[dirtyharry]

Hi ,

I have a problem that I am trying to sort out, I have googled and searched far and wide for a solution but to no avail.

My house mate presented me with his 120GB Toshiba hard drive that had mysteriously bit the dust. he says that it "just went dead". So I got out my trusty toolkit (Winternals ERD, Acronis disk recovery, WinHEX, Format recovery..etc) the lot !! All that I could see initially was that the drive was in RAW format. Odd ..! "i thought". So I asked him if he had formated the disk ? "No" "he said". Being a trusting soul I believe him . So I get out the FormatRecovery software and do the `clicky clicky` thing, and after a while some 40GB of NTFS partition shows itself. Where is the other 80 GB? I wonder to myself. So I load up WinHEX and check out the MBR and boot.ini etc , nothing. The disk is convinced that it is 32GB. Now this sounds a familiar, thinking back to the day when win98 walked the face of the Earth, devouring files and generally being beastly. So I check the BIOS (shouldn`t have to but hey) and the settings are fine, autodetect should see me right, LBA is enabled all should be cool. Not so!!

So the problem is how to get at this drive space. I am almost completed saving all the files from the disk, so disk formating is now an option. I somehow feel that this will not help any. I would appreciate input from anyone who may have experience dealing with kind of issue.


Thanks.

Edited by dirtyharry, 04 May 2006 - 09:20 PM.

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This is pointing to a drive hardware issue. Normally if a drive's decided it's only 32Gb big (and you of course haven't moved any drive capacity jumpers to tell the drive otherwise) when it was 120Gb previously, then the unit has probably malfunctioned for whatever reason and is now telling anyone who asks that it needs formatting.

Your best bet is to rip all the partitions out and reformat the drive, though if BIOS is only seeing this unit as 32Gb instead of 120Gb, you'll again only be able to make a Partition size of 32Gb. However I wouldn't really trust the drive now because if it malfunctions again, it might stop working altogether and make data retrieval impossible next time.

[Neil Jones]

This is pointing to a drive hardware issue. Normally if a drive's decided it's only 32Gb big (and you of course haven't moved any drive capacity jumpers to tell the drive otherwise) when it was 120Gb previously, then the unit has probably malfunctioned for whatever reason and is now telling anyone who asks that it needs formatting.

Your best bet is to rip all the partitions out and reformat the drive, though if BIOS is only seeing this unit as 32Gb instead of 120Gb, you'll again only be able to make a Partition size of 32Gb. However I wouldn't really trust the drive now because if it malfunctions again, it might stop working altogether and make data retrieval impossible next time.

[Samm]

Welcome to G2G, dirtyharry

Your best bet is probably to completely wipe the drive i.e zero fill it. This will automatically remove all data & partitions & return the drive to it's factory state.

One of the best utilities to use for this is Slate. You can download it from here:
http://members.tripo....htm#cleanslate

This MUST be run from a pure dos environment so create a basic boot disk with slate on & boot from that before you run it.