[gcranston]

This has all taken me an insane amount of time to try and fix, never expected that I needed to research compatibility of drives these days! Anyway, I don't like to beaten, so on I went. I'm quite technically minded but have never come across the concepts involved in rectifying this problem before. Few people seemed to get stuck where I did, so I'll share the things that solved it for me, and a question of whether something was a bad idea!?

I tried all the advice here, i.e. paulygavin's summary. With my SATA controller on IDE, the samsung as the only drive on a channel and on the master, with xp sp3. The HD Capacity Restore tool gave an error on selecting to restore the drive, including trying the unplugging the power trick.

Next used Samsung's EStool: no luck with the cd boot (errors on loading), had to have it on floppy - fine. Also tried HDAT2ISO: cd booting wasn't able to get on cd once finished booting, so opted to load NTFS drivers at the menu and had the HDAT files accessible on the C Drive. With both tools, was able to restore drive capacity to 1TB. However, once I'd rebooted past the bios, this got reduced back down again to 32mb (showed 1TB in bios if I went straight in on the first reboot).

My solution involved: 1. selecting the "Volatile" mode rather than "non-volatile"
2. In HDAT2, selecting "device config overlay menu" -> and disabling Host Protected Area (HPA).

My question: Is disabling HPA on the disk a bad idea? Does anything else use HPA apart from the motherboard/bios? Should I be disabling HPA in the bios instead of the disk? If so, any ideas what the option tends to be called? I have a Gigabyte P35C-DS3R (rev 1.x) bios revision F6 (not especially up to date). Can anything in the future suddenly re-enable HPA and render my disk inaccessible?

I want to keep this disk but feel a bit apprehensive about it!