Samsung Spinpoint F DT HD103UJ - capacity error

[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?

OK, just in case anyone else has the same problem. When I tried the trick of removing the power after selecting the drive,it worked! I managed to format the drive successfully but when I plugged my first disk back in (the one that was originally fine) it was now showing 32 meg even though I had previously formatted it with no problems and had loaded about 300 gig of data on it. Um.

Finally had to admit it was a motherboard problem rather than a disk problem so I bit the bullet and bought a new MSI motherboard and replaced the gigabyte one I had in there. Bingo! The capacity restore facility worked first time, my data was intact (phew) and now both disks are functioning perfectly.

[Cornholio]

Thats a real shame you swapped out a gigabyte mobo for an MSI, YES there is a problem with the HD103 drive but its VERY easily fixable with a simple boot into a .iso and about 5 seconds work ( it took me a hell of a long time to find this information, after trying everything else i was ready to throw the drive out of the window. )

So YES there is an issue with gigabyte motherboards BUT it is easily fixed

[heku]

Hi there.... i got the samsung HD103UJ 1tb capacity... and i was having the same problem... i did almost all u said before but nothing seem to work at all... so i tried the next...

i had downloaded the HDD Capacity Restore and the EASEUS Partition Manager 3.0 Home Edition...

in order for the HDD Capacity Restore to work well... u need to put the hdd on a single channel... for not got u all wakko 'cuz u don't kno how to do that... just turn off the pc and unplug the cd-rom drives.. if they're on the same channel that the 1tb hd is... then turn on the pc... run the HDD Capacity Restore and it should work correctly... when u restore the factory size to 1gb (934...gb)... run the EASEUS Partition Manager.... on it select the 1tb hd, rite click and select resize/move... then by clicking on the bar that it shows move it to the full size of 1tb... then format... and then do ur partition if need it...

after all this turn off the pc... plug back ur cd-rom drives... and it's done... install ur OS on ur HD103UJ....

[webappnet]

i had downloaded the HDD Capacity Restore and the EASEUS Partition Manager 3.0 Home Edition.....

heku, You are the king.... only one complaint, why couldnt you be the first one to write comment on this thread!! It could have saved me this sleepless... night!

Anyway to save all of you teh pain here is the link: tucows.com/preview/506435

I did not even need to reboot, this tool simply.... found the non allocated memory... and with the mouse... I have pulled the box from 133gb to maximum allowed size!


Two cookies go to heku and EASEUS!
THANKS ALOT!

On
web-app.net

[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!