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Right label wrong capacity DELL hard drive? Tool?


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Okay this is funny, I got a DELL recently, and opened em up.

Inside was an 80Giger, but when I load it up, the BIOS and OS calls it an 30Giger. Even when I go into the BIOS, it also sees the drive as a 30Gig drive. If the Hard Drive description

I haven't booted the machine yet, and me fiddling with the files, probably damaged the OS. The machine is a 2Ghz DELL, standard ( I guess ).

The drive had some smaller partition that was not being displayed. It had a "special name" for that smal bit of FAT16 part, however I deleted and reformatted the small partisan. So I forget the name. Seeing the contents, it looks like a couple of DELL files.

It has a standard unparted space of 13MB as most NTFS systems have.

I am confused, did somebody on purposely mislabeled the drive, or has somebody changed the official storage amount of this drive, for some reason???

I am just curious and all, because this is the first time I have seen an official label with incorrect information about a drive.

Is their a tool, program, command, etc I can do in order to get the rest of the 50Gigs, to show up?

I am unconvinced, deleting the partitian will not slove anything because, the BIOS is showing it as 30Gigs. This is not a 30gig drive, it is marked as 80gig with the official acid-tag and everything.

Edited by ROTS
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Alll DELL's have a recovery and/or "diagnostic" partition (that is the thing that you already deleted/reformatted)

There is NO such thing as "standard 13 Mb" unpartitioned space, and in any case that has NO connection whatsoever with NTFS (or any other filesystem used on any partition).

Post the actual EXACT hard disk make/model and - if it is explicited on the label - it's geometry.

There are some cases (quite rare) where a big OEM manufacturer to respect the "HD size" advertised in the PC specs/literature do "cap" a hard disk size to a given size.

Basically they promote a product with a hard disk of 30 Gb, and they order to Seagate (or oher manufacturer) - say - 10,000 30GB disks, then the products sells, and the manufacturer has not any 30 Gb disk available, so they get another 5,000 disks that are - say - 80 Gb in size, and in order to not change anything in the install/documentation these new larger drives are "capped" to a smaller size.

There are a couple ways this can be done, a "geenric" one using a HPA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Protected_Area

or a "make/model specific" one, by modifying the firmware.

jaclaz

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Okay this is funny, I got a DELL recently, and opened em up.

Inside was an 80Giger, but when I load it up, the BIOS and OS calls it an 30Giger. Even when I go into the BIOS, it also sees the drive as a 30Gig drive. If the Hard Drive description

[...]

Is their a tool, program, command, etc I can do in order to get the rest of the 50Gigs, to show up?

We don't know enough to skip to some software to fix the partitions. Also note that the OS only sees what the BIOS passes along, so it is too early to even look at Windows at all. Your problem almost certainly lies below Windows.

Photos would speed up the solution ...

* The physical HDD label

* The physical HDD jumper block

* The BIOS screen showing all HDD drives

* The BIOS page for that specific HDD ( select and press ENTER )

* Dell Service tag

Supply those and the answer will be evident shortly.

It is possible for a sticker mixup, though I never saw one myself. More likely is that the HDD has a capacity clip jumper incorrectly set. IBM and Hitachi drives always seem to have these, at least IDE models.

Other possibilities, BUT ONLY AFTER determining if the drive is jumpered correctly include ...

- Someone manually set the HDD settings in the BIOS. Changing it to AUTO and pressing ENTER to redetect should fix this.

- Cabling is another candidate, misusing a cable-select cable and jumper, or using a normal cable with the jumper on cable-select, or jumpering for master and installing on slave ( cable middle connector ), or jumpering it for slave and installing it on master ( cable end connector ). Blue end of cable not on the motherboard is also possible to mess up the auto-detect. Not fully inserting the IDE connectors can also cause a problem. And then there is the possibility of bent pins in the connector on the HDD or motherboard.

- The CMOS component of the BIOS could be bad, clearing it via jumper or battery might fix it. ( NOT YET )

- The BIOS is corrupt, maybe from a bad flash leading to scrambled tables making it incapable of autodetecting. Reflashing could fix that. ( NOT YET )

All of this must occur before looking at the partitioning because aside from dropping this disk into another computer, you cannot reliably trust what partitions you think you have when looking from THAT computer, until the jumpering and BIOS are working in tandem.

EDIT: typo

Edited by CharlotteTheHarlot
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- Cabling is another candidate, misusing a cable-select cable and jumper, or using a normal cable with the jumper on cable-select, or jumpering for master and installing on slave ( cable middle connector ), or jumpering it for slave and installing it on master ( cable end connector ). Blue end of cable not on the motherboard is also possible to mess up the auto-detect. Not fully inserting the IDE connectors can also cause a problem. And then there is the possibility of bent pins in the connector on the HDD or motherboard.

No, that CANNOT cause a different size detection.

jaclaz

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- Cabling is another candidate, misusing a cable-select cable and jumper, or using a normal cable with the jumper on cable-select, or jumpering for master and installing on slave ( cable middle connector ), or jumpering it for slave and installing it on master ( cable end connector ). Blue end of cable not on the motherboard is also possible to mess up the auto-detect. Not fully inserting the IDE connectors can also cause a problem. And then there is the possibility of bent pins in the connector on the HDD or motherboard.

No, that CANNOT cause a different size detection.

jaclaz

Not a different size, unless you mean "no size". :lol:

We need to see the pictures to know what's happening though.

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Not a different size, unless you mean "no size". :lol:

Yep, size on label 80, detected by BIOS as 30 means "different size" and CANNOT be caused by a bad or badly connected cable or bent pins.

The interesting part of the original post is however this:

Inside was an 80Giger, but when I load it up, the BIOS and OS calls it an 30Giger. Even when I go into the BIOS, it also sees the drive as a 30Gig drive. If the Hard Drive description

I haven't booted the machine yet, and me fiddling with the files, probably damaged the OS.

How the booted OS (that has not been booted and is declared as presumably damaged) can see it as 30 Gb remains a mistery ;).

jaclaz

Edited by jaclaz
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the BIOS and OS calls it an 30Giger. Even when I go into the BIOS, it also sees the drive as a 30Gig drive. If the Hard Drive description

...

I haven't booted the machine yet,

:huh: How can the OS tell anything if the PC hasn't booted ?

If the PC is 2GHz, the label (80GB) is probably right. If you know where the PC comes from, you should know if the drive has been swapped for any reason. I don't see Dell delivering a PC with such a mistake.

The first explanation that comes to mind is the capping to 32GB by a jumper to render the drive "compatible" with older systems. Lots of HDD had that ability. However, once you change the jumper, I guess the whole content of the existing partitions will appear as corrupted given the "new" capacity seen by Bios. You could image the partitions back and forth (it shouldn't be that much data if it is max 30Gig).

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However, once you change the jumper, I guess the whole content of the existing partitions will appear as corrupted given the "new" capacity seen by Bios. You could image the partitions back and forth (it shouldn't be that much data if it is max 30Gig).

Not really.

IF the case is that of a capping jumper, the effect is just that of declaring a lower number of sectors.

The existing partition(s) will be made on the "reduced" size (which is "at the beginning" and once you remove the capping you will have some additional unpartiioned space after the existing partition(s)).

Before:

|<partition>|

After:

|<partition>|---------------------------------------------------------|

jaclaz

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Now, then... a capping jumper is a good guess, especially since 32 GB = 29.8 GiB and OSes usually talk GiBs, while manufacturers talk GBs, of course... So the OP speaking of "the BIOS and OS calls it an 30Giger" would make some sense (then again, unbooted OSes don't talk, of course, but who knows whether they may dream?).

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Philip K. Dick does rock! worship.gif I do love his books! And I did read that, way back (and keep telling myself I should read it again, soon).

Right now, I've just finished Arika Okrent's great book on Invented Languages (you might like it, if you haven't read it already).

Now, when the subject drifted on to actions taken by unbooted OSes, the allusion was irresistible. :D

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Right now, I've just finished Arika Okrent's great book on Invented Languages (you might like it, if you haven't read it already).

Naah :w00t:, I won't consider reading a book that doesn't consider lolcat as a mainstream and highly sophisticated communication language ;).

lolcat1-Hamlet.jpg

I am also wondering why exactly there is not a flood of LOLCODE programs :unsure::

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

but that's another story, however the implied politeness in it demonstrated by the use of a salutation (HAI) to initiate a program, the request for data or input in the dubitative form (CAN HAS) and the way error handling is made (AWSUM THX and O NOES) is I believe not found in any other scripting language.

jaclaz

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