Hard drive displaying wrong size (1 Viewer)

[Jassen M. West]

I have a 20GB hard drive that a co-worker can't get to read higher than 128MB. I tried using partition magic to see if it was partitioned that way. As partition magic starts up i get and error message.

"Disk 2 appears to have partitions created using a different drive geometry. This serious problem can lead to data loss. No partition manipulations should be made using this product or the operating system products"
the file system shows up as BADMBR

any suggestions

 

[Chun Lam]

Have you gone into the BIOS and set the parameters of the drive (i.e. how many cylinders, sectors etc?) I'd try auto first, but if that doesn't work, see if setting the drive on the bus to manual and input the associated parameters.


Hope this helps.

 

[John_Berger]

MBR is the Master Boot Record. It holds information regarding how to boot the operating system from that drive. It should not have any impact if the drive if not used for being a boot drive. I am much more concerned about the 128 MB detection.

Definitely check for an Auto setting in the BIOS/CMOS. If it's not there, most hard drive manufacturers list the necessary parameters for manually entering it into the BIOS on the top of the hard drive. Make sure, if you are forced to do it manually, that you use LBA (Logical Block Addressing) as the mode for communicating with the hard drive. Hopefully you won't need to do that, though.

If the BIOS has an Auto option but it still cannot read the drive size, you either have a very outdated BIOS or the hard drive circuitry is not working properly.

 

[Jeff Blair]

I have seen that before. I had to use a program caled MaxBlast to get the HD back to full. You might be able to use partition magic to do it, but I'm not sure. Like everyone here said, make sure that AUTO is set in the BIOS. It should show you what it thinks the HD is. Good luck.

 

[Jassen M. West]

Thanks for the help. I tried all of your suggestions. Pointing me in the direction of maxblast led me to think about Western Digital's version of maxblast. I downloaded it and used it to format the drive. (WD's DataLife tools looks exactly the same as maxblast.) I now have a free 20GB drive. My co-worker told me I could keep it.

thanks again