Samsung Spinpoint F DT HD103UJ - capacity error

[paulygavin]

Hi guys, I am having the same trouble.

My motherboard is also a Gigabyte but it is the GA-MA69G rev 1.0 with latest Bios update (BIOS F6)

It has 4 SATA ports and to them I have attached 3 WD 750GB caviar Hard Drives which all work fine.

I just purchased the Samsung 1TB Spinpoint like the OP and cannot get it to recognise the full capacity.

Just as above my Bios also recognises it as a 33MB drive, and in windows it shows as 7.87GB.

Windows will not let me quick or full format it..... and the utility mentioned above will not allow me to use it as it says there are 4 drives attached to the SATA ports and that ONLY the 1TB Samsung can be attached for the tool to work.

Only problem is.... as the drive will not allow me to format it, I cannot get windows XP onto the drive to THEN use the tool.

What can I do? I really want to get this drive working rather than send it back!!

[rabbid]

I haven't used this tool, but is it possible to run it from a boot cd/fdd/usb with just the 1tb disk attached via sata?

[Andy3536]

I have a problem with the samsung drive, trying to install it as an only HDD in a new PC i built today, someone above said you can't run that program unless it's the only HDD in the PC but i can't install the OS.
Will it run as a second drive in my vista64 PC?

[Andy3536]

The HDD capacity resore doesn't work for me, it'll only detect the first HDD on the system and am unable to install an OS on the HDD, any body got any ideas?
Will scan give me a refund?

[paulygavin]

Andy 3536 I managed to fix my problem.... Here is what i did... give it a try,

As mentioned the samsung 1TB was showing as 32MB on my Gigabyte motherboard BIOS and 7.87 through windows XP.

First go into the BIOS and change the SATA controller option to 'LEGACY IDE'.

Then go into the Hard Drive screen of your BIOS and check that the HD which boots the OS is on a seperate channel to the Samsung drive. And check that the Samsung drive is the master on its channel, and there is no slave present on that channel.

Load up windows XP and download and install the HD CAPACITY RESTORE tool mentioned earlier in the post.

Then make sure you download and install WINDOWS SERVICE PACK 3 (you must have service packs 1 and two installed already)

Shut down windows and power off. Give it 20-30 seconds and reboot.

Go into control panel, performance & maintanance, system (if in classic view just go to system), hardware tab, device manager, then open up the disk drives tab and select UNINSTAL on the Samsung drive.

Open the HD CAPACITY TOOL and select the Samsung Drive (it will not let you use it if you havent put it on a seperate channel as i specified earlier). It should say that it is a 1000GB capacity and ask if you want to restore it. Select YES. It will then tell you to it needs to reboot the PC.

As the PC reboots go into the BIOS and your drive should now be recognised by the motherboard as 1000GB capacity.

If so, load windows and you can now quick format the Samsung to give it a 7.87 capacity.

Click START and then right click on my computer and go to MANAGE. Click on DISK MANAGEMENT near bottom and it will bring up your drives. Click on the Samsung drive and select delete partition. Once the partition is deleted click on it again and create a partition. It will now give you the option to make the partition for 931GB.

Et voila...... 931 glorious GB of hard drive space showing in my computer!

I hope this is of help to some people, let me know if you have any joy... the deal on the Samsung 1TB is so good that it would be a shame for people to return it as faulty when it can be fixed.

[paulygavin]

Sorry Andy i just realised you said want to use it as the ONLY hard drive.

Unfortunately you are out of luck unless you can get your hands on another HD and install the OS on that... then unlock your samsung 1TB before installing the OS on that.

Either take it round a friend with a SATA motherboard or buy a very cheap HD and use that to unlock it.

The information above should help anyone else out with a Gigabyte motherboard and Samsung HD

[Andy3536]

I did plug it into my computer (left) and i don't get 32 meg in the bios like you it tells me in windows i get 32 and in the bios i get 33meg.
Downloaded the ES tool from samsung and when i loaded it got an error message saying 'out of memory error'
Think the drives just knackered, i also have a very old PC with a reletivly new 160 gig samsung drive which detected first time in the bios.

Although i emailed scan for tech support yesterday phoned up today and explained and they're gonna give me a refund on the drive.

Just noticed that the western digital ones are on today only so got a 750 and a 250 the aaks versions.
There not much cheaper than normal about £2 each but i would have gone for WD after the samsung fiasco anyway and every little helps

Now i just need to hope my boss isn't an ass and gives me friday off for the pickup after i've been off all this week

[kamtheman]

Sorry mate but if teh above process doesn't work I just don't think you will. Even the technical department I had access to declared both drives i had unable to format.

Got a replacement Seagate and it formatted first time, through windows just like sata drives should.

Prices on this drive are tumbling and I do not think it is for the right reasons. You just shouldn't have to go through the above process to format a simple hard drive. For a few quid more go for one which is hassle free!

Good luck and please someone post here if you think they've changed the drive to format simply and I'll be first in line to buy another one or two!

[azrael1]

I had a similar problem, However I use vista 64 and that expander didnt work. Had to download the EStools and in their theres a function to restore the hdd back to its original size.

Works so far I think, just need to install Vista onto it,

[ps3divx.com]

Thanks so much for the suggestion to use the Atola HDD restore tool. I was having the exact same problem with my HD103UJ and my GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard. I upgraded to the latest BIOS which was supposed to fix compatibility issues but that did not help at all.

So, I loaded up the HDD capacity restore tool on my other Vista computer with the 1TB drive attached. It instantly recognised the problem and fixed it. This is despite the fact that my other Vista computer could recognise the drive fine (in full 1TB glory) -- the software tool was smart enough to know there was still an error.

I use Vista 32Bit on both machines. The HD103UJ is working flawlessly now, very fast drive and rather quiet!

Thanks again for the help on this board, hopefully the tool will help avoid people thinking their drives are buggered. There really needs to be something done about 1TB HDD compatibility, though.

PS: The Samsung boot CD did not work for me at all. My PC tried to boot off it but spat out a lot of errors instead. Skip the Boot CD and try the HDD recovery tool.

[rTU]

Hi there,

I got my HD103UJ today and I'm using a Gigabyte P35-DS4.

Followed paulygavin's advice and after telling the tool to restore capacity I get the message:

"Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore factory capacitiy cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform."

What to do now? And yes, it is set as master on a channel with no other device.

[TAKTAK]

what OS are you trying to do it from?

[rTU]

Ah. Sorry. WinXP SP 3 ...

Also the tool is recognizing the space correctly, Bios shows the already mentioned 32MB and Windwos shows the 7,87 GB.

[rTU]

Just updated Bios from F4 to F13. Problem still persists. Any ideas for a resolution?

[Pamhad]

I have the same problem as rTU - I bought two of these disks - one was perfect, the other DOA. The replacement for the DOA is giving me the capacity problem and the error when I try and use the tool to restore factory capacity

Did anyone find a resolution for this or should I just send this one back too?

[watercooled]

Formatted capacity of 1TB drive ~ 930GB
Formatted capacity of 500GB drive ~ 456GB
As you can see, the formatted capacity of a drive is near 93% of the decimal size. So, if anyone's drive appears to be missing a small amount of capacity, bear this in mind.