),I hope that wasnt affend you.
Comment by webyu on November 16, 2007 4:31 am
webyu: Thanks for translating this article! However, we are Atola Technology, we are not affiliated with R-TT in any way (as stated in your article). Thank you.
I tried to recover my USB HDD and the tool tells me than the capacity is 0 bits when reality it has 160 Gb. What I can do?
Comment by Alfonso Mendez on November 20, 2007 5:07 pm
Hello, It wont work via USB. Please attach the hard drive to an IDE or SATA connector on the motherboard
Thanks for the tool, my 1TB WD10EACS was showing up as only 32mb?! Got it under control now.
Comment by Drew on November 24, 2007 4:16 am
Excelent Software!!! Thank you so much for freely distributing this siftware. It is the only tool (out of 12) that I was able to get working to restore the original size of my HD. I tried using MHDD but it kept telling me to re-power the drive. So I tried to unplug the power right before I typed y to continue, but that didnt work. (Note: I had to do the At your own risk method of unplugging the power to the drive right before clicking the restore capacity button. Once I tried this it worked like a charm!) Thanks Again, Jo
Comment by JoMo on November 25, 2007 12:22 am
My computer came with a single 40 gig hard drive. I was given a brand new hard drive which did read 60 gigs when I first installed it as a secondary drive. I came up with an idea to clone my original hard drive to the newer one. After cloning the 40 gig drive to the 60 gig drive, it started to read it as a 40 gig drive also. I downloaded this tool and I am getting a message when I click on the desired hard drive, that there are two devices on a single channel. I wont be able to run my pc with the new drive alone cause I reformatted it and it still reads only 40 gigs, when it should read 60 gigs. Can I temporarily use a cd rom IDE to run the second
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog hard drive on? Will restoring capacity erase any data in case I want to try it on my original hard drive as well? Both hard drives are Western Digitals.
Comment by Johnny on November 25, 2007 4:27 am
I also forgot to ask. My brothers computer is getting and error message at start up. Explorer.exe file missing, must reinstall windows. He doesnt have the windows 98 installation disk, but does have the start up disk. Is there a way I can restore it back so it will run again without having to buy an installation disk? MY pc is running Windows XP and that was my Idea to clone my drive and put it in his computer . . . it didnt work. I know its an old operating system, but he would like to get his computer running again until he can afford a new computer . . . HELP!
Comment by Johnny on November 25, 2007 4:37 am
I managed to get my secondary 60 gig drive (that is only reading 40 gigs) to work on its own channel. I ran the HDD restore program and it says that the drive is already at full capacity (In which I know its not) no restoration is needed. It did read 60 gigs at first before I cloned my other 40 gig drive to the 60 gig drive. Why is it saying that? What am I not doing right?
Comment by Johnny on November 25, 2007 6:28 pm
Johnny The issue you are experiencing is related to partitions. I have covered that in my article. Thanks
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on November 27, 2007 12:33 am
My HD Capacity shows 137G in the prior to recovery, disk manager shows it to be 32G. Capacity should be 160G. When I run HDD Capacity Restore I get the following error. Hard drive is not accessible or damage in some way. Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform. My PC is a dell XPS 400. Thanks Terry
Comment by Terry on December 2, 2007 9:14 am
Well, I would do exactly what the program suggests :)

Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on December 2, 2007 6:05 pm
Very excellent. I have many times run into drives that insist they are smaller than the manufacturer states. Most time I have been able to reset the drives but only after considerable trial and error. Your program fixed my WD400 drive perfectly in a few minutes. Thanks for taking the time and making it public.
Comment by Don on December 4, 2007 2:41 am
This is amazing tool Dimitri ! A huge thank you from Spain. I spent more then 2 weeks breaking my head why my hdd showed only half of the capacity. Now I installed your tool and I got 104 Gig back!!! Thank you ! Words are not enough to express my grattitude. Keep up the good work, buddy. Best regards, WR
Comment by Whalerider on December 4, 2007 5:10 pm
I must echo what WR saidin my case ~30GB of irreplaceable dataand Id been at it for 5 months, off and on. I tried every
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog recovery program I could find. This was the first thing that even acknowledged the drive was more than 32GB. My undying gratitude, DmitryIf I were going to have kids, Id name one after youmaybe two.
Comment by fluxtatic on December 5, 2007 10:05 am
whit this tool can i fixed my usb memory was 2 gb end now is 16 mgbytes end the windows say cant not format these dirve
Comment by carlos on December 6, 2007 9:01 pm
Hi guys! Please help me! :( I decided to make some adjustment in the partition of my HDD using Partition Magic. Then suddenly it hang in the middle of Moving Partition operation. I decided to restart my PC and then the terrible thing happen. Now it keeps saying Hard Disk Failure. I tried every HDD Diagnostic tool i found but still I cant recover my data or even my hard drive. I even tried wiping it but it doesnt work. One thing I noticed using HDAT2 tool is that my drive HPA is enabled and it is FROZEN. Is this the reason why i cant wipe my HDD? Is there chance to recover my files or HDD? Please help me recover my hard drive! any help would be very much appreciated. Thank you very much!
Comment by Dennis on December 7, 2007 3:02 am
Dennis: Weve heard numerous reports about similar issues when trying to move partitions with Partition Magic. From your description I can only suggest to bring the drive to a data recovery lab (if you need data).
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on December 7, 2007 6:09 pm
Hi Dmitry Do you have any low-level formatting tool for USB Pen/Thumb drive or any other utility can restore a USB Pen/Drive? Looking to have your response Thanks, Lonely.
Comment by Lonely Ranger on December 9, 2007 5:35 am
Help please. I have a Western Digital 320 GB drive that I have moved from an old PC and converted to an external drive. It is only being detected as 137 GB. I have tried everything that I could think of, Jumpers, reformat, Partition Magic, plugging in to PC via IDE and nothing has worked. Then I discovered your tool and had hope. Unfortunately, after install (v 1.2) and running your program it does seem to be working properly. When it launches, I see a window that states Please Select the Drive. There is nothing else within the window (i.e., no drives to select). The design of the window appears to look a bit different than what is pictured in your screen shot? Do I have the right version? Im running XP SP2. Any help you can provide will be most appreciated.
Comment by Mark on December 11, 2007 3:12 pm
Mark: There are several reasons why the program might fail to The easiest thing to do would be to try it on another PC.
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on December 12, 2007 1:15 am
Great tool!!! I have a maxtor 160gb. ata. I had to covert the device to sata (more then two ata devices). Up till then there were no problems. but after a format the bios couldnt see more then 33gb. After running this app. the problem was solved, even in the bios!!! And that makes me happy because I want to install linux on this device. I allready tried everything but this option was really simple, thank for this tuterial.
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog jurgen
Comment by jurgen on December 12, 2007 1:13 pm
Thanks for clearing up the mystery for me. I purchased a 320 gb hard drive and it was telling me I only had 298 gb. Your explanation put my mind at rest. I was worried there was something wrong with my new hard drive. I wont stress over the loss of such a small amount of gb. and just enjoy what I have. Thanks again!!
Comment by Lilia on December 18, 2007 1:21 am
I just want to say HUGE thanks for creation of this great utility! I had Hitachi 1 TB (SATA) problem with it turning into 32 MB brick, it was on Gigabyte motherboard (recent one), appears to be a bug specific to them. Hitachis Feature tool was crashing when trying to enter Capacity menu, but this little great tool restored disk back to useable state and data is safe! All hail the creator of this utility! :)
Comment by AlexC on December 30, 2007 9:20 pm
I recycled a Maxtor FireWire enclosure once and learned to my chagrin that it helpfully set MAX LBA to the LBA32 limit on my 200GB drive. Not always just software that tinkers with LBA limits
Comment by Chris Combs on January 7, 2008 12:44 am
Thank you so much for your help. My 1TB WD10EACS was showing up as only 32mb. Used a combo of capacity restore and partition find to get all ~900 gigs back. Thank you very much for both of your great tools that you share with the world.
Comment by JasFromColo on January 7, 2008 6:34 am
I connected my device on a single channel and ran your utility and it says it is already set to highest capacity, but when I plug it is as the master, it only reads 127 gb. I did a low-level format on this drive and reloaded xp home edition. Is there something I am missing here? thanks, jasi
Comment by JaSi on January 7, 2008 6:49 pm
!!! .
Comment by Servise on January 8, 2008 4:12 pm
Hi. I have the new WD320 hard drive for laptops. But when I check to see how much I really have I get 298gb. What happened to the rest of the 21gbs. Why did WD say 320 on the hard drive when in reality its only 298gb. Is there some safe way to get the whole 320gb. Thank you. Jackie
Comment by Jackie Sherwood on January 19, 2008 9:03 am
Jackie: My article fully answers your question, please take some time to read it :) (see binary/decimal section)
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on January 23, 2008 8:03 am
I have a new 320gb Wester Digital drive which is currently only displaying 130gig under WinXP. The drive has nothing on it and has been installed on its on channel. When I run your program it is detecting my primary drive and the trouble one (displaying correctly as 320gb). When I attempt to use HDD Capacity Restore, it tells me the drive is in use and should be removed manually. I have done that and rebooted. The drive shows as not being in use under Device Manager, but I still receive the program message that it is in use. What can I do? Best Regards Kris
Comment by Kris on January 27, 2008 5:03 am
Kris: In this case the best bet would be to try it on another platform since there is obviously some sort of software or hardware interference. Thanks
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on January 28, 2008 7:20 pm
I recently bought a new WD10EACS 1Tb WD Drive that i tried to clone with Acronis. After the clone the disk showed as a 32Mb Drive. I tried every possibe HDD Utility (boot sector editors etc.) but i was unable to see the whole 1Tb. I turned the disk back and got a new one, just to realise that after the cloning, happened the exact same thing. A little google searching brought me here I really really really really really really really really want to thank you You did a great job sharing this tool with the rest of the world. It restored my 1Tb Disk instantly. Thank you my friend Really thank you
Comment by Karasardelis on February 1, 2008 1:54 am
I noticed when I used to work for a large computer manufacturer (name withheld) that if they had a large order for smaller capacity drives but only had larger sizes they would alter firmware to force a step down to the size they needed talk about a waste! What I wonder is could this be portableized to run from a USB key or the like?
Comment by HarshReality on February 5, 2008 6:12 pm
I do not see any problem putting this tool on a USB stick or something similar
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on February 7, 2008 2:54 am
I tried thinstalling the thing is it says affhdd.sys (driver not found). *Note: By portable I mean running without installation prefferable single file operation
Comment by HarshReality on February 7, 2008 5:59 am
Hello Dmitry. I have a Seagate ST380021A 80gig hard drive with Windows 2000 SP3 (or it is SP4?) installed on it. Several days ago it started crashing the machine and dissappearing from the BIOS, only to be detected again after disconnecting and reconnecting the drive (I thought it was caused by bad contacts and eventually changed the IDE cable). Yesterday the OS stopped booting, complaining that the device was not accessible midway thru the booting process, and from that moment on the BIOS detected only 69GB. Installing the drive on other computers detected the same capacity, and the partitions didnt show on those other computer MyPC (but the drive itself is shown on Device Manager). Enter your wonderful program (thank you and thank google!) and it inmediately detected the wrong 69GB capacity, the correct 80GB, and allowed me to restore it. After a power cycle all the partitions came back with the data intact. EXCELLENT! only that, back on its original PC, the OS complains again while booting and somehow the drive BIOS capacity goes back to being 69GB. I have restored the correct capacity twice, only to have it returned to the same wrong capacity when I try to boot from the disk. Do you have any suggestion that does not imply reinstalling the OS? Thank you in advance!
Comment by Fik on February 10, 2008 7:47 pm
HarshReality: Make sure that you put affhdd.sys into C:\Windows\System32 Also, the operating system has to be 32-bit only.
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog Thanks
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on February 11, 2008 7:15 pm
Fik: According to your description, the hard drive is most likely failing and needs to be replaced Thats all I can suggest without having the drive in our lab :)
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on February 11, 2008 7:36 pm
Many thanks for your help. My WD 80Gb NTFS became 32Gb after playing with different tools such as Partition Magic and many others. I tried 20 different softwares (at least !) since 3 days and you gave me back my 48 missing Gb in only 10 seconds ! Thank you for your job and for sharing this to everyone.
Comment by babble on February 22, 2008 7:25 pm
He utilizado este progranma y me ha recuperado un disco de 250 gb, el cual solo daba 137Gb. Muchas gracias I use this program with exit, one samsung disk 250gb, who only have 137gb, and the program restore 250 gb capacity. i dont know who was the problem, that change 250gb -> 137 gb. Thanks, Joaquin
Comment by joaquin on February 27, 2008 11:27 am
when i turn my toshiba on it only lets me into the bios set up ,it asks for the built in hdd user password-i dont know it and cannot figgure it out. PLEASE if anyone can help I would be forever in debt. again Please and thank you.
Comment by woods5150 on March 3, 2008 1:59 am
The best piece of software I have ever downloaded. My 2.5 laptop 250gb wd hdd lost 100gb after messing with Norton ghost and partition manager. Tried everything to get it back and thought I had blown my purchase. Found this software and bingo had my original drive back in seconds. Nothing else like it around. Thankyou soooooooooo much.
Comment by Craig on March 5, 2008 1:55 pm
How can I install 80GB HDD to old PC which BIOS accept max. 8GB HDD?
Comment by Thomas on March 11, 2008 6:17 am
Okay, my computers 80GB Toshiba HDD is having some problems. After I ran the system recovery DVD (for my HP Pavilion dv6500t notebook, which runs Vista Home Premium), my PC only recognized the ~20GB Windows partition and would automatically shut down after a while. After I ran Active@ Partition Recovery (part of Active@KillDisk freeware bundle), it found out that ~50GB of hard disk space was unallocated. Will this program work to fix that, or do I need something else? Thanks, Joe
Comment by Joe on March 15, 2008 11:31 pm
Hi Dmitry, I have a unique issue with my HDD, I have Samsung 40 GB IDE HDD on Desktop, one fine day it started showing MTR missing, I took the HDD to other Desktop. It started showing the capacity as 5.28 GB. The other desktop HDD also became the clone of this one and it started showing 28 MB rpoviding all the data loss. Suggest if Capacity Restore will help to restore the capacities of both these HDD. Is OS necessary to be installed on the HDD first before running the tool and is there any chance to get the data recovered from the other HDD. Please suggest.. Thanks, SySaAzm
Comment by SySaAzm on March 17, 2008 8:54 am
Thanks a lots and lots Dmitry, Your rock man.. :) I owe you. SySaAzm
Comment by SySaAzm on March 18, 2008 9:01 am
HDDGURU is my HERO! What we had here was a problem, I live in a very remote part of Honduras Central America and would have to drive hundreds of miles through rivers, jungle, and sprend days trying to find an answer from stupid people who sell computers but know nothing about them. And we dont even HAVE a best buy. we suck, here! Haaaaa Feels better to get that off my chest. 3 Cheers for the HDDGURU. Thanks Squatty and all the guys from Cool Hand Luke
Comment by Squatty T Justice on March 20, 2008 11:58 pm
I ran one article that stated that this would do a low level format on a HD. Is this a non-destructive format? I have Windows XP service pack 2 on one computer and another with service pack 3. The hard drives have applications that I cant replace. Will the newer program restore that data on the hard drive>
Comment by Terry on March 22, 2008 5:03 pm
Many, Many thanks, Dmitry My 250 Gb Fujitsu was locked after Acronis recover preinstalled version of Dell software disk was limited to 60 Gb. Only your tool fixed problem. By the way I used my PCMCI SATA adapter to connect locked HDD to another notebook. Its work! It was performed with STLab SATA adapter and ESATA portable HDD box (and SATA-ESATA cable). I think, it will work with any SATA adapter (Express Card too). Many thanks again PS. I spent more than 14 hours, and your tool made it in a second :)
Comment by Iaroslav Tsaryk on March 23, 2008 2:28 am
Terry: This program does not perform any kind of formatting; it does not alter the data in any way. It is absolutely safe to use it (I wont give any guarantee though). :) Dmitry
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on March 24, 2008 11:34 am
Iaroslav: Thanks for your feedback! :) PS. Not all IDE/SATA adapters are supported though. Unfortunately, I do not have a list of unsupported adapters, but generally, if it does not work on one PC or adapter, just try another :)
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on March 24, 2008 11:42 am
When running the program, its showing both of my SATA controllers, but under each Channel #x, it shows Unknown device for all 4 channels (though i have 3 drives connected.) When clicking the link, an error pops up saying No device has been selected. Please select a hard drive from the list of drives. Is this the issue of swithching the type of SATA ports in the BIOS? I havent tried it yet, but dont want to be tweaking BIOS
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog settings if i dont have to. The drives are on an Intel 631xESB/632xESB SATA AHCI ontrollers.
Comment by Blake MIller on March 28, 2008 1:19 am
Dmitry, Some of your utilities (true for HDDWipe and HDDLLF) seem to be unable to run on Win2000. When run, a messagebox comes up saying Error accessing device and then another one with Cannot change Visible in OnShow or OnHide. Then the program starts up, but all main windows are empty.
Comment by Alex on March 28, 2008 9:57 am
Alex: Those utilities were initially made for HDD Guru website and are not supported by me anymore, sorry
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on March 28, 2008 1:22 pm
Blake MIller: Please try BIOS settings first, and if it does not help, then the most reasonable option would be to try this tool on another PC.
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on March 28, 2008 1:24 pm
I didnt have BIOS control over the type of SATA interface, so i used it in another PC and PERFECT!!!! worked like a champ. (I had to first uninstall the drive from windows, which i think did it partially automatically) but once so and rebooted, the program worked perfect and i have a big drive again!
Comment by Blake MIller on March 28, 2008 8:20 pm
got a wda10eacs (1000GB), pluged it in a updated firmware GA-p35-dq6 and all i GOT is a 31MB drive , pretty cheap for a 1000Gig drive searched up WD support site and all i got is a messed up support page that doesnt have this info (or i could be looking at the wrong page, duh) anyways THIS TOOL ROCKS !!! it worked under my Vista ultimate ! in less than a minute including the installing of the software I got the full capacity of the drive ! SWEET !
Comment by western digital 1TB on April 5, 2008 3:36 am
What if I have a Hitachi/IBM harddrive that is a 60GB (can be read on the label with the exact geometry of the drive) but factory default only reports 31 GB. Even the Hitachi tool fails to set the correct geometry. As far as I can tell there is no limiting jumper setting that I use (even though the drive has such features). I have used it with a computer that probably dont like bigger than 31 GB hard drives so I have probably done some magic back then. There is some OnTrack software on the drive which kicks in at boot and that is probably why I have been able to use it fully. Does anyone have any idea how to resolve this issue? The HDD Capacity Restore Tool can only restore the factory default but since that one is wrong it doesnt work for me.
Comment by Roger on May 2, 2008 9:25 am
Roger: Have you actually tried HDD Capacity Restore?

Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on May 2, 2008 7:32 pm
Yes, I have and both numbers reported are wrong compared to the geometry on the label. And the Hitachi tool didnt allow med to go above the factory default.
Comment by Roger on May 3, 2008 8:58 am
Any chance releasing this tool on a self-boot iso image? or maybe (even better) as a static linux binary?
Comment by Eugene on May 5, 2008 3:25 am
i just want to give a BIG thank you for whoever created this tool! i literally spent hours trying to recover my hard drive. tried various methods, even the utilities from the mfr. but to no avail. then by accident i stumbled upon this site and HDD Capacity Restore and in a few seconds everything was back to normal! O_O thank you so much :)
Comment by clint on May 7, 2008 5:06 am
Roger: In this case I guess it might be damaged somehow. Not sure how could that happen though
Eugene I am sorry, but I do not think this is possible at this time :)

Hi Dmitry, I have a Gigabyte Mother board and as in other cases above my 1TB Samsung drive is only recognised as 32MB in the latest Bios, and 7.87 in Windows XP. The motherboard has 4 sata ports and attached i have 3 750GB WD drives which work fine. And the Samsung which isnt showing its full capacity When i try and use your tool and click on the Samsung drive it tells me that the drive must be on its own channel to use the tool. But the drive will not allow me to format it so i cannot install windows XP onto the Samsung drive. What can I do to get the program to work on the drive?? Please help me
Comment by Paul on May 9, 2008 1:03 pm
hi! im afraid your software didnt work with my hdd. ive restarted my computer but it doesnt take any effect. i lost 7 GB and now i havent been able to restore it yet. but thanks for your software, it may be work with others hdd.
Comment by Anonymous on May 11, 2008 7:15 am
heya, thx to u, 1000GB back, but my windows displays a yellow exclamation over dynamic disk in my diskmanagement. no partition. how can i get my data back?
Comment by scrieler on May 26, 2008 4:07 pm
i got it! http://www.computerbase.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-135480.html u can test the disk with TestDisk and set the disk partition to primr and u get the data back

Comment by scrieler on May 26, 2008 6:18 pm
Hi Dmitry, Did you write this utility, I noticed that its Copyright is Atola anyway thanks to Atola for allowing me to download it and if you wrote it a big thanks to you. I been surfing days looking for a utility that would reset my SATA drive WD2500aaks LBA code. It all started . after I built the system BIOS set to IDE and loaded a upgrade version of Vista which allowed me to do a clean install but denied an upgrade presumeably because I did not have XP home installed yet I cannt remember whether Vista indicated at the time that it would not validate ? Anyway the load went perfectly even rebooting okay. Now was the time to do the final load on the other disc setting the BIOS to AHCI the other options on the board are IDE and RAID I think my problem started because I did not relize that the AHCI driver also loaded other RAID drivers or are they the same. Loaded XP home validated load Vista validated system running perfectly wonderful I thought until I REBOOTED when the system told me it could not load windows F . Checked BIOS my disc was now showing 33.8gb instead off 250gb. Managed to reset disc first by zeroing it with WD utility followed by old Maxtor utility used this method twice unfortunately on the third attempt it failed to work whether I had set some thing differently, I dont know or whether first two times were reset by some else I had done ? anyway thats when the surfing started until I accidently came across your site which solved the problem in the time it took me to load your program. Im not sure why the disc kept changing but I think loading AHCI requires two discs ? as if it had been set to RAID . Any ideas I would love to know what was causing the size to change. Thanks again JIM Ps. sorry I coulnt make any shorter.
Comment by Jim on May 26, 2008 9:02 pm
I wish this tool would work for me :( I screwed with all four of my 750GB samsung drives LBA48 settings, and the samsung ES tool does not work to turn the LBA48 bit back on :(. Damn buggy samsung. So I had to pull out an old PATA hard drive, install windows XP32bit on it, install SP3, install the latest nvidia force3 drivers, and hdd capcity restore. Unfortunatelly, the drive does not show up in windoez at all, not even in device manager, and neither does it show up in your tool, even though it shows up fine in during boot time (on the pre-boot screens) and in shows up fine in linux on the same exact machine (well, as a 137GB drive). The drive is plugged into the main (sata1) sata nvidia controller. Is there any other things I should try?
Comment by Eugene on May 27, 2008 9:11 am
Hi, I have a Fujitsu MPG3102AT-E hard drive connected to one (of my early PCs) Pentium Socket-7 (QDI P5I430TX) and I had no particular problems for 8 consecutive years . except a strange clack at every boot !!!!! So, I decided to apply a firmware update (found from Compaq, SP16768) in case I got read of the strange clicks and clacks. The firmware was indeed for MPG3102AT-E and the firmware was updated to ver.9211. BUT, after powering down and powering up I enter the BIOS of my motherboard and ,to my surprise, I found my HD capacity short of 243 megs !!!!!! BEFORE the update the geometry of the disk was CHS > 19857 / 16 / 63 OR LBA > 1246 / 255 / 63 AFTER the update the geometry went down to CHS > 19386 / 16 / 63 OR LBA > 1216 / 255 / 63 I.e from 9773 actual megs to 9539 !!!!!!!!!
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog Although the BIOS screen screamed it was 10248 megs (which I knew was NOT true). I tried your tool (after installing WinXP on it, which took me about 1 hour and a half) and the window read : Reported capacity : 10,005 MB Factory capacity : 10,005 MB Capacity difference : 0,0 MB I wonder if there is any way to regain the actual capacity on my Fujitsu .. .. or is too late ?????? Thanks in advance.
Comment by Nik Papadopoulos on May 28, 2008 6:50 pm
Hi I have 1TB samsung hard drive, it is only reading 32mb, plus I am useing Vista 64, how can i fix.
Comment by David on May 30, 2008 9:28 pm
Hi Dmitry Mine is a similar story to many others here. Bought a brand new Seagate Barracuda 500Gb PATA drive and after playing around with it, the drive became a 137Gb drive. I think connecting it to a Win XP SP2 laptop via an old Maxtor OneTouch I USB enclosure was to blame. I tried the SeaTools for DOS that Seagate said would fix it. No love. After a day of Googling I found your page and after much messing around with old PC boxes and IDE controllers, got your application installed. Worked like a dream where all others had failed. Killer app dude, I thank you Dmitry, great work.
Comment by Glenn on June 3, 2008 8:10 am
Hi, the HDD Capacity Restore Tool was able to fix my only 33gb with a 1tb hdd problem in minutes, and allowed me to recover all my data, thanks very much. :-) Cheers -Richard
Comment by Richard on June 4, 2008 8:48 am
[...] able to fix the 33mb vs. 1tb problem with my WD HDD, using the HDD Capacity Restore tool linked in this article. Data was not damaged, everything still there after the [...]
Pingback by Richard Spindlers Weblog Blog Archive Dont buy 1TB disks, kids on June 4, 2008 6:03 pm
Capacity Restore Tool not work on vista 64, I reinstall xp, then HDD Capacity Restore Tool was able to fix my Samsung 1tb hdd problem in minutes from 32mb to 1tb, thanks very much. :-)
Comment by David on June 5, 2008 3:22 pm
Hi Dimitri, Im more or less desperate: I have set LBA mode of my Samsung HD753LJ (750Gb Sata2) to 28 bit, but now I cannot restore the HHD to the LBA 48 bit (the Samsung HDD tool, ESTool, gives me an error). The native size is now set to 137Gb and also HDD Capacity Restore shows me a Factory Capacity of 137Gb and so it restores only this size. If I run Config command in MHDD it say me that the HDD does not support config changes (or something like this).
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog If you have any idea how to restore the LBA48 mode, please help me. Thanks
Comment by ziki on June 10, 2008 9:24 am
ziki: If you have checked the jumpers as described in the article, then I guess you can return the drive for a replacement.
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on June 10, 2008 6:37 pm
Hello, i have 1 TB seagate maxtor that detect 0MB, i run the tool and it says Protect with password ?? How can i resolve the problem ? Thanks ZeBong
Comment by ZeBong on June 12, 2008 9:59 pm
HDD Capacity Restore doesnt work, following constellation: I want to restore my PRI MASTER IDE drive after a mistake with SeaTools option Set capacity to Ive removed PRI SLAVE IDE drive and started Windows XP from a third drive. There Ive installed HDD Capacity Restore. When I start HDD Capacity Restore and choose my PRI MASTER IDE drive (that is a WD1200JB) to restore, it says me: The drive you choosen is used and cannot be deactivated. Go to the device manager and do it deactivate manually. When I this do, I must restart Windows, before the deactivation is made. When Windows will be restarted its first activity is to reinstall the drive I want to deactivate. It is a snake biting in her tail.
Comment by czer27 on June 13, 2008 5:16 pm
Thank you, Dmitry. Ive reformatted more IDE drives than I can remember, and I never knew that capacity reduction is a drive option. W/R/T the comments early in your article about Windows 2000 not supporting drives larger than 137 GB, Id like to issue a warning. Dont install W2K directly to such a drive. Not even if its been slipstreamed with SP4 or later, and the EnableBigLBA option is set. Windows installs, but neither partitioning nor LBA handling is correct. At some future date it fills the first 137 GB, and (I speculate) the LBA addresses wrap around, and the drive silently corrupts itself. This looks exactly like a BIOS 137 GB problem from outside. The giveaway is that the BIOS does know how big the drive is, and displays it during the prestart. I tried slipstreaming SP6 and presetting the EnableBigLBA registry fix. Didnt work; I dont know why. I found an easy workaround is install on a smaller drive, install SP6, set EnableBigLBA, then make a backup with Acronis True Image (google for free acronis true image.) Then attach the large drive to the secondary controller, and restore the Acronis backup to the large drive with partition expansion enabled. Now the system is on the large drive and youve got a safe backup as a bonus. So if you think youve got a BIOS 137 GB problem on a scratch install of Windows 2000, its quite possible thats not the real problem.
Comment by Dr. Klahn on June 15, 2008 7:50 pm
Hi Dimitry, in addition to my first reply: Today Ive tried run HDD Capacity Restore on another PC, to restore my boot drive. But it was the same procedure as before: First Vista installs the standard volume and the driver for my WD1200JB HDD. After restarting OS I started the HDD Capacity Restore, choose the WD1200JB (Master on SEK IDE) and run the tool. After a short time came a pop up window: Device is
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog currently in use and cannot be removed from the system. Please remove it manually in the Device Manager and try it again. Device Manager says: You must restart. After restart the first action is to new install the drive. This seems to be a general failure of the program.
Comment by czer27 on June 18, 2008 6:46 pm
czer27: It is possible that you have a file system or partition corruption on that hard drive, and that corruption prevents Windows from unmounting it. You can fix that by either fixing those file systems/partitions (for example, with chkdsk) or deleting all partitions from that hard drive.
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on June 18, 2008 8:13 pm
When I found your software I thought that my dreams had been answered. However, after trying this on 4 different machines,(3 desktops and a laptop) it only seems to recognize EIDE drives, not the SATA that I want to repair. Am I doing something wrong or is there a newer version of the software? My primary machine uses Intel ICHR8f AHCI drivers.
Comment by John Woods on June 27, 2008 4:15 am
if i use the tool will i lose my data on hdd??

Comment by zaher on June 29, 2008 12:28 pm
zaher: The tool is safe to the data, however, we make no guarantees it is always wise to have a backup.
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on June 30, 2008 3:00 am
Wow, Just wanted to pop in and say thanks for the tool, worked 100% and 100% easy to use. Also great job with the on going support on this page, that is just amazing and rare to see, Thanks guys n Girls!
Comment by Tony_c on June 30, 2008 8:56 am
Just bought a new computer, got os on it, started copying my files and to my suprise the hdd got full. its a seagate 250 but only shows 127. i have service pack 3 on both my computers, and i tried taking the hdd out and putting it in my other comp, and using this software. it says the hdd is already at factory 250 capacity, and after i ran the software the drive dissapared from my computer. if i reboot it shows up again but still at 127gig.
Comment by kevin on July 2, 2008 7:40 am
Solved my problem with SATA drive with an adapter from Addonics in San Jose, CA. Replaced my ATAPI DVD drive with this combination and the drive was recognized. After running the repair routine it reported an error with the drive so I restored my system to normal, very disappointed. However, when I checked the drive on a USB-SATA adapter, the program had done its job, my 250GB drive was restored to its full capacity. Thank tou!!!!
Comment by John Woods on July 3, 2008 9:58 pm
I reduced the capacity on my four Samsung HD103UJ (1TB) by switching off the 48-bit LBA mode with the software provided on the Samsung homepage. Unfortunately, this process doesnt seem to be reversible, as none of the Samsung tools (ESTool or HUTIL) nor HDat2 were able to switch it back on.
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog And all HDD Capacity Restore has to say is: Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform -which I did, as well as on others of the four drives No progress. Couldnt find much about the Drive on the net, as its relatively new, but I strongly advise anyone who owns one of these little frackers to never ever switch off the 48-bit mode Its a one-way-street! In the meantime, any tip would be highly appreciated Its some 500 Euros worth of Harddisks, and Samsung say its not their responsibility, since switching off the 48-bit mode with software provided by Samsung is not the intended use
Comment by Thomas Abercrombie on July 4, 2008 7:07 pm
Hi Dmirty. Can I use your program to restore hard drive capacity from primary hard disk? Or should I just make another partition and run the program from it? Thanks from your help!
Comment by Bakica on July 5, 2008 10:03 pm
Same problem as Thomas Abercrombie: I reduced by error my samsung hard disk HD502IJ/Y with estool to lba 48bits to no, and now I am blocked to 137 Gb! I am getting mad, even this tool doesnt work: Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform. I didnt contact samsung, but I have asked a refund to go on seagate disk (forget about samsung). Bby the mean time, if anyone has a clue, that would help a lot of people.
Comment by David on July 7, 2008 3:36 pm
I have two thoughts: 1) What happens if you use that estool to enable LBA48? 2) What happens if you try Capacity Restore on another PC?
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on July 8, 2008 12:33 am
Youre a lifesaver.. my 1 TB harddrive which had all my data on was reporting on 33 MB and coming up as RAW in Windows. Windows kept asking me to format.. Thought I had lost everything! I tried OnTrack Recovery, then TestDisk with no luck and then tried this! Worked a treat.. and so simple to do.. Thanks heaps!!
Comment by Bevsta on July 9, 2008 1:01 pm
I cloned a 40 Gb hdd to a new 120 Gb hdd to upgrade my Dell Inspiron laptop. Now I have a new 120 Gb hdd that reports 40 Gb. Ive learned now why and how that happened. Removed the new drive and attached via USB to my pc running your Capacity Restore Freeware. The application does not recognize the new drive when attached to the pc. So, how do I get the Capacity Restore tool to recognize and restore the capacity on my hdd? Please help!!
Comment by Ken on July 12, 2008 12:34 am
Ken: Please try CTRL+F while on this page and then type USB; and you will find your answer :)
Comment by Dmitry Postrigan on July 12, 2008 12:42 am
I purchased a new Samsung Spinpoint 1TB drive a month ago to put into my music studio computer (I constantly run out of space with all the samples and high quality audio I use). It worked perfectly. Bought the same drive today and it said it was 33Mb.. I was ready to send it back as faulty, but this program fixed it first time! Thank you so much! Do you have a paypal donate option? A few bucks is a bargain for this free utility. Question is.. why was is shipped from Samsung like this?

Comment by Tom Walter on July 15, 2008 8:53 pm
Encountered odd problem and tool didnt even recognize drive. Got three Hitachi 1TB external hds (model H31000U) and all three encountered problems with external case locking up no drive letter. Had to power off, power on. From online forums, apparently problem with the case. Removed drives from two cases and used in other cases. Third drive kept using in original case and went through the lockup/power off/power on procedure until it no longer showed up. Computer Management->Disk Management now shows the drive as UNALLOCATED. Is there any way to get the drive letter to show up again without INITIALIZE DISK? Im afraid Id lose my data. If I INITIALIZE DISK with Computer Management->Disk Management, but not FORMAT, is there a tool to recover what was on the drive?
Comment by KW on July 19, 2008 9:58 am
well i downloaded HDD Capacity Restore and it say 41gb but system says 38gb why i bet you cant explain that can you ? where is the other 3gb ????
Comment by spike on July 20, 2008 4:10 pm
Exxxxxxcellant! Thank-you. Now the 120Gb drive that only reported 31Gb is as it should be. Wish I knew about this program years ago!
Comment by TomUnderhill on July 22, 2008 10:02 pm
This worked perfectly turning my Samsung hard drive that was handicapped at 31.4 gb back up to 120 gb. Note on my end, I had to use Disk Management to first remove the 31.4 gig partition, so its completely unallocated. I was then able to run Cap Restore and brought me to the right size. Thanks for this product, it solved my issue when 10 other programs and two days of searching around couldnt do it!
Comment by Arvin Bautista on July 23, 2008 4:45 am
I have same problem as Thomas Abercrombie and David with Samsung HD502IJ (500GB) HDD. I cant enable LB48 mode again. Its stoped 137GB. Error message by estool: Abort command. I sent mail to Samsunghdd support, not yet response
Comment by Csaba on July 26, 2008 12:36 am
Hi, i have a 80GB western digital disk, model WDC-WD800BB. I used it in a PIII with DDO with windowsxp and linux. Now i instaled it on a motherboard ASRock K8NF&G-VSTA and it only reconizes 33GB on bios, on windowsxp the disk doesnt appear, on linux the disk shows its full capacity. When i run your program, on windowsxp, as i get to the point to restore the disk capacity I get the message: Reported capacity:33.820GB; Factory capacity: -1 Bytes and cappacity difference: -33820284929 Bytes. I havent clicked restore capacity yet. Is it normal to appear this Factory capacity message? Hope you can help me. Thanks.
Comment by Vitor on August 2, 2008 2:03 am
I bought a 1TB drive to replace my 320GB one in my PC. The 1TB drive developed an error after I ghosted the image of my old C: drive on to it, causing the BIOS to register the drive as only 33mb! After trying every solution on the net, nothing worked until I tried this software. Within 1 minute everything was back to normal. Thank you so so much.
Comment by Andy on August 5, 2008 6:44 pm
Okay, heres another Samsung F1 1Tb rescued. Been running linux on f1 750gb for quite a while. fast, silent, liked it. when it came to building a htpc, the choice was obvious: f1 1000gb + vista ultimate (played with mythtv and vdr, didnt like it). now, everything ran smoothly until i tried to install dvb-s card driver. got a bsod and here we go! the drive of 33megs. your tool brought it back to life. MANY THANKS! Still, im kind of puzzled: is this vista or samsung i should blame? anyways, dont think in any case drive should crash that bad!
Comment by alex on August 7, 2008 10:09 pm
Dear friend! thank u very much for this little program (HDD Capasity Restore), I run it and everything is OK. I have a WD1001FALS 1TB and suddenly VISTA and BIOS recognize only 33MB. I did everything, updated the BIOS of my mobo (Gigabyte X38-DS5) and nothing happened. Then I found you (via Google) and you saved me! Thank you very much once again!
Comment by Manos Arvanitis on August 8, 2008 11:37 pm
Looks like I have the same problem as ziki, and some others on this page. I have the samsung HD750LJ (4 of them) and i cannot turn the LBA48 bit back on, using 2 different hardware configurations both using estool and this program. Sending all 4 of my drives for RMA :(
Comment by Eugene Gluzberg on August 10, 2008 5:00 am
THANK YOU !!!! So many hours spend trying to format the disk, update bios, trying every SATA slots, calling the samsung hotline, etc HDD Capacity Restore fixed it in several seconds !! THANK YOU !!!!
Comment by tristan on August 14, 2008 7:13 pm
> > > >
Sorry, you will have to remove the hard drive from the laptop and attach it to a desktop PC. USB mass storage is not going to be supported since it simply does not allow the protocol that we are using to access the hard drive.
> Dmitry I dont think you are correct. I tried cloning my disk using EZ Gig 2 software with my new 250GB drive attached via a USB adapter and it was able to change the new drives size. It now reads 93GB instead of 250GB. So, if it can get into that state via a USB connection, it can get out of it using the same connection. If you dont want to support USB drives because you dont know how thats one thing. But dont say it cant be done, because it can.
Comment by Tony on August 16, 2008 7:27 pm
I am trying to reset my western digital external hard drive. when i plug the hard drive there is no icon also disk says its full(ALL BLUE) when it is actually empty any sugestions?
Comment by David on August 19, 2008 3:30 pm
Tony: I am perfectly aware of what are you talking about. But I dont like discussing it this way.
Hi Dmitry, While attempting to clone my laptop HD (60Gb) into one with more capacity (200Gb), the software I used apparently locked the
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog new HDs capacity to 60Gb. Ive tried reformatting the new drive but cant seem to get it to its factory capacity. Both HDs are SATA but Im connecting to the larger drive via USB. I would love to hear any thoughts on how to address this you may have? Im considering installing your utility in a bootable CD with Windows XP, installing the larger drive into the laptop and then trying to restore capacity with your software. Would this make sense? Tanks much,
Comment by Rodrigo Riadi on August 25, 2008 9:38 pm
Hi, seems i have got a odd error with HDD Capacity Restore Tool. It read the drive, its current size is about 10 000MB, its specs natively should be 40GB, and it oddly was reported by the program as -2Byte. Ofc it fails to recover it. Any way to fix this?, or is it a bad disk or something?
Comment by Paddan on August 30, 2008 4:02 pm
A great utility, but on my new server it recognizes the drives connected to the mainboard, but doesnt see the two TB-drives that are connected to my Promise SATA TX4-card (or the card for that matter). :(
Comment by Edward on September 8, 2008 7:48 pm
Edward: Unfortunately, it will not see hard drives on Promise or any similar additional cards; this is normal.
Just used this on my 3 week old WD 1TB 10EACS + Gigabyte P965-DS3, the drive was showing only 33MB. This made it work instantly! Many many thanks
Comment by Dave on September 9, 2008 12:19 am
You are a genius!! 1tb drive from samsung in a gigabyte p35c-ds3r just recovered in a moment with this small tool!! Many thanks to you!!! samsung spinpoint f1 1tb hd103uj capadidad incorrecta 8gb gigabyte volver a tamao de fabrica Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Lets google index this great blog!!
Comment by nief on September 11, 2008 12:33 am
Excellent sounding tool however its not working for me. I have a Gigabyte GA-8i915MD-GV Mobo and a Samsung 1TB Hard drive BIOS flashed to newest version but still reports 33MB and in Disk Management reports 7.87GB, and wont format properly. I installed The utility, and restarted Started up the utility, and it reported that i DO have 1000GB Drive, and it did its thing, and asked me to power-down. After I started up again, Disk Management still reports I only have a 7.87GB Drive What am I doing Wrong??? Please help me!
Comment by Keeper on September 11, 2008 9:32 pm
WHOOOO HOOOOOOOO My Bad! LOL I just ran the program again and waited about 30 secs this time before switching on.
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog As the pc booted up i went to check my bios and it reported 1TB!! So good so far. When in windows, Disk manager also reported 1TB, and formated properly! Thanx Dude! GREAT GREAT GREAT TOOL THANX!
Comment by Keeper on September 11, 2008 9:48 pm
its not working for me at all with the same issue

Comment by Thermal on September 13, 2008 10:51 am
Hi Guys, I have a Samsung HD103UI 1TB, that was only reporting 32mb in the BIOS of my Gigabyte 965 PS4 board. I wasted a whole day trying to use other tools and bios updates nothing worked what did work HDD Capacity Restore Tool, this is all you need http://hdd-tools.com/products/cr/download/crsetup.exe
Comment by Frustrated on September 13, 2008 2:46 pm
d/l the utility . havent tried it yet but could have used it back in May when my 160 gig went wonky and I lost data. After reformatting assuming that having W2kP SP 4 was good enough.. I only got 128 gig.so since the machine that it happened on is a old HP VL400..I then set to format that drive on the eMachine/Gateway unit that came with XP Home pre-installed and got my 149GB back. the loss of data was no big deal.with the Gateway as the primary I use both as DVR/PVRs so all I lost were a few TV season finales which have been repeated this fall anyhow. Still perplexed as to what happened as even the drive letter disappeared from windows explorer[My Computer].
Comment by Browncoat on September 16, 2008 9:12 am
Oh.limited space eh! continued Now Im an XP hater..I dont like that activation nonsense and I dont care for the built-in spyware..[WGA etc]. For the computers that I build and upgrade I prefer W2kPro, generally 2000Pro has been more stable for my everyday use, worms and trojans cant hide because there are no restore points. So I read where you broke off with HDDGURU..therefore I ask.what utilities does Atola offer that I can run on Windows 2000 Professional? It uses the same NT5 kernel that XP and Vista wraps around on and the only advantages I see in XP is faster bootup[no waiting for the 'preparing network connection' dialogue box] and different handling of USB devices..not worth the cost when I can just drop in my W2kP CDs. What is Dr. Klahn talking about? there has never been more than SP4 for W2kP If there is an SP5 and SP 6 Id sure like to see them.
Browncoat: I am not sure why do you say we broke off with HDDGURU (never occurred). All our utilities run fine under Windows 2000. Thanks
In a previous post you said that the utilities on the HDDGURU site you no longer support.in business that implies you broke off with them to form Atola. Is that not correct? Anyhow thanks for the heads-up on W2kP. Id be willing to pay to order a cd with all of your utilities on it..aka Spotmau. Sorry for any misunderstandings.
In short, that is not correct :)
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog Thanks DP
Dmitry, I was just reading some of the comments and it seems clear that I have to put an image of my functional C: drive back on the truncated disk and run capacity restore from there. I would have done to begin with but for some reason your program wants me to manually disconnect the device in device manager. I am confused, and I was scared to lock up or injure my computer. Can you enlighten me?
Comment by Uriel Utter on September 19, 2008 8:51 pm
Uriel Utter: This utility has nothing to do with partitions or images of anything. It only works with the hard drive as a physical device. You certainly cannot alter (restore) capacity of a hard disk that you use to boot the Operating System If this is the case, then you would have to boot from some other hard drive (or attach this hard drive to another working PC as a secondary drive).
Ok, I guess I included too much information and was unhelpful, sorry about that. What Im getting at is, 1) Can I run the utility on a HDD in an external enclosure (reading above tells me no, but Im not versed in this program) and if not, how do I get the utility to function? Also, once I try to run the program for a HDD installed in the machine, the utility wants me to manually remove the device from Device Manager, which prompts a restart. Will I get system functionality in this case? Sorry to be so ignorant, this is a frustrating voyage of discovery for me.
Comment by Uriel Utter on September 19, 2008 9:40 pm
If youre looking to restore capacity on a notebook drive and you dont have a desktop available, you can use Hitachis Feature Tool, which must be copied onto a bootable CD/DVD. Google Hitachi Feature Tool and follow the instructions. Good luck!
Comment by Rodrigo Riadi on September 26, 2008 12:44 am
I disagree with your statement: Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME will not support big drives (>137GB) even if you install all hotfixes. There are ways to get around this problem, but since these Operating Systems are rather rare nowadays, I do not see the point of writing about them. I have Win ME and was searching for the drive limit problem. If you have the knowledge, why not share it anyway for people like myself? Thanks and best wishes to you.
Comment by Jim on September 26, 2008 6:34 am
Dmitry, thank you very much! Your Tool save us a lot of Time, is works fine with a Samsung HD103uj that was after a Systemcrash only reporting 33mb in the BIOS of a Gigabyte Board and with a external USB HDD Connector. And the Best all Data was ok. Thank you for this fine Tool, good work!
Comment by DvB & Heinz on September 27, 2008 1:12 am
Hi, I havent try your utility yet, but Ill try this evening (my WD1001FALS is recognized as 32MB instead of 1Tera). My question is: my system worked fine until windows said that the hardware was changed and it was necessary to reboot the system. After the system never booted up. Could it be a virus or an unwanted application that runs silently and brakes the bxxs? ;-) I dont want that after the repair the HD will fall again in the same situation. Windows was installed on another HD (Seagate 250Gb) and works fine. This problem happened when I cloned the Seagate
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog partition with Ghost 9.0 on my new WesternDigital partition to replace it Any suggestion? Thanks a lot
Comment by Lubbp on September 30, 2008 5:45 pm
Since every hard drive has to be hooked up to a single cable for the program to work, I hooked up a 80 gb HD to the cable that I disconnected from the CD Rom. The program says that the HD already has full capacity and no restoration is needed. But MyComputer, drive E, says that its only 21.3 gb. Again, your pograms screen says: Channel 0 Master Maxtor 30 gb [that's correct for one of the HD] Channel 0 Slave Unknown device. Then Channel 1 Master WDC 80 gb, Channel 1 Slave Unknown Device. What am I doing wrong? Is the HD faulty, is the jumper set wrong? Your help will be appreciated. Thanks for the free program, Dmitry!
Comment by Diana on October 3, 2008 7:55 pm
What ever happened to our good friend and mentor Dmitry? Is he in Hawaii? Dmitry, if you read this, WE NEEEEEED YOU!!!!!!
Hi, I have the same problem as others on here, and I havent seen a solution for when HDD Capacity Restore gives you a drive not accessible/is damaged error. I tried two of the Samsung HD103UJ 1 TB SATA2 drives, with the 32 MB of space/7.97 GB unallocated/cant format or use problems and they both get errors in the program. What is the problem here? I run a fully updated XP, have a Gigabyte P35-DS3L, and am using a SATA 500GB WD as my primary. And does unplugging and plugging back in the power source work? What will it do? Thanks for what seems to be a great tool, just wish it would work.
Comment by Ivan on October 8, 2008 1:15 am
Diana: you probably have only one partition and the rest of the space is not occupied. Just use Disk Manager to create more partitions.
Many thanks, Dmitry, and welcome back! I will try to partition my 80gb second hard drive although I wanted to use it, in conjunction with the main 30gb drive, just for storage (documents, MP3s, photos) whole and without partitions. Hence, I was planning on keeping just WinX Professional on my primary 30gb drive and all the rest of my stuff on the second (80gb) drive.
I was talking about the one that you have issues with
Thanks again. I do not want to hijack the thread thus taking up your valuable time and precluding you from helping others. Perhaps I havent made myself clear. I have two hard drives on my PC. One is 30gb and registers just the right capacity on your program. In it I have my OS. No issues with that drive. I am trying to connect a second hard drive for storage, just one big 80gb partition. Your program tells me that this specific 80gb drive does not need to be resized. However, when I look at it from MyComputer it shows not 80gb but 23.3gb. If I understood you well, I must partition tis additional (slave) hard drive since I cant use a whole 80gb partition. Maybe I am wrong. I appreciate your free program and all your help.
In this case it really does not have one 80GB partition but one 23.3GB partition :). You would have to either create one additional 55GB partition or delete the old 23.3 GB partition and create a new 80GB one. Hard drives do not function without partitions, so 23.3 GB is the existing partition on that drive.
VERY clear explanation, Dmitry. Thanks a million and until next time.
For those of you wondering whether it was Vista or the drive manufacturer: My old OS was worthless due to viruses, so I bought Vista and a new 1TB Seagate SATA hard drive. Took out my old drive, put in the 1TB, boot up, the BIOS only sees 33MB. It has nothing to do with Windows. I messed with a few hard drive settings in the BIOS and rebooted a few times and it came up as 1TB. Not sure which one of the settings did it.
Comment by Ryan on October 9, 2008 5:35 am
Dmitry Postrigan, you are a GENIUS!! My humblest Thank You :) Im quite a seasoned IT guy but this one had me under my table in tears, I wish you all the very best and thank you again for your time to release this beautiful open source application :) Regards, Dan from Australia
Comment by Dan on October 10, 2008 3:50 pm
Dmitry, I have just used your tool. Unbelievable!! in a matter of seconds I recover the full capacity of 3 old hard drives that I had in the closet! Excellent tool +++++
Comment by Adrian on October 19, 2008 7:16 pm
Does it run from Linux? I dont have Windows on my computer.

Comment by bob on October 20, 2008 3:14 am
super program, i bought 1 tera wd caviar, and I saw only 33mb, this program fix it to 1 tera bytes
Comment by Anonymous on October 25, 2008 4:36 pm
Thank you so very much! I had my 500GB PATA drive that I tried to use in Maxtor Onetouch USB enclosure. It changed the size to 128GB, even that the original drive was 250GB. You saved my day! I asked the support from Western Digital, how to restore they just told me to put the jumpers correctly and told me that Serial ATA drive should work just fine I already told them the model and type suckers, they probably didnt even read my support call!!!! ;-) Cheers, GaryP
Comment by GaryP on October 27, 2008 9:57 pm
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog When I try to open the utility, I get the error Error opening driver. What is wrong? How to solve?
Comment by Kay on October 29, 2008 4:53 pm
I got the same error when I tried to install it on Bart PE, which is on my USB bootstick. Then I desided to install it on regular XP and thats it. What OS do you use? Cheers, GaryP
Comment by GaryP on October 30, 2008 8:36 am
Fist of all thanks for all who wrote her/his experiences about this subject and congratulations to the prof Dmitry! I have a External 1 TB HD brand: Smartdisk (inside a Samsung HD103UJ ). After a powerloss i got only 38 Mb instead of 1 TB! I tried several methods like formating this small partion, delete it etc. but it doesnt help, untill i found this Excellent tool BUT: I got the HD out from its case and connected it to my Desktop (Because this tool can NOT recognise USB Mass Storage devices) I restart my pc and run the tool: I get my 1000GB back (actually 931,51 Gb and it says %100 Free space)! The PROBLEM is now: 1-) I had 600 GB data on it and i think i loose all of them. Some people here wrote, that they get their capacity + all Data back ! How ? 2-) I am still at the moment to make a the big decision: a-) Format it ! otherwise i cant use it ( so i will have a clear 1 TB HD but loose all my data) b-) I am waiting a suggestions from some experts..Maybe there is still a solution ? As i wrote before, i ONLY formated the 38 MB part before i use the tool and i hope someone can help me before i shoot myself :-) Thank you in advance.
Comment by fedon88@yahoo.com on November 1, 2008 12:46 am
Nicely done! I had tried to upgrade my Dell Inspiron 1705 hard drive and didnt know about the difficulty with that due to the HPA issue until my new Seagate hard drive was resized and no utility I could undo the change (Seagates, Magicboot, etc) until this one. The one thing I did discover I needed to do was to format the partition (even though it was the wrong size) before the utility would see the drive but once that one done the full size was restored in seconds (However the partition remained at 95 gig but that was easy to resize using another utility.). THANK YOU!
Comment by Mike H on November 2, 2008 6:52 am
****************************I Need Urgent HELP !**************************** Fist of all thanks for all who wrote her/his experiences about this subject and congratulations to the prof Dmitry! I have a External 1 TB HD brand: Smartdisk (inside a Samsung HD103UJ ). After a powerloss i got only 38 Mb instead of 1 TB! I tried several methods like formating this small partion, delete it etc. but it doesnt help, untill i found this Excellent tool BUT: I got the HD out from its case and connected it to my Desktop (Because this tool can NOT recognise USB Mass Storage devices) I restart my pc and run the tool: I get my 1000GB back (actually 931,51 Gb and it says %100 Free space)! The PROBLEM is now: 1-) I had 600 GB data on it and i think i loose all of them. Some people here wrote, that they get their capacity + all Data back ! How ? 2-) I am still at the moment to make a the big decision: a-) Format it ! otherwise i cant use it ( so i will have a clear 1 TB HD but loose all my data) b-) I am waiting a suggestions from some experts..Maybe there is still a solution ? As i wrote before, i ONLY formated the 38 MB part before i use the tool and i hope someone can help me before i shoot myself :-) Thank you in advance.
Comment by fedon88@yahoo.com on November 3, 2008 12:31 am
Dmitry: Please HELP!!

Comment by Fedon on November 11, 2008 12:03 am
I have 2 Samsung HD753LJ (750GB) drives that I removed LBA48 support, using the Samsung ESTool utility. They are now stuck on that, and neither the ESTool, or the HDD Capacity Restore utility can fix them. I will have to send them back to Samsung. I noticed someone else had the exact same problem with the same model drives. Lesson: DONT CHANGE THE LBA SETTING FOR SAMSUNG DRIVES!!!
Comment by Jimmy on November 16, 2008 10:05 am
Fedon: Sorry, but I can only suggest calling a data recovery company in your area
Dmitry, Some people here wrote, that they get their capacity + ALL DATA back ! How ? Regards,
Comment by Fedon on November 17, 2008 11:20 pm
I have to say thank you for this awesome program. Saved my life!
Comment by Rob on November 19, 2008 1:28 am
Excellent Utility Direct and to the Point It reminds me of the days 20-25 years ago when the simplest programs were some of the most useful programs you could have! I have been using an old Alienware machine for a 2TB media Server using TVersity for the past year and a half. I recently built a new gaming machine and converted my old gaming machine as the new media server. When I did this, I installed a new WD 1TB Caviar Black drive. It worked perfectly for a month until this problem occurred (33 MB in the BIOS, etc.). Fortunately, I had the right mind to not fool around with the data and search for answers. This utility fixed the problem. I appreciate your explanations at the beginning of the page of the causes of the problem. One question though for future reference Does this utility work with Windows Vista 32 bit? What about 64 bit OS? Thanks and superb work!
Comment by Charlie on November 22, 2008 5:20 am
Charlie: It should work fine under 32-bit Vista. 64-bit OSes arent supported at this time. Thanks
Could someone please tell me how can I find out if OS (XP or Vista) is 32 bit or 64 bit? Thanks
Comment by Fred on November 30, 2008 8:40 am
i have had both these errors errors 1/ Device is in use and cant be removed. Please Remove Manualy in Device Manager and try again! 2/ More than one device detected on the channel with the selected device. The device has to be single on a channel problem solved on my pc i had the ide cable for the hardrive[ system board end] connector inserted into the secondary slot of the motherboard, changed them round as they should be, ide cable [system board end] to primary slot on motherboard thanks for the tool
Comment by Dave on December 3, 2008 3:11 am
Fedon: Re: data loss You said: after a powerloss i got only 38 Mb > The power loss event may have also damaged the drive. As Dmitry said, try a data-recovery expert at this point. You do use a surge protector, dont you?
Comment by RaSi on December 4, 2008 3:38 pm
I ran Norton Ghost 14 and was creating an Ghost backup file on a 1TB WDC 10EACS when Ghost crashed and left me with a 33MB drive. After much searching, I found your utility and my drive is now back to 1TB. Many many thanks for the utility much appreciated T thought I had a brick and had lost hundreds of megabytes of data that I was just trying to back up!
Comment by Lindy on December 11, 2008 2:20 am
Hello there I just want to thank you very much had three 1tb seagate drives each showing 32mb ( no help on Seagate site ) I ran your program on all three and two came up perfect with all data in tact. Excellent tool and simple to use. well done. I have one drive that show the drive having 931.gb unallocated is there any way to retrieve this drive with out losing the data. Regards Paul
Comment by Paul Keane on December 12, 2008 12:40 pm
GA 965P DS3 + WD10AEDS 1TB HDD resulted in 31 or 33 MB available, your proggy fixed it. Sweet. Now I can install Windows, yea. bitbum
Comment by Anonymous on December 14, 2008 6:49 am
Many thanks for providing this utility and web page. It took me 5 hours from the first size reporting error, forum searches,arrival here, system reconfiguration (to set up Windows on another SATA drive so I could run the fix) before my stupid Samsung HD103UJ 1TB/Gigabyte P35C DS3R combination could be repaired, but finally Im there. Samsung do themselves no favours by not recognising this problem on their support pages, even if it does only occur with some motherboards and may or may not be entirely their fault.
Comment by Steve F on December 18, 2008 12:02 am
its of no use at all

Comment by Anonymous on December 18, 2008 5:36 pm
Hi dear I use program and my 31 MB hard disk convert to 137 GB har disk The original size is 1TB
What is the solution ? Thanks a lot .

Comment by Hai on December 18, 2008 8:49 pm
My Gigabyte P35C-DS3R motherboard was detecting my 1TB Western Digital WDC WD10EACS as 33MB . Your magic program fixed it although I had to juggle the power and uninstall on the device manager and reboot a few times to get it to avoid that Manually remove from Device manager pop up and I had to re-run your crsetup to run the program each time because I got an Error opening driver popup otherwise Thanks for helping me avoid returning the drive to the shop :-) Anton.
Comment by Anton on December 20, 2008 1:16 pm
Hi Dear I have eagate st 3250310ns with 250GB when I connect it to the pc the bios detect it as 0 size with the HP model gb0250c8045 and windows cant detect it can you help me B.R. Ahmad
Comment by ahmad on December 28, 2008 6:07 pm
Thank you for a brilliant utility, it worked like magic. I was trying to clone my C drive to a 1Tb Samsung HD103UJ drive and without knowing what I did wrong I ended up in the situation where my PC showed just 33M capacity oin the HDD. The Samsung HDD tool seemed unable to correct the problem and in desparation I did another Google search and found your site. Thanks again. Paul
Comment by Paul Maconochie on January 6, 2009 12:44 am
Hi Dmitry, First thanks a bunch for the tool. I had a hard drive whose capacity was mysteriously shrunk from 160GB to 23.1GB, and thanks to this tool I recovered the full use of my hard drive. Id like to understand exactly what happened though from a technical standpoint, if you can shed some light Here is my what happened: I had a dual boot Windows / Ubuntu, and my hard drive was partitionned this way: - 150 MB for /boot (grub) - 120 GB for a NTFS partition for Windows - 15 GB for an ext3 partition for Ubuntu mounted on / - 17 GB for another ext3 partition for Ubuntu mounted on /home - 1 GB of swap One day, my Windows displayed a nice blue screen of death, and thats when my problems started: Windows couldnt boot anymore, BIOS was reporting a capacity of 23.1 GB, and so were other recovery tools on other PCs (I had put the drive in a USB enclosure, and the drive appeared to contain a single unformatted 23.1GB partition). However, Ubuntu still booted normally, and tools like gparted and fdisk on Ubuntu were still seeing the full disk with all the partitions, and were able to mount the partitions properly and read from them. What do you think could make different tools report different sizes? Some were looking at what the hard drive controller was reporting (including the effect from the DCO), while others were looking at the MBR? Also, a suggestion: it would be awesome to make this tool usable from a Live CD of some sort; because when this happens to a laptop, using this tool becomes very tedious: you need to unseat the hard drive, and install it on a desktop (with a 44 pin to 40 pin PATA connector adapter for PATA drives). It would be much easier if you could just insert a CD and run the tool. Any plans for that? Florent
Comment by Florent on January 9, 2009 2:38 am
New Samsung 1000GB HDD, installed on an XP machine, formatted and reported the whole drive size as being available. I used Acronis to do an image of my Operating System shortly after not sure what happened or what I did but I couldnt see the Acronis image any more and the Samsung reported its size as being 33Mb / 7.8Gig. Tried absolutely everything have probably wasted some 20 hours downloading progs/images to blow to a CD, to boot from to change this that and the other and then eventually came across you. Ran CR first time and got a weird report that CR thought the size would be actually less than 33Mb and made the factory capacity out to be less than zero strange, on running and a restart it reported 7.8G. Anyway ran a second time and it declared that the factory capacity would be 1000GB, ran CR, restarted machine, used XP Disk Management to partition = all present and correct! FANTASTIC. You are a GOD, it would seem from all the surfing I have done on this topic you are the only one who seems to understand the problem and is prepared to help out with a solution that is easy for the average guy/gal. I would have thought you would have been extremely rich by now with every disk manufacturer wanting CR on their utility disk? Once again many, many thanks for ending my nightmare.
Comment by Pete Knight on January 11, 2009 12:23 am
When I run this program, it doesnt find any harddrives. When I click Show All Channels, it has things like Channel Master #0 and Channel Slave #0, but it says Unknown Device. Any ideas? More specifically, the program says No drives detected on this controller for both the controllers listed.
Comment by Chris on January 15, 2009 7:40 pm
I have a new 320gb drive for my laptop in a usb enclosure. i cloned my old 60gb drive to the 320gb. now the 320gb drive shows only 54gb. now this sounds like just the utility i need but can anyone tell me how I connect my laptop drive to a pc?
Comment by Nick on January 21, 2009 7:27 am
i am eternally grateful! you saved me from further depression! i thought my 1TB western digital would be gone along with all my precious data in it, but you just saved my life! i am eternally grateful sir!
Comment by randall on January 23, 2009 7:18 pm
I have the same problem as Chris.. Same drive size and same problem.. Was wondering if anyone had any ideas.. Thank you
Comment by Stuart on January 27, 2009 11:55 pm
Downloaded your utility, saved to desktop then ran. Would not install, indicated the file was corrupt. Deleted file and downloaded again, same results corrupted. I am running XP SP3 on a new laptop. Any suggestions?
Comment by Schuin on February 5, 2009 6:28 pm
Downloaded your utility using VISTA just fine and installed. With the hard drive that I want to increase back to OEM capacity installed in the laptop, how do I run your utility? It must unmount the drive to change it, but I am running from it. Can put the drive in an external USB caddy, but your utility does not support USB to see and work on the drive.
Comment by Schuin on February 6, 2009 12:27 am
I have WD 80 GB SATA boot drive. When I tried to use Partition Magic (wihout any action) the program reported that there is a problem wih my partition table and that it may correct it. Like a fool I clicked OK and as a result my disk simply disappeared from my computer. In detail the disk is seen by BIOS correctly, but it is not seen by XP.It is very strange to me that:1) the XP starts from the this disk( it means that the computer sees the boot.ini file and ntldr), but after several seconds computer reboots
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog 2) no program can be started flom the floppy , when tihis faulty HDD is installed. I checked it with CD-boot rescue program and it reported that there are no faults on my disk!!. When I started my XP from another disk, the computer worked fine, but my faulty disk was still not seen. to my opinion there could be the problem with Master boot record or partition table. I have discussed my problem with several my friends and they treated it as unsolvable, because all repair programs are working under Windows installed on another disk but as I already mentioned any of the the operating systems do not see this disk!!!! Do you have any idea what could be the reason and wherecould I find a remedy program working e.g under boot CD with Linux which could simply format the whole disk to make it visible to Widows. I do not care very much about my files there, I want my disk working! Than you for your assistance Wlavek
Comment by WaldemarF on February 13, 2009 12:24 am
Iive tried to run this tool on a Samsung HD502IJ that got the 48 bit problem. The tool reports factory capacity 500,107MB and Reported Capacity 137,438MB, however when I try to restore capacity I got the message: Hard drive is not accessible or is damage in some way, but the HDD is working, however with only 137GB.
Comment by JTeixeira on February 18, 2009 11:09 pm
Holy shit, Ive given up hope until I ran into this remarkable little tool. A 69GB WD Scorpio turned 160GB again and now I can get the data back. Thanks a million!
Comment by pd2jk on February 20, 2009 1:00 pm
I have 1TB External Hard Disk Western Digital (WD), now its only read 31MB , I am Used More program to resolve but not resolved. thanks
Comment by wahid on February 22, 2009 12:22 pm
Hi there, I have been going round & round here and getting very frustratedheres my problem..I have a Dell laptop..I copied my 60 GB HDD to a new 250 GB WD Scorpio Blue HDD using EZBackup..worked like a charm, I could even boot up using the new, larger HDD in my laptop, but it only showed as a 60 GB drive..ok, enter your fantastic programwhich restored my drive back to 250GB. Then I used Windows Disk Management to partition my 190GB (actually 187GB) and then I installed it back in my laptop, turned it on, only to receive the BSOD, stating something along the lines that my hard drive has a problem, etcit will not boot with the new drive. My BIOS reports that my HDD is 58GB and that this field is not changeable, period. I know it also has to due with the Media Direct hidden partition, etcthat Dell puts on here. The questions I have are, 1..how can I get my computer to boot with my new drive installed? and 2can I remove Media Direct at all, seeing as Ive never used it in the 4 yrs Ive had this laptop? TThank you in advance
Comment by barb on February 22, 2009 7:04 pm
hey, it says device is currently in use and cannot be removed from the system. please remove it manually in the device manager and try again first of all how do i manually remove it and second if i do will my computer not turn off because its got my OS installed on it
Comment by tristan on March 3, 2009 11:00 pm
Hi, Do you have any suggestion to restore factory capacity of a 2.5 in external hard drive without using USB enclosure? thanks Song
Comment by Song on March 4, 2009 1:51 am
I had a new western digital 1 tb hdd I bought last week and its been working great, I decided to reinstall windows. I loaded up BartPE moved some of my old folders and when I rebooted my bios (and my pci sata card) both detected my 1 tb hdd as 33MB, I used your tool and it WORKS GREAT, . Thank you so much, everyone that has helped out and put in time is wonderful thanks a lot for all your hard work.
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog TLDR: HDD Capacity Restore Tool restored my wd 1tb hdd showing 33mb back to ~937gb and I powered it off, rebooted and everything was there and working great. Only thing I had to do was disconnect the sata cdrom on the same channel because it wants only one device on it which is understandable. :)
Comment by neil on March 7, 2009 11:44 pm
Hello, Thanks a lot for the great tool, but I cannot figure out why it shows factory capacity -2 Bytes for my SATA OEM drive (windows reports 127GB), but label on the drive says 250GB (it has no jumpers). Any ideas ? Thanks a lot, Roman
Comment by Roman Zhovtulya on March 10, 2009 2:16 pm
Hi, Im trying to restore a 250 GB SATA OEM drive (windows reports 137 GB), but your tool reports Factory Capacity: -2 Bytes. What could be the problem? (I connect directly to a SATA cable, using version 1.2 of the tool, the drive has no jumpers and a PC is 1 year old). Thanks a lot, Roman
Comment by Roman Zhovtulya on March 10, 2009 2:29 pm
hello, i have one hdd samsung 103UJ of 1TB.My bios says that he is only of 32MBwhat is to do?plzz help meee
Comment by junioiru on March 13, 2009 12:18 pm
i have had 2 WD SATA 1T drives in my system for some time now. and was startled when i found out one of them started coming up as 33MB. after running a few recovery programs to try and find out what was going on. discovered that the drives CHS was coming up incorrectly. went to the bios to check what was going on but unable to set those settings manually in these newer computers. i knew i had to try and find a program that would allow me to set these values manually and hopefully override the bioss settings. i did find one but after 3 days of pounding the drive i gave up on it. i was almost going to take the drive back to them but decided to do a google search. your page was the first thing that came up. and withing minutes my drive was working the way it should again. now just seing if the previous programs didnt damage the existing data on the disk. brilliant program!
Comment by shane on March 16, 2009 2:07 am
Hi, I have a 40GB HDD, a virus somehow manage to infect my HDD (Notebook IDE) and now I cant even format my HDD, It is always delayed write failed on an enclosure (plug into other pc), It has no bad sectors at all, but miraculously I manage to format it and divide it into two partitions, I thought it was a Thank God I restored my HDD physically, but the bad news is, when I tried to put it back into the laptop to install windows in it, but it is sad to discover that the HDD is cannot be accessed by the windows installer cd.I tried to use different CD installers but it is always the same result. so, my question is, is there anything that I can do to revive this HDD?, I need it so bad
Comment by Ismael on March 23, 2009 5:25 am
Sounds like an extremely handy program for many people, unfortunately not me It simply kept giving me the error Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform Which I did, but windows, bios, and other recovery tools very stubbornly would only see a 32mb disk or nothing at all. I tried other PCs, and even replaced the Mobo on mine with an MSI figuring even if it didnt make this tool work, I would need a replacement anyway after my anger at this Gigacrap board would have forced me to repeatedly drive over it in my car. Just when I was coming to the conclusion: Gigabyte GA-945GM-S2 Mobo + Samsung 1TB Hard drive with all family photos = Divorce waiting to happen. I came across http://www.hdat2.com. Booted with the free iso, did the easy steps in the answer to Q1 method 1 in the FAQ (luckily the command didnt abort as I wouldnt have wanted to do the steps it says to do if it does abort. I think moving to method 2 would have been a wiser move at that junction). Then rebooted, disk back to normal with all my data
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog eagerly awaiting me to set up that backup solution I had very stupidly been putting off doing.
Comment by Jon on March 27, 2009 5:49 pm
Add another Thank You to the list, Dmitry Postrigan. As a web developer for free software I (/we) see alot of downloads and installs with little feed back except for the can you add this or theres a bug here; so with respect to your time and knowledge, you have been a big help to me, thank you. Just recently i started to play around with VMwares ESXi Server and somewhere along the lines a 1TB drive was changed to 33mb. This drive had around 200GBs of important information and another 500GBs of misc stuff which was only partly backedup. After trying a few other recovery software to no avail, your program brought the drive back to life will allfiles intacted and working like normal. Thank you again.
Comment by AWC on April 5, 2009 12:54 am
Big thanks to the author for this tool. I have a WD WD10EACS 1TB, full of important, but backup up, data. After a MB bios update, the drive would only be recognized as 33mb, and in need of a format. Thanks to google and your tool, I was able to quickly restore my drive to believing it was 1TB. Now, my big question is: Why does Microsoft not buy/license your software and incorporate into Windows so it can recognize this issue and fix it on the fly? It would save many people who do not find your tool the heartbreak of losing photos and the like. Cheers, and thanks again! Matt.
Comment by MDA on April 10, 2009 8:01 am
Jon: Thanks for your post about HDAT2! Ive been trying for months to get HDD Capacity Restore to fix my 200GB 2.5 HDD, but never got it to work properly. My drive got screwed when I tried to ghost a 60GB drive with Norton Ghost and it dropped down to a formatted capacity of 54GB. Anyway, after messing with HDAT2 for about 15 mins, Ive got my full 200GB back! THANKS!!!
Comment by SCT on April 13, 2009 5:59 am
Hi, I am upgrading my brothers Dell Inspiron 6400 120GB hard drive. I put in a brand new Samsung HM500LI 500MB drive, and it was magically truncated to the original drives size. After browsing a lot and trying various utilities, including Samsungs own utility, and nothing would restore the drive to its correct size. Every utility that issued a command received a command aborted. Fortunately I ran across a post about your utility. In about 60 seconds, I downloaded, installed, and ran it with the result being that the drive size was correctly restored. Thank you very much!
Comment by Robert on April 13, 2009 12:22 pm
I wanted to upgrade my wifes Dell E1505 from 80GB to 250GB, both were Seagate drives. The new drive was truncated back to 80GB during the clone using Seagates cloning software. I had to find a SATA to PATA adapter to allow me to attach the SATA drive to my old desktop system, but it worked. One comment, you have to make sure that there is only the one drive on the channel. Thanks much.
Comment by Bruce on April 15, 2009 3:19 am
I had a problem with my Samsung HD103UJ (1TB) drive with all my personal photographs on it. Drive showed 32GB! This excellent program restored my capacity and best of all ik kept al my pictures! So thanks a lot :-D
Comment by Kris on April 18, 2009 3:15 pm
Thanks a bunch. I had a WD 80 gig that only showed 33 gig and within a minute running your magic program I now have 80 gig again. I have no idea when or how it happened but Im sure I did something wrong a few years agao. LOL Also the change of the HD space didnt erase any of the OS on the drive. Thank you , Thank you, Thank you! Anyway Im using the 80 gig now for Windows 7 Beta test.
Comment by Iggy on April 26, 2009 4:24 pm
My problem was with a Samsung HD103UI 1TB, similar to others above. The drive after purchase only showed/allowed a 32MB partition. Problem was solved with the utility, despite it giving an error at first. I followed the advice about disconnecting the power cable despite having a brain fart and doing the SATA cable instead, but the result was the same. So as a headsup to people, if you get an error that it cant fix the drive, run the program again and when the restore capacity button appears, disconnect the power or SATA cables from the drive, reconnect, and try again. Worked perfectly fine for me. NOTE: My drive was empty since it is brand new, I wouldnt necessarily recommend this to anyone who has information already stored on their drive that could be lost.
Comment by Mick on April 28, 2009 7:36 am
Thanks a lot. I bought a WD 1TB HDD yesterday and it shows 931.51GB initially. After formatting, it showed only 31MB. It didnt help after I updated my motherboard to the latest BIOS version. Goggled for this issue and it appears to be kind of LBA48 problem. I am not familiar with it but this program just helped me to get back my 1TB in a few clicks!! THANKS SOO MUCH!!!
Comment by M. H. Lei on April 28, 2009 4:57 pm
I have two 120 gb Maxtor HDs with the exact same problem at the exact same time (not likely hardware failure). They were recently in a TIVO, installed by me, and they were married as a dual drive. The TIVO went bad, so since these were new (3 months) and worked OK in the TIVO, i wanted to reuse them in a PC. Both report 10.24 mb (not gb) capacity. No tool I tried can get them back to 120 gb, They will not zero fill because it is less than 65556 sectors reported, I see no partitiions on either. Seatools, recommended by Seagate/Maxtor, passed the test for 10mb, and did not restore them. I tried your restoration program, it reports it sees the manufacturers capacity of 10 mb (that is, it did not restore the 120 gb). What shall I try next, I dont know what to do, both fail in the same manner at the same time after working OK in the TIVO? Any suggestion is welcome.
Comment by Bob on May 13, 2009 5:10 am
RE: Samsung HD103UI 1TB The instructions in this comment got my entire drive full of data back: the drive only showed a 32MB partition. Problem was solved with this utility. If you get an error that it cant fix the drive, run the program again and when the restore capacity button appears, disconnect the SATA cable from the drive, reconnect, and try again. That you to the utility author and thank you to the commenter above. Dmitry, please put a PayPal button up, I have $20 with you name on it. Thanks, Dan
Comment by Dan Tidswell on May 20, 2009 12:40 pm
I have a 300 Gb WD VelociRaptor drive that I installed Win 2000 Pro on. And which has a ceiling of 137 Gb. I then did an XP upgrade and then partitioned the drive into three more drives as I plan on multi-booting the drive with XP, Vista, and Server 2003 and a fourth drive. I formatted the partitions and attempted to install Vista on the second drive. When it asked to install on a specific partition, I selected the second drive which should have been D: drive. An error message stated that all drives, not just the three partitioneds that I did in disk management stated that they all were either unformatted or damaged. This is a brand new drive that I received less than two weeks ago new. Will this program be able to correct my problems and allow the drive to revert back to its full 300 Gb capacity?

Comment by David on May 26, 2009 5:23 pm
Its great to read of others successes, so Im wondering if this program could help in my situation I have a 250GB WD Caviar SATA drive (2500KS) that now thinks its a generic 8GB ROM drive due to firmware corruption. Since the capacity restore tool extracts the factory capacity, will it report my drive as a 250GB (by scanning the drive itself) or 8GB (by reading the firmware). Before finding this site, my only other option was expensive data recovery (AU$1,000+ !!!) Backup drive died two weeks ago and I hadnt got around to replacing it. Any thoughts would certainly be appreciated. Thx
Comment by Arnie on May 28, 2009 1:53 am
Arnie: If your hard disk firmware is corrupted (one simptom is it doesnt correctly report its model on BIOS), you can try Repair Station (also developed by Atola) available here: http://www.hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/ This software can repair most of firmware problems on most hard disks for a very reasonable price ($49.95). You can download for free to check if your drive is recoverable before paying for the recovery. I used it once and worked well for me (a drive that identified correctly on BIOS, but reported all its sectors as bad, and no smart information). After using Repair Station, drive was accessible again (though I received some scary warnings about inminent drive failure because of many bad sectors) but I also had to use data recovery software (EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional) to recover files, because file system was damaged. In my opinion Repair Station is a very useful tool because allows PC technicians and advanced users to recover data from drives (with corrupted firmware only) which otherwise would require the services of a data recovery company (very expensive). However, its not a one click solution for the ordinary PC user. If your data are valuable and you are not sure of doing it for yourself, contact with a PC technician to do it for you.
Comment by Jos Luis on May 28, 2009 9:31 pm
Arnie: If your hard disk firmware is corrupted (one simptom is it doesnt correctly report its model on BIOS), you can try Repair Station (also developed by Atola) available here: http://www.hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/ This software can repair most of firmware problems on most hard disks for a very reasonable price ($49.95). You can download for free to check if your drive is recoverable before paying for the recovery. I used it once and worked well for me (a drive that identified correctly on BIOS, but reported all its sectors as bad, and no SMART information). After using Repair Station, drive was accessible again (though I received some scary warnings about inminent drive failure because of many bad sectors) but I also had to use data recovery software (EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional) to recover files, because file system was damaged. In my opinion Repair Station is a very useful tool because allows PC technicians and advanced users to recover data from drives (with corrupted firmware only) which otherwise would require the services of a data recovery company (very expensive). However, its not a one click solution for the ordinary PC user. If your data are valuable and you are not sure of doing it for yourself, contact with a PC technician to do it for you.
Comment by Jos Luis on May 29, 2009 10:59 am
Arnie: If your hard disk firmware is corrupted (one simptom is it doesnt correctly report its model on BIOS), you can try Repair Station (also developed by Atola Technology) available here: http://www.hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/ This software can repair most of firmware problems on most hard disks for a very
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog reasonable price ($49.95). You can download for free to check if your drive is recoverable before paying for the recovery. I used it once and worked well for me (a drive that identified correctly on BIOS, but reported all its sectors as bad, and no SMART information). After using Repair Station, drive was accessible again (though I received some scary warnings about inminent drive failure because of many bad sectors) but I also had to use data recovery software (EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional) to recover files, because file system was damaged. In my opinion Repair Station is a very useful tool because allows PC technicians and advanced users to recover data from drives (with corrupted firmware only) which otherwise would require the services of a data recovery company (very expensive). However, its not a one click solution for the ordinary PC user. If your data are valuable and you are not sure of doing it for yourself, contact with a PC technician to do it for you.
Comment by Jos Luis on May 29, 2009 11:10 am
[...] Could be worth a try if the RAID controller has rewritten the capacity tags on the drive: Atola Technology Archive Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity [...]
Pingback by ex-RAID drive return to normal size? on June 8, 2009 2:46 pm
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You This issue was annoying me so much. When I get my life managed again, I will have to make a donation to the creator. I had the problem with Dell. If you try to clone a media direct HDD. So my new 320GB drive was stuck at 75GB and dell support claimed it couldnt be fixed. With the aid of another site for parts, I bought a IDE to Sata converter, hooked it up to an old computer and ran this. Took maybe 1 whole second. After I just had to go to disk management and format a new partition with the 230+Gb of space I now have. Awesome ..
Comment by Sqrach on June 9, 2009 6:57 pm
You my friend are wonderful! I tried restoring my Samsing F1 1Tb hard drive which had the 32MB error on Windows 7 64 with no luck, and tried it again on Windows XP 32. I had the same drive is in use error, but powering down the drive and on again (just before repairing) worked. Restarted, and there we go! All my files back over 400GBs worth!! Not too sure what caused the problem, but Im guessing it was something caused by the power out I had. Lets just hope that it doesnt happen again! Once again, MANY THANKS!! On
Comment by Tom Jenks on June 9, 2009 7:57 pm
I did exactly how many of you didbut my Samsung HD103UJ couldnt be resized or even recognized just after trying HDD Capacity Restore Tool. My mobo is a Gigabyte GA-MA69VM-S2 For those who did like this the drive only showed a 32MB partition. Problem was solved with this utility. If you get an error that it cant fix the drive, run the program again and when the restore capacity button appears, disconnect the SATA cable from the drive, reconnect, and try again. is it safe to disconnect and REconnect SATA cables with the cpu ON?!
Comment by Andr Stein on June 16, 2009 12:58 am
Just to let you knowI DID disconnect/reconnect SATA cable andDIDNT work. Too bad. Dunno what to do anymore
Comment by Andr Stein on June 16, 2009 1:46 am
Bob Ive got the same problem two maxtor dirves, one 133 GB, the other 120 GB, after being in a TiVo they only report 10 GB. Did you ever find a fix for this? Thanks!
Comment by Fred Hunter on June 20, 2009 5:32 am
This program didnt work for me. I installed it on my laptop, and ran it with the hard drive in the laptop. It came up in the list within the program, but when i tried to continue it said the hard drive was in use so it wouldnt work. So i thought, ok that makes sense, i need to put the drive in an enclosure an plug it into a different computer. So i did that, but now when running the progam with the drive in a enclosure plugged into my mums computer, it wont recognise the drive, i think because its connected via usb. In device manager the drive is displayed as Generic USB storage device. So how can i use this program i wonder? The only thing i can think of is running it from a boot disc, but theres no mention on the site of needing to do that, and the software is designed to run on windows, so im just wondering how to use it.
Comment by Josh on June 23, 2009 7:38 am
Hi, It didnt work for me either ;-) I have a WD Blue Scorpio 320GB [2.5inch] reporting as 98GB. I suspect it was my fault using it in an external box that only supports up to 160GB when trying to migrate my system from the old drive using Acronis Easy Migrate I have removed it from device manager. It is recognised in Disk management [computer management]. It makes no difference which of these I remove it from [or both]. I have shut the program down and restarted and also rebooted no joy. HELP !!! Thanks
Comment by Gideon on June 27, 2009 8:43 pm
p.s. it is not connected by usb it is connected directly to the m.b.

Spent all day trying to resolve my issue as per 3 posts above. Tried fresh window install and then install of HDD capacity restore still reported as locked. Tried good old DOS debugging. Then I found this http://discussions.virtualdr.com/archive/index.php/t-223100.html Seagate tool work on WD drives :-) This info especially SeaTools for DOS http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=enUS&name=SeaTools&vgnextoid=720bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD Manual on how to do that.. http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/SeaToolsDOSguide.pdf F. Set Capacity Occasionally, a disc drive may be too large and its size needs to be reduced to a lower capacity. Similarly, a drive with a reduced capacity may need to be reset to its native maximum capacity. Three choices are available under this section: S Set 32GB Capacity. A common setting for older systems. R Reset to Drive Maximum. Full capacity is restored. M Set Manually. Allow you to set a specific size.
Hope this helps folks ! G

Josh Some laptop manufacturers have hidden particians to save and protect bio files etc. Compaa and Dell do. This may be the reason you cant get 100% of your hard drive space. Anyone else have any ideas to help Josh?
Comment by Iggy on June 28, 2009 5:54 am
HI , im from brasil, sorry my poor english , but ill try to explain what happened to me, i have an hd seagate DT980310AS, 80GB, and in laptop, with Xp, y can see 76 GB, iinstaled HDD CAPACITY RESTORE, AND APEARS TO ME (SHOW ) Channel#0, master st980310as SERIAL 5ST09FY6 SIZE 80GB Security : NOt Locked when i confirmed i get a wrong msg, what i did wrong? can u help me? i really need to recover my full hd .. its an dell laptop thanks thnak this operation will determine factory capacity
Comment by Santiago on July 2, 2009 2:19 am
Not finished post** this is the message that apears to me! device is currently in use and cannot be removed from the system Please remove it in the device manager and try again. guys i ran the hdd cap recover in my Xp, did i wrong , please in need help. tnxs
Comment by Santiago on July 2, 2009 2:38 am
Awesome tool, you have saved my HD, from 32 Mb to 1 Tb with only one click. Thanks a lot :D
Comment by Tucho on July 6, 2009 8:30 pm
Thank you so much you saved my hard drive. A 1 TB WD Green Caviar, 10EAVS i believe, said it was 32 mb of raw data instead of 1 tb and now its fixed after one click. Thanks a million times over, I hope my comment helps people find this.
Comment by John on July 7, 2009 7:45 am
Excellent program. I had this 160GB that was showing up in the BIOS as 33GB and I could get no more out of it. I tried everything, zero fill, hex editors, fdisk /mrb, nothing worked. Then I download this little Capacity Restore and *POOF* It is 160GB. Thanks a million!
Comment by Haderade on July 13, 2009 4:29 pm
Fantastic! Fixed 1TB drive that read at 32mb. Would not work at first so I used the Power Plug in/out method. Worked like a charm. Thanks heaps! saved me the nightmare that is RMA.
Comment by Matt on July 14, 2009 10:43 am
Yeah but how can you fix a hard drive when you are running 64 bit??
Comment by john scoles on July 16, 2009 12:51 pm
I am trying to use this on a Dell laptop. I upgraded the SATA hard drive from a 100 GB drive to a 500GB and remaged the old drive onto the new drive using Acronis True Image Workstation. I now get 100 GB max capacity on the new drive. I tried using this utility, but it wants to unmount the drive, and of course it cant because the Windows XP is running on the drive. How can I get this utility to run and free up the remaining 400 GB on the drive? I know the BIOS can see the entire drive, because when I first installed the drive (before I imaged it), the drive was showing 500GB. Thanks in advance. Thank
Comment by Steve Jacobson on July 19, 2009 4:08 pm
For some reason, main drive on my Dell laptop (160gb SATA Seagate Momentum) got same capacity (73gb) as the external drive connected. After several tries with SeaTools to unlock, I landed through hddguru.com to your excellent utility. The main problem was removing the cover from my desktop so I can attach the disk :) After that, couple of mouseclicks and I got my three-way boot disk back! Thank a lot ( !!), youve saved my day!
Comment by George Georgiev on July 22, 2009 2:27 am
Im trying to restore two laptop drives to their native size after Norton Ghost resized them to the size of the disk I was trying to clone. HDD Capacity restore is reporting Unknown Device for all SATA drives in my Dell Desktop (including the laptop rives Ive attached to the SATA cables in my desktop. What can I do ???
Comment by Deano Montreuil on August 9, 2009 4:02 am
Thanks a lot, this saved me a lot of trouble!

Comment by David Zhao on August 9, 2009 12:12 pm
I tried to use this software on my Samsung HD103UJ 1TB (1000GB) HDD, but not worked for me. It is showing 33mb on BIOS and 7.87Gb on Windows (non allocate space). The following message appears: Hard drive is not accessible or damage in some way. Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform. I already tried to do that trick, pull of the power cable and put it back again, still not working. I think the problem is my current motherboard, a Asus P4C800 Deluxe (not the same motherboard where the HDD was messed up, it was on a Gigabyte mobo).
Comment by Jaison Niehues on August 12, 2009 4:10 am
[...] maioria do pessoal devolvendo o HD para o vendedor), cheguei ao utilitrio pelo Dmitry Postigan, o HDD Restore Capacity, que no funcionou para mim ele falava que o disco estava com algum problema e no podia [...]
Pingback by Soluo para o problema com o disco rgido SATA HD103UJ de 1TB (1000GB) da Samsung, aparecendo 33mb ou 7.87GB | Blog do Jaison on August 12, 2009 6:00 pm
I was hoping to make this utility work on a BartPE disk, but it does not. Any suggestions?
Comment by Lenny on August 18, 2009 4:38 am
i got the same problem and massage from ur Program by a Samsung HD103UJ 1 Terrabyte if here any tricks ? Mfg: Scrat
Comment by scrat on August 19, 2009 2:31 pm
This is an invaluable tool, fixed a Samsung HD103UJ 1TB that was showing as 128gb when formatted, and this is on a failing drive which has to be sent back. If your a system builder like me this tool is part of my portable tool kit. Thanks M8 you saved me a headache.
Comment by Crazylegz on August 21, 2009 4:29 pm
Have used this excellent tool in the past, however ia unable to get it running on Windows7 (either 32 or 64bit) have tried running it under win xp compatability mode but no joy, any ideas ?? The problem i have is an error message error opening driver.
Comment by Jerome on August 23, 2009 7:51 am
Aww, this was great. I had taken my computer apart for blowing it out with some compressed air. I do this occasionally and always ensure I write down which drive the sata cables were in and even which position in the case they were in, as sometimes that weird magic thing happens where something is wrong even though nothing should be. Well even after putting everything back in the same way it came out, powering it on caused me to notice something. My 1tb Samsung (about 700 gigs full, one of 4 internal drives) was reporting that it was not formatted, and something about 7.87 gigs. Long story short, your program just saved the universe from complete destruction tonight. So yeah, good job.
Comment by Aelphais on August 28, 2009 6:37 am
WHOOHOOO! Thank you.

Comment by Greybear on August 31, 2009 6:40 pm
thank you so much!! it fixed my two 1TB Samsung HDD 33MB Problems i was gave up and i saw your solution i tried it and fixed immediately!! thank you so much again
Comment by joeclown on September 1, 2009 9:45 pm
How do I get the harddrive I want fixed on one channel.Says there is more than one on this channel. Thanks, Mary
Comment by Mary on September 1, 2009 10:08 pm
I tried the program but it does not give results that I am comfortable with. I have a WD1600BB drive. Disk management shows 7.88GB. this program has a reported capacity of 0 (zero) with a factory capacity of 2 (negative 2). I did not attempt to restore the capacity. Can you give me an idea as to why I get these results? Would it be harmful to click the restore button?
Comment by Splunge on September 1, 2009 11:10 pm
Hi, there I have MB Gigabyte GA 35T-DQ6(rev.1.0) and bought one HDD 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 Raid edition(HE103UJ). BIOS recognize it as HDD with capacity 33 MB. When I tried to fixed it with your program it shows this Error: Hard Drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform. Please tell me what to do next?
Comment by serpentiny on September 4, 2009 9:18 am
This tool is magnificent!! relief my days long pain, save me hundreds of hours work, (I know I should have backup) you are really great! care to disclose a little technical details? may be this concept can work on other hardwares. thanks again
Comment by C Guan on September 10, 2009 8:36 am
Thank you for the info and the app. i used it on a WD 1TB driver and got 400+ gigs of backup data back and dont have to buy a new drive.. 1000 thanks
Comment by Robert Littell on September 17, 2009 11:18 pm
Got a variant for 64 bit systems?

Comment by Dsarvadi on September 22, 2009 4:42 am
With your program I was able to repair the hard drive WD1001FALS 1TB, but the number of LBA is slightly different from what is specified on the disk can I manually set the number of LBA?
Comment by Andrey on September 22, 2009 8:41 pm
Thank you very much. all values LBA recovered accurately, but only at the second attempt
Comment by Andrey on September 22, 2009 9:19 pm
Dmitry, I have read through all the posts and seem to have a problem that is slightly different to that most have experienced. I recently cloned a 160MB HDD to a 320MB HDD, and the new 320 HDD shows up on Windows XP as a 160 MB drive, nevertheless, it shows up as a 320 MB HDD on HDD Capacity Restore, thus when i have run the program it simply says there is no capacity to restore. It also shows up as a 320 HDD on my BIOS and on Drive Manager in Windows, but when i explore the drive it shows up as a 160 MB one. Have tried putting the drive on various different PC`s but the result is always the same, for some reason XP reads it both as a 160 MB and a 320 MB drive, and I have not been able to find a way to make Windows XP explore or see it as a 320 MB drive.
Comment by Nolo on September 24, 2009 6:55 am
Happy Days, My friend just got back his replacement WD 1TB drive for it to only be 32mb in size after reading this article and running the tool everything is good the 1TB drive is all back.
Thank you and good work!

Comment by Rizzo on September 25, 2009 5:44 pm
hi i have a 64GB kingstone usb data storage . it not format & not storage any data on , what work i do ? please help me
Comment by porp on September 25, 2009 7:37 pm
I concur.anything for 64bit systems? As some people above I get the same error when opening which is error opening driver. This did work on my 32 bit system but several months ago I built 64 bit and last week literally cleaned out my computer that had dust in it and of course when putting back the 1TB HDD Windows Vista cant read it properlyI dont really want to put it into an expernal caddy and move the data off just to format it again..then put the data back on.
Comment by Shez on September 27, 2009 4:19 am
Hi everyone, I have a problem with my secondary 1TB hard drive. Here are the symptoms in the order that they occured, and how I have responded thus far. 1) My 2nd hard drive suddenly stopped getting read by Windows 7. It said that it needed to be formatted in order to be used and for some reason, it said that it was in FAT32, even though it was NTFS last i checked. 2) I looked on the internet and found that even if I quick formatted it (in an attempt to get it back to NTFS) the data would still be on the hard drive as long as I didnt write anything more to the hard drive. 3) So I did that, with the plan of using some sort of software program that could retrieve data after a format of the hard drive. 4) After that, Windows started reading the drive as an NTFS hard drive.. but it said that it only had 32MB of hard drive space.. which was obviously not right. So i looked on the internet again and found out about a common problem (probably what most people here are having) about hard drive caches being read instead of the actually capacity or something like that. 5) So i got this atola hdd capacity tool from here, however when I try and select the drive, it says that the device is in use and that I need to manually disable it from device manager. I tried this, restarted my computer as instructed, but it still said the same thing.. the settings in the device manager didnt indicate any changes (still offering the option to disable the hard drive). 6) I have a LOT of reaaaally important documents and files on this hard drive. If anyone can provide any help, suggestions, solutions, etc, I would be extremely grateful. Ive been at this for about 4 hours now.. and am getting really worried about losing my important information Please offer your advice. Thanks
Comment by Ion on September 28, 2009 10:33 am
Worked superb on my Western Digital WD10EADS HDD size trunked by guess what a Gigabyte motherboard. (M61PM-S2, MCP61 SATA controller, Nforce 430 chipset) Thanks!!!!!
Comment by name on October 1, 2009 12:48 am
i used this program and lost all my 830 GB data from a 1 TB WD caviar green hard drive
Comment by I have one on October 5, 2009 1:44 pm
Durch das Imaging mit Acronis, habe ich an einem Dell Inspiron eine 250 GB zu einer 120 Gig HDD gemacht. Leider habe ich dieses Tool erst nach 3 schrecklichen Wochen gefunden. Nun habe ich das Tool genutzt und wieder eine 250 GB HDD. der restliche Plattenplatz wurde freigegeben und kann nun als zweite partition genutz werden, die original Daten wurden nicht verndert.
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog Es ist ein groartiges Tool und gehrt in jede Werkzeugkiste It works great. Greating from Hamburg
Comment by cyberdiver on October 8, 2009 11:02 am
[...] the drive. Along with that response there was the suggestion to look into this tool that would restore hard drive capacity. I used the tool but it didnt work and gave the following error: Hard drive is not [...]
Pingback by Azuki Panda Samsung Spinpoint 1 TB Failure on October 22, 2009 8:21 am
I used Acronis to clone my 30g drive to a larger 120g drive plugged in to a USB HD adaptor and, of course, it made the large drive only 32g. I understand that your utility does not work via a USB adaptor I understand that. My questions is this: If Acronis could mess it up via USB, why cant a utility (like yours) fix it via USB. That is, couldnt you offer an option that just does what it can to a USB drive even though you can not do every thing possible?
Comment by RickRock on October 24, 2009 3:45 pm
I cant say how much Iam thankful for your tool, Dimitry. Your software safed so much money, a few thousand euro maybe. All my files are back, after I finally made the tool run with that if youre brave enough-trick. I have learned (hopefully) to make regular backups from now on. I am using XP with SP3, it is the 1 TB HD103UJ from Samsung together with the Gigabyte 965P-DS4 Rev. 3.3 F9 (Now F12b) Mainboard. The old BIOS version destroyed the hdd within a few seconds (hopefully the new one is fixed), when I connected the 1 TB hdd to the first channel on that mainboard. It is the typically Gigabyte Bios bug so many people report about. I dont know what I would have done if my files were lost for ever. Thank you so much
Comment by A thanful guy having his personal files back on October 24, 2009 5:10 pm
Does anybody knows if there is a similar tool like this, just with the ability to detect and change capacity of USB attached drives in Windows XP? My goal is to find a tool, where i can remove HPA-Partitions in Windows XP via USB attached drives. Any help is very helpful.
Comment by Chris on October 31, 2009 4:03 pm
Tried to clone a Dell 80 GB drive into a Toshiba 320 GB drive then somputers would only recognize it as a 78 GB hard drive (the 320 GB toshiba) none of the tools available on the Internet fixed it as this tool. I have to say Thanks. Now I will install it from zero not cloning. Something very common with dell computers. Thanks again. At first the tool did not work on an Intel DG33 aso I installed it on a 965 asrock and just great. by the way always good to have an asrock option.
Comment by ALAN AVELLA on November 5, 2009 4:02 am
Thank you for the tools,i have fixed my 1T WD Green Disk which became 32M raw disk.
Comment by angelhj on November 7, 2009 2:50 am
Thanks for this comprehensive explaination and the comfortalbe tool solved my 32MB problem with 1T WD green HDD on Gigabyte 965P system.
Comment by Silvio on November 17, 2009 11:11 am
hi i have a problem that my pendrive KIngston USB 2.0 4 GB is showin 0 bytes of used, available and total space.How can i correct
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog it? Plz reply to my email I really thank to whosoever replies!!!
Comment by njnike on December 9, 2009 2:04 pm
Many thanks! This also fixed by 33 MB problem with my WD10EACS 1TB drive!
Comment by corpz on December 14, 2009 9:36 pm
during recovery of hard drive data i got this message..more than 1 device is detected on the channel with the selected device the The device has to be single on a channel
Comment by fareed on December 19, 2009 3:28 pm
I have a new 1TB external WD USB HD which shows up on 2 different computers as being 468MB and completely full. Tried to DL the fix program from here, but windows tells me the program file is corrupt when I try to run it. I re-tried but got same msg. Any chance the download file got corrupted ? thanks in advance for any help.
Comment by Corsair on December 20, 2009 1:37 am
i have maxtor 80GB sata, how i restore it?? i try boot win UBCD4win and try Restore, but shown warning that HD is used, why..?? i boot from USB stick, it not from My HD, thanks,
Comment by pamungkaz on December 24, 2009 2:10 pm
Seagate 250 GB drive, after messing around with formatting it only showed 37GB, Seagate and most other google sites showed no workable ways to fix it. Your program fixed it immediatly. Windows 7 Pro. Thanks so much Bud
Comment by Bud on January 1, 2010 5:54 pm
Wow, I thought I had lost almost a terabyte of information the other day my 1TB hard disk was showing up as only 32MB in Windows 7! Windows kept saying that the drive had not been formatted and did I want to format it now? As a computer engineer I had an inkling that I might be able to get my data back and did not format it. After a little Google search of hard disk only shows 32MB I found HDD Capacity Restore. I downloaded the program and ran it on a different computer (with my HDD attached) and then restored the capacity of my hard disk all data is still there! Great program and I will recommend it to all my collegues if they ever encounter the same issues!
Comment by Jon Breen on January 8, 2010 3:09 pm
So I had a pair of WD10EADS 1tb drives that I recently moved to a new PC. One is correctly detecting at 1tb, and the other at 32mb. This is an especially big problem as they were part of an extended drive, so at this point neither will operate. On the PC i moved them to (with W7), the application does not see any drives. So, as suggested, I tried it on another (which happens to be a Vista box). There the app can see it. The first time I try to run it, it shows the drive at 1TB, but off by 1mb. Then I run the app, and it says Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform I noticed it was removed from the device manager successfully, so I try running the app again. This time it appears at 33mb, but I get the same error message. So now Ive tried it on two PCs with different results, neither positive. Any thoughts? Thanks
Comment by jeff on January 11, 2010 9:11 am
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog Im running into a problem is there anyone that can help me. I cloned my laptop hard drive onto my new hard drive and now it shows the same hard drive space of 80gb instead of 500gb. I tried using this program but it wont let me because Device is currently being used and cannot be removed from the system. The read some of the comment and it said to remove the hard drive onto a Desktop computer. I on the other hand dont have a desktop computer. Is there another other way to fix this. or if i were to put it onto a desktop do i need any kind of special tools?
Comment by Frank on January 12, 2010 9:19 am
Im trying to reset the capacity of an external connected via USB 2.0 with this capacity restore tool. I have a 160GB maxtor that is only being recognized as a 32 gb drive. The restore tool is not detecting the external drive. Does anyone have any suggestions? thanks
Comment by mike on January 14, 2010 9:49 pm
Mike you can try this: open the plastic case, extract the fisical disk and connect it directly to the board of a PC, it should work, post here if you have more questions, good luke!, (english isnt my native lenguage). ecrosys
Comment by Edwin Cuadros on January 22, 2010 3:48 pm
Frank, you need a good software to make this things well, Ghost (symantec) can clon from low size hd to high size hd, and using the full space of last one, if you like to do it from windows can use Partition Magic to resize the current partition and use the full space of your hard drive, post here if you have more questions, good luck!, (English isnt my native language). ecrosys
Comment by Edwin Cuadros on January 22, 2010 3:55 pm
Edwin, Thanks for the help. I now have the drive inside a case and Im getting new problems. THE CRT detects the drive and says it is 163 GB meanwhile windows still says it is 31.4. When I select the problem drive on the opening screen I get a pop up saying Quote: This operation will determine factory capacity of the drive . If the device is detected in the system, it will now be removed from the device manager. This is needed to avoid conflicts with the operating system. detected in the system, it will now be removed from the device manager. This is needed to avoid conflicts with the operating system. This is needed to avoid conflicts with the operating system. Then I select OK, the other option is cancel. Quote: device is currently in use please remove it from the device manager manually So I uninstall it I disable it, everything requires a restart and the drive is auto detected again and Im back where I started.
Then I select OK, the other option is cancel. Quote: device is currently in use and cannot be removed from the system. please remove it manually from the device manager and try again. So I tried to uninstall it, disable it, everything requires a restart and the drive is auto detected again and Im back where I started. Im looking for help here http://forum.hddguru.com/restoring-drive-max-capacity-part-t14618.html
sorry about any confusion had some problem with cut and paste
Thank you so much I have a Maxtor 22 1TB drive that has already had the firmware fail I thought it had gone again, yet your software has restored it once again. So, I say Thank You, once more!
Comment by Craig Thorpe on January 25, 2010 11:36 pm
I have had a HDD fail Bios sees it but says 0GB capacity no other program sees it or say fail. i need to recover my files from this before i send it back to seagate. will this repair this or any ideas on what to do
Comment by Dedge on January 27, 2010 12:11 am
An hour ago I rebooted my system and was met by the horrible sinking feeling in my stomach that only comes with catastrophic data loss. My 1tb hitachi drive was now 32mb and windows wanted to format it. An hour of google searching a some grey hair later i found your program, and it worked like magic. Really, I need a better phase than that, because works like magic usually takes about a day and this took five minutes! You have earned yourselves some massive geek good karma, thank you so much!
Comment by Ben on January 27, 2010 11:12 am
I have a 1.5Tb Samsung HDD, that only shows up as 465Gb. When running HDD Capacity Restore, it says; Uninstall the HDD in the device manager. After doing this, the PC has to be restarted for the uninstall to be completed. After shut down and restart, the HDD is automatically reinstalled by Plug&Play. so nothing accomplished. Then I disabled Plug&Play, uninstalled the HDD and did a required restart. But now the window of HDD Capacity Restore is empty and does not show any drive at all (I have 2 internal drives). I am running in circles with this. Anyone have any suggestions?
Comment by Harry Harms on January 27, 2010 3:56 pm
Trying to restore capacity to a laptop hard drive. I have plugged it into my desktop, HDD Capacity Restore sees the HD, but I get the following error message: More than one device detected on the channel with the selected device. The device has to be single on a channel I understand that theHD needs to be on its own channel, but I am not sure how to accomplish this. Any advice? Thanks.
Comment by andy on January 27, 2010 6:15 pm
I was searching for a couple of days why my drive was not showing the capacity of 120GB and just showing 31GB. .It was driving me nuts. Then I ran across this site.I ran your HDD Capacity Restore Tool and it worked great!!! I was able to finally install Windows 7.Thank You !!
Comment by Dale on February 2, 2010 11:26 pm
Hi my WD WDC10EADS 1TB HDD showed up only 32 MB after a restart.After a search i met your soft.Previously my os was win 7 Ultimate 64 but your soft ignored working then i uninstalled win7 and reinstalled a 32 bit XP.then soft restored my HDD capacity back. But it was showed unallocated HDD and my 2 partitions got lost. Now, is it possible recover my partitions and data back? and if yes what shoud i do? warning: when on win7 accidentally i formatted that 32 MB area once.Does this change the situation. Thanks in advance
Comment by Nikolov on February 9, 2010 11:45 pm
seem im getting the same error as Andy, any help would be be great thanks
Comment by jerrimy on February 9, 2010 11:48 pm
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog heyi was trying to partition my xternal hard drive 1 tb samsungn it was in fat 32 formatnw i am only remaining with 18 gb rest all is vanished and i don even see them newhrplzzzz help me guys hw to get rest 980 gb bak????m using vistais dis software gonna help me??? if not whr hw wht m i supposed 2 do.plzzz lemme no asap.tc
Comment by yogi on February 16, 2010 4:32 pm
Thanks so much for your utility! Works great for me, my WD1001FALS was displaying 32MB and is up to the right size after using your app.
Comment by Brian on February 19, 2010 9:43 pm
Thanks a lot for this, when I tried to replace an old 80GB HDD in my DELL laptop with WD2500 and it shrank to 80GB as well and caused me a big headache. With this utility I have my 250GB WD back, coooool!!!
Comment by vld on February 23, 2010 3:26 pm
Thanks :)) U make me happy Worked for me also with 1 TB WD1001fals problem :)
Comment by OzzY on February 25, 2010 10:48 pm
Your the man. After hours of trying to re-size my wd6400aaks drive with ftool (wouldnt let me go back to max capacity) I gave google a try and found your brilliant program. Installed it on my WHS plugged the drives in to a sil3114, started HDD Capacity Restore. Magic happened. Cheers thanks a lot.
Comment by trv on March 2, 2010 3:20 pm
Dmitry, Its amazing how fast and easy this was. I was also bitten by the cloning Dell laptop nightmare. Went from 60gb to 250gb in about 5 seconds. I wasted too much time thanks to Dell, before I found your program. They should pay YOU for helping their customers!! Thank you very much!!
Comment by Joe C on March 8, 2010 8:05 pm
I have a 1tb external that shows my pc that it has data and yet I cannot access it, all folders show 32please help.. The tool did not see my drive!
Comment by P.Ray on March 9, 2010 5:11 am
thanx so much i have a hard disk with 1000 gb it was only recognized by the mother board as 33mb and after i used your software it fixed thanx so much again
Comment by ahmed allam on March 10, 2010 8:02 pm
worked a treat on my hitachi deskstar 164gb ide drive that was reporting 33gb, thank-you!
Comment by Brad on March 20, 2010 5:21 pm
Tried the programme on an 80Gb Seagate drive that has an Ontrack Dynamic Drive Overlay installed. Capacity is shown as
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog 31.5Gb. Unfortunately it didnt work. Any suggestions as to how I can get rid of the DDO? I have tried all the usual suggestion ie reformating etc
Comment by Colin on April 11, 2010 12:07 pm
Thanks for the help! My Harddisk is now at 1TB instead of 33MB!

Comment by CJ on April 24, 2010 2:20 am
This worked a treat on my samsung HD103UI when it showed 1TB as 33MB, had some probs with 64bit windows but if you install the program and run it straight away you dont get the driver error. I had nearly filled my HD when this stupid problem happened and this program fixed it in 20sec after days of trying to find a solution. No data lost, everything is perfect, only problem is that I had to put the drive into a computer as the program does not run via USB to external case. AWESOME!!! Thanks so much
Comment by Orgy on April 24, 2010 6:21 am
I have HP Pavilion DV4 laptop.Its having two operating Systems viz Vista Home Premium SP2 ( 32 bit ) and Windows 7 Enterprise ( 32 bit ).In both the OS i installed the HDD capacity restore.This software is unable to detect HDD in both OS !!! I have Hitachi 320 GB HDD.After installing i shut down laptop then started again laptop then used the software for first time in both the OS. Kindly tell me what to do ?
Comment by Varun on April 25, 2010 4:14 am
Got a brand new Samsung HD103SJ that was showing as 128GB instead of the 1TB it should be. Tried it in several computers with several operating systems (including Partition Commander) and still couldnt get it to show more than 128GB. Was about to RMA it when I came across this utility, and it worked perfectly in a matter of seconds. The drive now registers the full 1TB size. Ill definitely add this to my permanent collection of useful utilities. Thanks!
Comment by Crusader on April 30, 2010 3:51 pm
I had a WD800jb 80gig HDD with bios suddenly showing only33 gig. Win98 saw 80gig but I could not access most of the drive. After a couple weeks of searching I found your program here and in minutes I had all 80 gigs back & lost nothing. You are awwwsome THANKS SOOO MUCH Mike
Comment by MrMike on May 11, 2010 9:35 am
Recently upgraded a Sony HXD-770 DVD recorder with a 500GB hard drive The old one was a 160GB, but had its capacity reduced to 120GB. Sony HXD-870 recorder is sold with 160GB capacity. They must use the same drive, but make it report only 120GB when in a HXD-770, and when in a PC. Used your program reset to full capacity, Thanks!
Comment by Con Hacon on May 12, 2010 4:56 pm
[...] Download und Infos hier: http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity [...]

Pingback by Gigabyte Bug: Gestern 1TB, heute 33Mb | Ionee.ch on May 20, 2010 5:30 pm
I have a Hitatchi 1Tb SATA HD that shows up in Win XP SP3 32bit as only 32mg Unformatted. Ran your program with no success because drive is not detected. Checked bios settings with no options to change between NORM,COMP,or LEGCY. Only options are Auto and Large. This is my only SATA drive, so its by itself on its own channel. OP is on IDE HD. Could you help?
Comment by LdVader on May 23, 2010 12:05 pm
I have a Hitatchi 1TB SATA HD on an XP SP3 32bit that only shows as a 32mb drive. I have no options in my bios to change to NORM,COMPAT,or LEGCY. Only options I have is either AUTO or LARGE. Jumpers are set to factory default. Drive is on its
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog own channel as master. OS is on a separate drive and IDE channel. My 1TB will not show up in your porgram. Any ideas or suggestions?
Comment by LdVader on May 23, 2010 8:52 pm
I have a gigabyte ga-965pdq6 and this has happened to me 3 times. Ive RMAd 3 WD Caviar Black TB drives. I found this thread after roaching the 3rd one. I downloaded the program to restore the drives capacity, but it does not see any of the drives.( I have 2 WD 1TB drives on matrix raid6.1 in raid 1.) I have already updated the BIOS to the most current for my MB.
Comment by Rick on May 24, 2010 4:24 am
I have a Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 1Tb Sata HD. After a power outage, the drive now shows up in both the BIOS and OS as only 32mb. I have alot of irreplacable data on it. My system is running Win XP SP3 32bit. Primary HD is on an IDE channel. My Hitachi is on its own SATA channel by itself. Mainboard is GA-K8NF-9(rev.2.0) nForce4(-4X) chipset. I tried to download the HDD Capacity Restore Tool, but the program doesnt see my SATA drive. I cant find any settings in my BIOS which will allow me to change my SATA config to Norm,Compat,or Legcy. The only option I have is either Auto, or LARGE. Both settings have the same results. What can I do to get the program to see my HD? Can anyone help? P.S. Sorry about the muliple posts. I check back for a relply and my post keep disappearing.
Comment by ldvader on May 25, 2010 8:58 am
thanks alot this utility is very good my WD HDD green 1TB was 33MB now 1TB thanks again for the help>>>>>>>>
Comment by khaled sallam on May 25, 2010 11:18 am
Thank you very much for this utility. My 1TB Western Digital hard drive had lots of irreplaceble data on it when it suddenly lost the capacity (down to 32MB). This was a secondary hdd with only data on it. When this happenned it showed as a 32MB unformatted drive in My Computer. After running your utility the drive not only was restored back to its original size, but all the data was still on there just as if nothing happend. Thank you, you have saved me from a major disaster.
Comment by JPJ on May 26, 2010 5:55 am
Hi, just found this site and was wondering if you have or are planning to have a 64 bit version of this software in the future as many systems are now running this version now. Many thanks in advance.
Comment by Larry Craig on May 31, 2010 3:40 pm
working 1tb WD back to me from 33mb RAW

Comment by Jeka on June 25, 2010 4:17 pm
Hey the tool is showing me the original capacity to be -2 Bytes. Some people have also had the same problem but you did not reply to them. Please tell me what problem it could be. Your help will be much appreciated. Thank You
Comment by Sohaib on July 15, 2010 6:02 pm
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog Hello, Ive a western digital hard drive 1.0 TB Model # WD10EADS .. ive a problem that in BIOS the hard drive model shows UNKNOWN & SIZE 0 MB . can i try this software ? the hard drive has a EXT3 Partition & Data on it does it harms my data or not ? please help me , i really badly want to backup my data as soon as possible . Thanks
Comment by zAm on July 18, 2010 7:12 am
Thank you sooo much!!! Your program just saved my life, literally. Losing 1.5TB data would be too devastating for me. Once again, thank you so very much!
Comment by Zack on July 27, 2010 1:22 pm
! SAMSUNG HD502HI (500 ) SAMSUNG: ES Tool 80 . 48- . . . : 1. NATIVE SIZE ( ) . 2. 48- Error. , HDD Capacity Restore Tool . .
Comment by Vasiliy, Ukraine on August 2, 2010 11:49 am
, SAMSUNG HD502HI (500 ). 2- : 1. IDE Windows XP Pro SP-3 MASTER, SATA SLAVE SAMSUNG HD502HI. 1. SATA-1 Windows XP Pro SP-3 MASTER, SATA-2 CABLE SELECT SAMSUNG HD502HI. , . . MHDD ( ), CONFIG . MHDD , ! !
Comment by Vasiliy, Ukraine on August 3, 2010 8:16 am
Hi. For those who cannot run this because they are running 64 bit windows, but you do have a copy of linux handy (even a live cd like knoppix should work), hdparm version 8.0 and higher will work for this. download the hdparm tar.gz file from sourceforge to your linux machine. tar ungzip -xf hdparm(version).tar.gz cd hdparm(version) make if receive errors, you may need to yum install gcc gcc-c++ to get a compiler going. if you still have errors, your linux kernel may be too out of date for the program now, from the same directory: ./hdparm -N /dev/(hard drive device) this will show you if youve got that damn HPA going on. it will also show you the true maximum number of sectors. then you can run: ./hdparm -Np### /dev/(hard drive device)
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog where ### is the maximum number of sectors as we found out previously. This will set your drive back to normal size. (hard drive device) may be sda, sdb, sdc, hda, hdb, hdc, etc, depending whether the drive is sata or ide, and depending which disk it is on the system.
Comment by Gabriel Ramuglia on August 7, 2010 5:26 pm
If I had a Tableau T5 with an IDE to SATA controller connected to it, and a SATA drive connected to that, and then wanted to use this software to detect the HPA and DCO areas, would it work? Now clearly with a write blocker, no changes to the HPA or DCO would be possible, but I am curious about how it would react. Stuart
Comment by Stuart on August 9, 2010 9:23 pm
How to set my harddrive sinlge on a channel. This question is asked several times, but i have not found an answer for this problem. Who can help me? THANKS!!! My harddrive has a sata connection
Comment by Danny on August 10, 2010 6:59 pm
Wonderful tool, after several hours of failing to restore data on my HDD I found this tool and it was like one click, power off, reboot and there it was. Working HDD with no data loss. Thank you so much.
Comment by Lobo on August 14, 2010 6:27 am
Thank you!!! Your tool saved my WD1001FALS and my WD15EADS (total value about $200), plus all the files on one of the disks. I lost the files on the other disk because I tried other tools on it before I discovered yours. Many thanks again!!!
Comment by Mike on August 25, 2010 8:49 pm
I think you are talking here about 2 different things: 1. recovering factory HDD capacity hoping to get more space than it is on the HDDs label ;) - this program HDD Capacity Restore Tool is really good 2. recovering HDD capacity lost due to usage of the disk - if your HDD shows less capacity then it should show as left for usage, then there are 2 things you can do to force the disk to show true free capacity. a) run software named Total Commander 7.5. In menu there is button named Configuration/ Options/ Display here click onto Show hidden/system files (for expert only!). If you click on it make Apply. Note: This action shows hidden files that you probably deleted in the past and those files take capacity off your HDD. Open your HDD in Total Commander by clicking onto name of the drive. If you see on your HDD folder named RECYCLER then enter it and delete as many files as you can. Probably you will not be able to delete the file named log but it makes no problem; it has small capacity. PS. Deleting the files from folder RECYCLER is safe because it is kind of HDDs trash basket. In this folder you may find the files you deleted in the past; just click on the random one to find out what I mean. PS2. These tips worked for me in 100%. Secondly, one tip: each disc before usage should be formatted in deep level,- it may take even few hours depending on the HDD capacity you format. This kind of format can help even to fix the disc in some cases. Mac from Poland
Comment by Mac from Poland on August 28, 2010 10:34 am
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog Brilliant! Thank you this saved my 1.5TB WD EARS drive when WD and Gigabyte were both useless.
Comment by Richard from Oz on August 29, 2010 8:37 am
I have downloaded your HD Capacity Restore 3 times. I tried to use it on Win& and Vista macines without success. It keeps telling me I have a driver error, and the next screen opens up and shows only one HD. I have at least three HD hooked up using USB. The one drive I want to recover was originally 200GB, but while I was reformating it we lost power and when I reformatted it only 132 GB is shown. Do you have any suggestions on how to install the program so it sees the drives hooked up via USB, and help me figure out how to get rid of the driver error problem. I hope you can help me. Thanks Bill Sheff
Comment by Bill Sheff on August 29, 2010 9:42 pm
Can I use MHDD to remove the Dynamic Drive Overlya from an old Maxtor HD without losing he data? Any suggestions on how to proceed? Thanks.
Comment by Bryan S on August 31, 2010 5:02 am
Hey Ive been going through hell trying to get my new 2.5 500g Seagate HD to work on my laptop. I brought this cloning program with attachment hardware to transfer all my info to my new hd, but what I didnt know was that cloning only transfers the original amount for my first hd which is only 60g. Now my 500g hd looks like 60g. I finally found your program but for some reason when I go to reset vaules on the new hd it keeps me from completing. Ive scanned to new hd for errors clean as can be. Ive even used the seagate disc wizard program and even that wont allow me to reset the hd capacity. Really confused but I know Im really close, PLEASE HELP!!!!!
Comment by Matthew G on August 31, 2010 8:19 am
Does anybody knows how to fix Raw Read Data Erros or what software to use for fixing ? thanks
Comment by mac on August 31, 2010 12:53 pm
I have an old Gateway laptop 4525GZ with an IDE WD250 HDD (I installed) that shows up as 127GB. Ive read many postings, showing a similar problem that I have. I cant use your application while the drive is in my laptop, so here are my questions: What is the best/easiest way to back this drive up before I pull it out and start messing with it? Will an interface on a desktop fit this 2.5 drive? Ive got an old PC that probably has an IDE interface.
Comment by Jim S on September 10, 2010 11:24 pm
Ive got a TB of data thats been lost to this missing capacity problem; the problem is Im on Windows 7 x64 and this tool isnt working for me is there any chance of a 64 bit version of this program being released?
Comment by S on September 12, 2010 4:54 am
thx bro workd 1st go !!! wooot

Comment by fat80y on September 17, 2010 11:14 am
oh it was : 1 TB seagate showing as 32mb
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog only a small change ! xp 32bit
Comment by fat80y on September 17, 2010 11:16 am
I attempted to launch Ghost 2003 to image a drive. The ghost software hung after the reboot when trying to launch in the singleuser mode. I attempted to launch it several times same result. After eventually getting my PC to reboot into Windows XP (SP3), I found the following damage: 1. The boot disk (160 GB IDE) would not boot properly (something appears to be wrong with the boot track). I attempted to fix with repair console (fixboot and fixmbr), but there is still a problem, but no data lost from this drive. 2. My 1 TB SATA drive had been resized to something ridiculously small (8 MB?). Windows reports it as RAW drive, and disk manager says it has no free space. Data recovery software cannot access the area which contains my data. I tried to reset the reported capacity with CapacityRestore.exe. It sees the true factory capacity, but gives an error when attempting to reset to factory capacity. I prefer not to do a low level format I want to try to recover data!
Comment by pppumkine on September 20, 2010 6:02 am
whats the purpose of the affhdd.sys driver ?

Comment by jmf on September 22, 2010 12:17 pm
this does not work with Windows 7

I have HDD Western Digital WD1001FALS, capacity 1Tb. After adding another hard drive and cleaning PC with vacuum cleaner, capacity was changed to 33Mb. BIOS and Windows XP found it as non-formatted drive with capacity 33Mb, file system raw. Your programm help me to restore the real capacity back. And the main there is no change to the information!!! I restore it all! Thank you very much!!! , !
Comment by Greatfull on October 6, 2010 10:12 am
Fucking amazing software. Thought my hdd was dead until this fixed the problem in a fucking minute! Thanks!
Comment by Phil Sullivan on October 7, 2010 3:47 am
Great utility. I had a clone your old HDD issue where the new HDD got all confused about how big it actually was. Mucked around with MBRs and so on for ages. Then I ran across this page and tried the HDD capacity restore. successful first time! Thank you very much. I got 500Gb back. Well done that man.
Comment by Jonathan on October 7, 2010 10:41 pm
Nice tool. It saved my data on a Samsung HD103UJ. After some partition operations (on another!! harddisks in my PC) my backup drive was unaccessible and had a size of 32MB. (Windows said this is a RAW partition.) I tried the original Samsung ES-Tool under DOS. This program can theoretically restore the factory size, but it FAILED. (Sector1 ID not found or similar.) Yes the __tool from the manufacturer__ was not able to correct this issue. My luck was, that I dont manipulated this 32MB partition. (Because the trial versions of the recovery tools doesnt support write.) So, I tried this Atola tool, and it worked by me and saved my important data. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!
Comment by Peter on October 9, 2010 4:10 pm
I tried Acronis TI 2009 and DriveImage XML. I think the first program made this problem. (Of course im not sure.) Several sources reported never corrected bugs in TrueImage.
Comment by Peter on October 9, 2010 4:19 pm
Hi Ive just trashed Vista on my laptop, hope your tools will help Im assuming some sort of floppy disk image will allow boot up tools to be accessed. Patrick
vou testar tenho um Hd samsung que recohece apenas 31Gb mais nativamente ele 80Gb, j verifiquei o jumper e est correto I have a test that will recognize only samsung Hd 31GB 80GB it is more natively, and Ive checked the jumper is correct
Comment by marcio on October 10, 2010 11:33 pm
[...] Download HDD Capacity Restore v1.2 Capacity restore [...]

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I could not get this program to work for me; I could not get my HDs to show up on the list when I ran the program, no matter what BIOS settings I tweaked. ButI would like to pass on a tip that did help me. My hard drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 250GB that was only reporting the infamous 30GB or so. I found a tool on the Hitachi website called Feature Tool. http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/ I used it to change the drive capacity to maximum capacity, and now I can see the lost area as an unallocated section of the HD! Still need to alter the partitions, but its a start!
Comment by Randall on October 18, 2010 6:03 pm
Hello, I cant believe it. I have a WD caviar green of 1Tb, and it has only worked for a week. After that, it has become of 32Mb. All systems (bios, windows,linux etc) only could see that 32Mb. But, ZAS! thanks to this marvelous application I have recover all the missing space. Thank you very much for this magic application !!!!!!
Comment by Mkronik on October 25, 2010 8:57 pm
Thank You So Much !!!! I Have A Dell Inspiron E1705 Laptop And I Replaced The Factory 60G HD With A 250G. I Used Norton Ghost 14 To Back Up Old Drive. I Installed The New Drive, And When Ghost Tried To Restore Onto The New Drive, The Software Just Locked Up. After A Few Tries At The Restore, I Gave Up And Decided To Installed A Fresh Copy Of Windows. I Stopped The OS Install When I Noticed The New Drive Was Now Only 60G Not 250G. I Used Every Tool I Could Locate To Try And Fix This Problem To No Avail. I Took A Chance And Installed Windows On The 60G Partition, Figuring I Could Fix The Problem With The OS Installed. This Tool Worked Perfectly! I Used A Desktop Computer Running Winxp Pro, And After A Few Reboots To Get My New Laptop HD Connected On A Separate SATA Channel From The Boot Drive As Per The Instructions In The Program. I Then Had To Disable The Laptop Hard Drive In Device Manager Also As Per The Instructions In The Program. I Ran This Tool And Presto The Additional Space Showed Up! Then I Used Partition Magic On My Desktop To Make The Entire Drive As 1 250G Partition. I
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog Returned The New Drive To My Laptop, And All Is Working Well. Thanks Again For Such A Great Tool !!!
Comment by Carl Wittig on November 8, 2010 6:25 pm
VERY VERY BIG THANKS!!!! Your program is best solution! Hitachi support is SUXX
Comment by Serge on November 9, 2010 11:39 am
When I attempt to use HDD Capacity Restore, it tells me the drive is in use and should be removed manually. I have done that and rebooted. The drive shows as not being in use under Device Manager, but I still receive the program message that it is in use. What can I do?
Comment by Colin on November 10, 2010 10:30 pm
HUGE THANKS FOR THE TOOL! For those with the device is in use problem just go to Device Manager and remove/uninstall the affected HDD. Close the tool and then re-run it as administrator since I found that not explicitly selected Run as Administrator caused the information in the tool to be all jibberish. After that just try and run it again and all should work and then power off. Note that I had to power off again manually for it to be properly detected since it was reading 1TB RAW instead of NTFS Confirmed and works with Windows Vista 32bit and HDD works when shoved back into my original Windows 7 machine which couldnt run the tool.
Comment by Evan on November 14, 2010 2:01 pm
Also having the WD Caviar Green 1TB > 32MB problem. Downloaded tool, but will not run on Win 7/64. Error appears Error opening driver. No other information or useful tips click OK, and then all drives show as a set of garbage characters and are Security: Locked, Maximum. Not sure how to proceed is there a new version forthcoming? Tnx!
Comment by Tim on November 16, 2010 4:01 am
Same problem as Colin I am using Win XP and have tried uninstalling the drive same error
Comment by Overlord on November 16, 2010 5:31 am
After going crazy tring to get the program to work about a month ago I tried 1 last time before I was going to format the drive and it WORKED!!! So happy now :D
Comment by Overlord on November 16, 2010 5:48 am
Thanks! I was losing my nerves with WD Caviar Green and this great tool solved all problems.
Comment by Vince on November 20, 2010 5:04 pm
It doesnt work with my western digital external hard drive. can some one help me?
Comment by hard drive restore on November 21, 2010 10:53 pm
Thank you so much. I have now been able to restore my 160GB WD HDD to its full capacity.

Comment by Eric on November 22, 2010 7:55 pm
I am looking actually the very opposite! I have 3 bricks of 750GB Seagate 7200.12 series HDDs. I made a RAID 0 set with them. But the total capacity reached 57GB more of the 2TB limit. Not only partitioning problems, here god bless WDCs latest Acronis HDD tool, which supports over the 2TB limit + Raid 0 + divided 2 or more partitions on greater than 2TB partitions, but this time I have more specific issues with Windows XP. > I DONT WANT TO USE THAT 57GB ON WINDOWS XP, I WANT TO DISMISS (DO NOT WANT TO SHOW) 19GB FROM EACH HDD! HOW CAN I DO THAT? < Can anyone help me, how to hide desired much of capacity for each HDD for not to pass the 2TB limit! This is something like a 32GB or 128GB capacity jumper setting with software this time. Thanks for all readers
Comment by Cemal on November 23, 2010 2:43 pm
Man, thank you so much for the tool and the information! Worked like a charm. Thanks again!
Comment by Vladik on November 26, 2010 11:17 pm
Thank you so much for all of this info and the Capacity Restore tool! I just spent about a day trying to figure out why my brand spanking new WD1001FALS (Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB) was showing up in my BIOS and in XP as a mere 32MB drive. I thought it was a BIOS error for most of the day since my mobo is pretty old (but the BIOS has been updated) and I was really hoping the problem wasnt a defective HDD. I am so happy and relieved that this has been resolved prior any expensive/unnecessary upgrading or me hulking-out on my computer. Again, thank you so much!!!
Comment by pantsonfire on November 27, 2010 8:30 pm
VERY VERY BIG THANKS!!!!

Comment by salim on November 28, 2010 7:03 am
hey man, the software can only detect my internal drive and not my external i-omega 1tb which i need to restore the capacity of?? ? can u help me with this pls i seriously need to restore the capacity and restore and recover the data from the drive.. thanx in advance 4 the help.!!!!
Comment by thegrandmaster on December 13, 2010 12:04 pm
Hello DP, When i burned estool and the lba mode is disable/off i cannot turn it on it says busy not clear i have a samsung hd161hj..
Comment by juan tamad on December 17, 2010 1:52 am
Dmitri, there is a great need for a utility like this. After much searching, this is the first site that actually described and dealt with the protected partition/table problem. My problem is that at the moment I only have two laptops to work with. So the disk drive in question is tethered to the other machine via USB, and HDDCR does not load the USB drivers. The only possibility that I can see it to find a desktop with which to work, on somehow to get HDDCR onto a boot disk and work from the optical drive. Thanks, p.
Comment by Paul B. on December 21, 2010 6:48 pm
Hello, First of all I think this is a genius of a tool, and well done to all those who have succeeded with it. I just get the message that there is no error to fix. The manufacturers setting is 1000 GB and so is the actual capacity. Im reading 931.51MB unallocated still. Any advice for me please? Thanks Paul
Comment by Paul on December 27, 2010 6:17 pm
[...] Try this utilityhttp://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory- [...]

Pingback by What Went Wrong My new 1TB HDD is only showing 288GB that I can use | Computers and digital electronic Q & A on December 30, 2010 12:30 pm
For a samsung drive in a Windows 7 64 bit setup, I was unable to this program. However I found a solution by following the steps recomended here: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm? t=1069572&p=-1#bottom
Comment by Krz on January 28, 2011 12:09 am
I have a WD 1Tb wd10eacs. Today, my computer detected only 33Mbs and asked to format the drive! With this guide I recovered the drive and all of my data was intact (50Gbs of photos). Saved my life! Thanks!
Comment by memhiss on February 10, 2011 3:28 am
Tools is simple bur powerful ,, thanks it works on my 1TB wd..

Comment by Herson on February 10, 2011 4:14 pm
When I click on Restore Capacity I get the following message : Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered. Please try run this program on another platform.
Comment by Paul on February 16, 2011 10:11 am
thanks
Comment by cn on March 12, 2011 10:25 am
Hi, I have a vaio laptop which came with a stock 500gb harddrive. Not sure why the laptop is only seeing 288gb now. Everytime I try to factory install it, it keeps saying error can not restore from this disk or something. What happened to the other 200gb storage?? Is this tool free to download and will it restore my 288gb hdd back to 500gb???
Comment by Crash on April 7, 2011 11:40 pm
hi guys, i am having the same problem as some other guys up here, who dont get a clear answer. i get the message Hard drive is not accessible or damage in some way. Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform\
i dont even know what this means. could some one please help me, i have some impotant stuff in this hard drive and i cannot lose. HELP PLEASE!!
Comment by Anonymous on April 13, 2011 1:16 pm
hi guys, i am having the trouble with my 1tb samsung showing up as 32mb, like some other guys up here, whom dont get really clear solution. when i use the HD capacity restore tool the following message shows up. Hard drive is not accessible or damage in some way. Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform. i have some very important stuff in that hard drive and i just cant loose it all. could someone PLEASE HELP!!!!
Comment by Zak on April 13, 2011 1:20 pm
This tool is amazing!! My 1T disk only showed 32mb in bios and system suddenly, today i restored capacity by this tool, ITS DONE!!! My date all safe and sound also!!! Thanks!!!!!!
Comment by TT on April 24, 2011 8:32 am
Thanks a lot. Nice program. My WD10EALS only showed 32MB, and now it shows 1TB, all data are safe also :D
Comment by ben on May 3, 2011 5:33 pm
Thanks!!, I have problems with a Samsung 1TB only showed 30 MB (after a data-destructive test), with this utility its 1TB again :) (Desktop PC, HD internal-secondary, Win XP SP3, I first disable the HD in the device manager to allow the utility to work).
Comment by Condor0086 on May 4, 2011 2:39 am
Thanks Heaps. My new WD10EARS only showed 32MB and this tool restored it to 1T easily. Seems many people have had similar problem from my Google searching.
Comment by epacor on May 5, 2011 7:19 am
Thanks, worked very well. I had the problem with my GigaByte motherboard with an outdated BIOS. Accidentially attempting to boot from the Caviar Green 1TB drive I had bought nuked the drive and made it only show 33MB. I didnt get my data back by using this problem, but thats no problem, just glad to have it work.
Comment by Alexander on May 9, 2011 1:25 pm
Thanks. And I had the problem with my GigaByte motherboard and with the Caviar Green 1TB drive. It only show 33MB.
Comment by Lynx on May 23, 2011 7:42 pm
[...] [...]
Pingback by Anonymous on June 9, 2011 11:26 am
Hi I have a Hp Laptop, 120G SATA HD and 2Gb Ram. I wanted to repartition it to install it a linux OS. I partitioned it in 100G NTFS and 20G ext3 with a Partition Magic 8. Then I decided to free space to the NTFS partition to give it some more to the recovery partition HP installs on each laptop has around 1.5G. Then I used a Bootable Active Partitioner and did exactly what I mentioned
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog before. I resized the 100G partition to 85G. Then I created with the rest of 15G a new partition. I didnt format it but after creation it turned in to a FAT32 by itself, the n I tried to deleted and it didnt . Then I decided to deleted the 85G NTFS in order to make it both just one again. The Active Partitioner didnt read the HD again. I tried to boot it with partition magic 8 again but it says there was no installed HD. I checked it with Win98SEs Fdisk and it only showed the ext3 partition, I mean there was 85G lost. I reinstalled the whole system with an Original HPs manufactures CD. When it was done I could tell the HD was only 115G. I mean, even though it recovered that lost partition, 6G were still lost. My questions are the following : Can I get those 6G back again with HDD Capacity Restore Too l? How can I do it with just a single HD ? I read above that its possible to remove it and attach it to a desk top . Can I do this ? How ? Have in mind its the laptops is a sata one and I have two sata ports in my desktops main board.
Comment by Charles on June 9, 2011 11:39 pm
Hi, I have a Samsung HD103UJ 1TB, that was only reporting 33mb in the BIOS. I have WIN 7 x64 and I have VirtualBox with XP sp3 x86. My question is whether this program HDD Capacity Restore working on a virtual machine?
Comment by NeoRegis on June 17, 2011 11:54 am
Thanks program worked well on a Windows Vista hard drive that we put in an old motherboard and it set 1TB to 33Mb. Ran the program and restored to 1Tb and all back to normal. Thanks, heaps
Comment by Glenn Allen on June 23, 2011 4:01 am
[...] [...]
Pingback by Windows Xp Hardeschijf Crash - Pagina 4 on June 25, 2011 11:40 pm
Hello thank you for the site, its the only place on the web that seems useful to fix my problem, but its still above my head. I am running win XP, I just bought a Samsung HD 103sj terabyte hard drive and its showing up as a 127 gig hard drive. I tried running the program but it tells me that the device is currently in use and cannot be removed. Someone on here said to remove/uninstall my hard drive through device manager? This is my c-drive, windows is running on it, if I uninstall it, how will I get anywhere? I dont understand. Does the program need to be on a different hard drive and it cant be on my c-drive for it to work?
Comment by Pierre on July 6, 2011 5:24 am
Still have not resolved my problem, but I just found out that if my hard drives file system is formatted as FAT32 it would prevent my computer from reading my hard drive as a terabyte and that I need to switch or reformat my hard drive to NTFS, does that seem to makes sense to anyone out there? I have a compact evo w6000 and just tried to install a samsung HD 103 sj terabyte drive that reads as 127 gig.
Comment by Pierre on July 6, 2011 8:59 pm
I just tried the tool but because its my C: drive (in a laptop) its constantly in use and cannot be removed from Windows for the restore tool to work. So Im still stuck.
Comment by Dan on July 11, 2011 10:26 pm
Not at all impressed. It seems to be very picky and appears to work in very simple situations. One drive on one channel. Drive cant be locked which is normal but cant unlock drive on laptop, Doesnt recognize USB drives must be connected to system bus. Im glad it works for those of you with simple problems that could be fixed by other means but this tool doesnt work when other tools dont.

Comment by Dan on July 16, 2011 3:45 pm
I cant run this tool on Win7 x64. :(

Comment by Jarrod on July 17, 2011 4:03 pm
So I was wondering. I have an older computer (not super old) with a bios that probably doesnt support over 137 gig drives (thats what it shows up as in my computer). But a drive that I want to use that is bigger than that. Can I use your tool to restore capacity? Or do I need to update bios (if I can) and THEN use the tool if it shows up as 137 gigs ?
Comment by question on August 7, 2011 6:38 pm
Very good tool.. I have used it to restore my 40gb harddrive which showed only 20gb in the bios it works well and now i get back the full 40gb capacity thanks.
Comment by Senthikumar on August 19, 2011 3:52 pm
Hi, the issue of a WD 1Tb drive shrinking to 32Mb happened to me a few days ago and the usual panic of losing data stepped in until I discovered your tool. However, the 1st thing is that though the BIOS and windows reported 32mb, your tool reported the original size less 1mb (drive difference). I applied your tool, shutdown for a few mins and restarted. The Bios now reads 1000Gb but windows still reads 32mb and no data to be seen. I ran the tool again and it reported that the drives full capacity is available but disk management says otherwise. Please help.
Comment by sdazzell on August 19, 2011 10:11 pm
9YuZIp http://wnbUj5n0mXqpcvm27Hms.biz
Comment by joseph on August 24, 2011 4:05 am
thanks a lot.it suites my problem about HDD error:-)

Comment by John Riel Manatiga on August 26, 2011 4:41 am
Im a developer/computer scientist and I deeply appreciate your job as it literally saved my life. Thank you and God bless you.
Comment by N on September 3, 2011 2:08 pm
Hi there, Ive just taken a 120GB drive out of my defunct Compaq 6630 laptop put it into a caddy, but have a problem: my desktop running on 7 sees the new drive as Vista (F:) but with only 6GB, and none of my old files I thought were there.. Have tried to run your HDD Capacity Restore as I thought maybe I was only getting access to a protected partition, but get message error opening driver. Any suggestions how to resolve? Many many thanks in advance, David
Comment by David Thomas on September 6, 2011 10:09 pm
This program is magical. It runs within Windows, yet did something no other program I tried could; It actually restored my hard drives factory capacity. For anyone with this problem, I suggest trying this first. It was so easy, just one click. You can read more about my experience here: http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f16/solved-seagate-barracuda-32gb-limit-599363-3.html The two pages before that explain my futile attempts at doing it with other programs.
Comment by Russell on September 20, 2011 10:39 pm
HDD Capacity Restore Tool works.Thanks.It restore back my Hitachi MK5065GSX 500gb from 32gb. limit capacity.Thanks
Comment by cat ram on September 23, 2011 6:25 pm
[...] you could install a SATA card to use the SATA hard drive.Powered by Yahoo! AnswersRelated BlogsKen asksCan an ATA6 notebook hard drive be used to replace an EIDE drive?Going from an EIDE 40GBebook hard drive be used to replace an EIDE drive?Going from an EIDE 40GB drive to ATA-6 160GB.admin [...]
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Thank You! It helped me with my Seegate 1T!

Comment by ordinary man on October 14, 2011 9:45 pm
BlueNet device [...]Atola Technology Archive Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity[...]
Trackback by Automatic Voice Alarm Notification System on October 16, 2011 2:12 pm
Just Finished using this tool. About the problem: For some reason, brand new WD 1TB HD was 32Mb capacity only. After installation of HDD Capacity Restore Tool, it detects that the Hard Drive is not original capacity and fixed it. Many Thanks!
Comment by Yuri Abelev on October 16, 2011 11:55 pm
[...] It actually gives instructions on the hard-drive papers. After you buy it.Powered by Yahoo! AnswersKen asksI bought the Xbox 360 kinect 4GB 3 days ago at target, is it possible to exchange it for content">I bought the Xbox 360 kinect 4GB 3 days ago at target, is it possible to exchange it for a [...]
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Thank you so much i messed up my 80GB seagate IDE harddrive today and found your tool after using it i got an error message said please remove from device manger only i did serveral times and finally my hard drive was set to it max HD settings to 80GB just want to say Thanks alot very happy and keep up the work Thanks Dan
Comment by Dan Reilly on November 11, 2011 4:51 am
Hello. I bout a Samsung 1TB HD103UJ a year ago and have worked fine so long until I tried to format and suddently became a 132GB disk. tried to use Samsung Estool.exe to recover original size with no success. My system has Windows 7 and motherboard AsRock AM2NF3-VSTA http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=AM2NF3-VSTA. Can anybody help me? Thanks
Comment by Domingo on November 25, 2011 1:50 pm
I had 2 160 gig laptop drives that suddenly decided to become 60 gig drives. It was driving me CRAZY. Your utility worked perfectly. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
Comment by Ralph Posmontier on November 29, 2011 6:59 am
Thank you. You saved my day. 60+ % of drive space was missing.
Comment by Anonymous on December 14, 2011 12:15 am
Ugh. I am having hell trying to just use this program. The disk I want to fix is always in use by the operating system no matter what services or programs I disable. I disable in XP device manager, and I must reboot, then XP just auto-reinstalls the driver for the disk and I get In use again. Tried in safe mode but cant use the program in safe mode. I tried installing xp to another machine but it only has 1 IDE channel, so I am stuck yet again. I have tried for 8 hours just to get your damn program to be able to work! Ugh! Isnt there a way to run this program as a standalone .exe or in safe mode?!
Comment by Bruce on December 21, 2011 2:04 am
Hi Just recovered a samsung story station 2 hard drive. Bought it as a 2 TB drive but it has only been 930 GB for the last year and a half. 2 mins with your software and it is 2TB again. You are a bloody legend whose face should be printed on money. Doug
Comment by Doug on January 2, 2012 3:11 pm
I wanted to thank you VERY MUCH for your posted free HDD Capacity Restore program. Drive worked perfectly for 5 years until last week. I spent at least 20-30 hours on my own and with various tech supports, no one had the correct answer. Even Western Digital support had no tool to restore my drive to the original size! However, knowing it was a size reporting issue rather than corruption helped me word my Google Search and voila, I found your software. It was simple and solved the problem! Is there somewhere I can donate something as a thank you? In performing a back up I received many error messages in my log: Failed to copy source: Cannot copy file (23): Data error (cyclic redundancy check). The ones I checked so far are all mp3 files and when I go to play the originalcontinued Note in
Comment by ROBERT BOKOR on January 11, 2012 12:28 am
Installed your program, but when I start it, all it says is Please select the drive, but there is nothing to select? Help!
Comment by Scott G on January 16, 2012 6:39 am
HI, Cloned a Dell 60g laptop drive onto a 120g drive. now the new drive reads as 58g. Installed the new drive in dell desktop. The software sees the new drive and the boot drive. When I select the new drive, not the boot drive, it says that it is in use and manually remove from device manager. This does not work, as you need to reboot and xp re-installs the drive. I tried re-powering the drive, live without success. Any more suggestions? Thanks, Richard
Comment by Richardd on January 29, 2012 6:39 pm
If it reports you to manually remove from devise manager, go into devise manager and remove drivers there. Or do as i did and close program and reopen and click on devise again. It removed it for me. And yes it really works!! Thank you!! I recovered a 120gb and 320gb westeren digital both reported 32gb
Comment by Bugman7410 on February 6, 2012 7:28 am
[...] solution uses the Atola Technology HDD Restore Capacity Tool to fix the firmware use with caution! Answered by [...]
Pingback by Can I change HDD cylinders value? on February 9, 2012 6:05 am
thanks free sofware..! i have problem with my hardisk capacity, my hardisk 250 G but free capacity 0 byte
Comment by rudy on February 20, 2012 6:56 am
Why version for Win 7 64bit cannot be developped? Nowadays almost everybody using this OS.
Comment by 123 on March 27, 2012 12:49 am
Any updates on the error opening driver bug on the 64-bit Windows OSs?
Comment by Werner on April 9, 2012 12:49 pm
I tried the HHD tool and it work fine. I left the hard drive in the laptop and boot from dvd/cd drive. The program loaded and I selected the change drive capicity and it work. Next, the new drive created a partition that was using the lost space. You have to go to adminstration tools/disk management and extend the partition to the primary drive. E-mail me for further instruction.
Comment by John on April 18, 2012 6:26 am
I downloaded a free Click Cleaner program in my brothers laptop without knowing properely how to do it and what was it exactely supposed to happen, then the laptop stoped ,then I turned it on and on a black screan appeared press F11, which I actually did without knoing what thats mean, but later started some factory settings in proces which (alarmed) it couldnt be stoped at all even if I pressed the stop buton or tryed to unplug the laptop. It just kept continuing its process. So , in the end it reinstaled the Vista windows, but what is worse is that there are no programs anymore and all my brothers very important informations from hard disks dissapeared completely, the hard disks being totally erased. Is there something that could be done in order to fix this problem and recover everything he lost ? With all due respect. Serban
Comment by Ion serban on May 1, 2012 5:34 pm
THANKS! Your program solved my problem with Samsung HM250JI 250GB HDD showing only 128GB on Xp Pro SP3. All genius things are like this, very simple and effective!
Comment by Niper on May 9, 2012 3:21 pm
hi thanks I used your tool but there was a small problem: it make 6 ntfs partition to 1 raw partition ba 9800 Gig size can i restore my data and my partitions?
Comment by afshin on May 13, 2012 10:09 am
hi thanks I used your tool but there was a small problem:
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog it make 6 ntfs partition to 1 raw partition ba 9800 Gig size can i restore my data and my partitions? afshinslami@yahoo.com
Comment by afshin on May 13, 2012 10:17 am
Is there any way to clean the bad sectors in my hard drive? Thanks for this info!
Comment by Burn Xbox 360 Games on May 16, 2012 4:04 am
my hdd 160 gb samsung 0 bite

Comment by shamim on May 22, 2012 9:38 pm
My 3TB Seagate GoFlex Home disk was no longer recognise by his adapter base. Due to some external manipulations, he report a lost of some 120MB from his original capacity. After running your software, the drive his OK and everything runs perfectly. Thanks for this great tools.
Comment by ampinto on May 30, 2012 8:57 am
[...] ersten Ergebnisseite der google-Suche habe ich diesen Thread gefunden, in dem auf der ersten Seite diese Seite mit einem "HDD Capacity Restore Tool" verlinkt ist. Methode: ich habe mir das erste [...]
Pingback by Anonymous on July 9, 2012 10:00 pm
Hi, Just want to double check that this software will work on a Seagate 7200.12 ST31000524AS which has the same issue. the only reason I ask is that this blog post dates from 2007 and were now in 2012. many thanks Alex
Comment by Alzoo on July 23, 2012 5:18 pm
I tried running this on a windows 7 64Bit, it ran, however stated it was missing a driver and showed the driver on each sata channel. Can anyone confirm if this works with Win 7 or 64bit for that matter. thanks again. Alex
Comment by Alzoo on July 24, 2012 4:36 pm
Thank you very much My new HDD Seagate Barracuda 1000 gigabytes only had 32 megabytes! After a long search the Internet I found your program and everything is OK..thank you very much..
Comment by Yarda on July 31, 2012 9:53 pm
Hi . thanks for your great job and help i have a 1TB Western Digital HDD and it suddenly turned a 31 MB partition , however i did a stupid action as i formatted this new small partition .. will that affect the work of the program? do i have to do something else? or will it work perfectly also will the recovered hard disk come back with the same partitions as it were before this whole thing happened ? Thanx alot . and have a nice day
Comment by jack on August 16, 2012 3:20 am
I can say it runs fine on Windows Server 2008 R1 x32 (Vista base). Fixed my 2TB WD2002FAEX (WD Black) which was reporting 1TB. Now it is back to a 2TB drive and running fine. Suggest an update to support 64 bit soon as it is getting hard to find 32 bit machines these days. Thanks, great product.
Comment by Gary on September 4, 2012 12:22 pm
To add something to the helpful comment of Gabriel R. (August 7, 2010 5:26 pm) I even had cases when this hdparm option FAILED. There is still one way out to restore your hard drive to factory settings. If possible by any way, PLEASE MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR DATA FIRST. Then do this: # hdparm yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing dco-restore /devsd[whatever] (could be /dev/sdb, or /dev/sdc etc, it depends on your setup) Use-case: my Samsung HD400LD. I was stupid enough in assuming it could be made faster (from UDMA/100 to UDMA/133) by using Samsungs HUTIL! I ended up with a drive unusable on native controller (worked fine on external PCI card). This was the only way out, because HUTIL did no longer recognize my drive.
Comment by Andreas E. on September 16, 2012 2:22 am
ive installed the tool & opened it. select drive Channel #1, slave: WDC WD10EACS-00D6B0 ..Serial: WD-WCAU41863976 size: 33 MB ok i click on/select it & i get a pop up more than one device is detected on the channel with the selected device the device has to be single on the channel
Comment by Brett G on November 3, 2012 2:17 am
i have a new WD 1T HDD installed. its saying 19.2MB Free of 28.9MB ? i tried formating & disc clean up in my properties but will not change i have norton partition magic 8.0 but its incompatible with W7 Ultimate 32bit how can i re-format it to get my full 1T
Comment by Brett G on November 3, 2012 2:21 am
Thanks! this utility saved a HD full of data. I had plugged it into another machine to restore a Ghost image sadly the machine had a Gigabyte motherboard. You know the rest. Thanks again!
Comment by Wizard Prang on November 20, 2012 5:06 am
Does it work on ssds?

Comment by Fuji on December 8, 2012 12:07 am
I have a samsung 830 256GB ssd. I migrated my partions from my 100GB hdd. 4 partions. 2 were dells hidden restore partions and the 2 others were active OS and a storage partions. I used Norton ghost to migrate them. Everything was ok at this point. Disk manager showed the 4 partions i migrated plus the unallocated space left.
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog I then restored the OS back to using Dell restore function,which was Norton Ghost using the hidden partions. After the restore was done eveything woeked except my ssd capacity went from 238GB to the 100GB. Exactly the same as the old hhd. Disk manager shows the 4 partions i copied but now it doesnt show any unallocated space. So i basically have a 100GB ssd now. My compter runs XP media edition 2005. Sp2. Showed the full capacity before i restored it. Does this program work on ssd?
Comment by Fuji on December 8, 2012 1:23 am
[...] the most probable issue for my situation could be that the Gigabyte motherboards bug of accidentally adjusting the HDDs Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) while trying to create a Hduring the failure. It is no wonder both my BIOS and Operating System (OS) now report a wrong size [...]
Pingback by Fixing the 1TB Hard Disk Reporting as 32MB via 64-bit Windows 8 | omg0sh~ on December 17, 2012 6:58 pm
Great Tool I had a Toshiba laptop hard drive mk5076GSx 500GB hard drive that only showed up as 50gb this happened after installing the drive into a laptop that couldnt accept the full size somehow this truncated the drive into only being detected and using 50GB somehow this set the max address to a small number of sectors. On my XP Dell desktop this tool wouldnt run because it said that it was sharing a sata channel with the OS drive so I grabbed a server from work (with SAS drives), installed windows 7 on it, connected the single sata port to the toshiba drive and the power from a different workstation to the toshiba sata power connector (server didnt have a separate sata power connector) and then ran the program with compatibility and runas administrator then finally this awesome tool restored my drives capacity to 500GB. THANK YOU!!!!
Comment by Jason on December 31, 2012 4:34 pm
You my friend are a saviour! 1TB HDD recovered after showing 32mb in a matter of minutes!! I have bookmarked this page and do all I can to support. Thank you Again!
Comment by Robert on January 12, 2013 12:53 am
For those of you with Win7 (32 or 64 bit) you can download the SeaTools for DOS from Seagate support downloads and burn an ISO CD, boot to CD and rund Advanced Features. Select Set Capacity to MAX Native, then reboot as normal. I only used that method because I dont have an older version of Windows that is 32bit. I hope either method works for you. Good Luck
Comment by Workaround on January 14, 2013 7:20 am
This tool worked great! Thanks Dmitry.

Comment by Geoff on January 25, 2013 8:44 pm
thanks a lot sir for providing this tool.

Comment by SivaRamaKrishna on March 16, 2013 8:07 am
[...] zijn met de nodige hardware. Misschien is dat met deze schijven ook gebeurt. Kijk hier even naar; Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog Met citaat [...]
Pingback by schijf geef niet juist volume - Pagina 2 on April 14, 2013 9:27 pm
. . . !

Comment by Alex on April 17, 2013 8:31 am
[...] the drive firmware known as the LBA48, HPA and DCO records becomes corrupted.This solution uses the Atola Technology HDD Restore Capacity Tool to fix the firmware use with caution as it can brick the disk!If the disk is still under [...]
Pingback by USB Drive Not Showing Full Size | Click & Find Answer ! on April 19, 2013 12:39 pm
thank you it,s better then any hard disk repair software
Comment by subham karmakar on April 22, 2013 1:20 pm
I have harddisk drive wd5000bmvv. They are 500Gb but report to pc 120Gb. I want to restore capacity to 500Gb I think it about DCO (Device Configuration Overlay). This model have only usb interface. no SATA. program name MHDD does not support usb. How can I do?
Comment by tiger jinkuchi on April 28, 2013 11:47 pm
you really saved my life. all my files are back, 10q so much.
Comment by saved my life on May 11, 2013 11:05 pm
i have 2 partitions: Local Disk(C) == normal total capacity: 29.2 GB free space: 2.19 GB ================================================= Local Disk(D) == problem Now: total capacity: 5.00 GB free space: 1.83 GB BEfoRE the PRobem: total capacity: 45+ GB free space: 3+ GB =========================================================== Intel(R) 82501GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) serial ATA Storage Controller 27CO Channel #0, master: Hitachi HDS721680PLA380 Serial: PVG804ZLR7E68V Size: 80 GB Security: Not locked IT SHOWS correct disk CAPACITY & IT pop up a message: More than one device is detected on the channel with the selected device The device has to be single on a channel HEEEEELP PLEEEESE!!!!!!!
Comment by PERICOPALOTII on May 14, 2013 9:00 am
[...] Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology [...]

Pingback by restoring hard drive | Win Phone Pro on July 10, 2013 6:09 pm
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Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity Official Atola Technology Blog

July 19th, 2007