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twojay · Officially active! Joined: 21 Mar 2010 Posts: 2

So I was playing PC games the other day and after I was done I went to access some files on my hard drive when I noticed one of my three drives was missing in 'My Computer'. So thinking nothing of it, I tried to restart. After getting stuck on the Loading Windows screen, I restarted again. Nothing appeared on screen this time. I assumed that the PSU died. So I ordered a new one and hooked it up. Everything booted up, except one of the drives didn't show up (a different one from the one previously mentioned). I ran tests on the processor, video card, memory, other two hard drives (one hard drive had 200 some sectors moved, which showed up as a warning in HD Tune), everything seemed ok.

So now more about the bad hard drive,

Specs: Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB 32MB Cache SATA (link)

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All recovery programs I've looked at so far keep thinking the hard drive is about 33.4MB large, with a Cylinders-Heads-Sectors of 64-16-63.
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GetDataBack seemed to do the best, recognized the actual size of the drive:

Step 1
Start: Cyl 0 Head 1 Sector 1
End: Cyl 1023 Head 254 Sector 63
LBA start: 63
Total sectors: 1,953,520,002
Bootable: No

Step 1/During scan

Many:
I/O Error 'Unknown error (65284)' reading sector XXXX on HD129.
until I choose 'Yes to all'

Index Allocs: 66
Boot sectors: 1
Files identified: 2 starts, 0 usrdef
MFT entries: 0,0 $MFT

Step 2 - Select File System
http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/2539/step2c.png

Step3 - Recovery Tree
No files listed....

testdisk did the 2nd best, it was able to recognize the hard drive was 1TB big. Although says it can't recover the partition. PhotoRec was able to recover 1 mp3 and some data files.

Spinrite noticed the different sizes/partition of the drive. Wasn't able to run recovery on the drive, even after all its warnings that I shouldn't

Ultimate Boot CD didn't seem to want to load any of its programs... Although, Ultimate Boot CD for Windows' utilities worked.

Western Digital's WinDlg was only able to scan the 33.4MB limited space. The quick and extended test, and SMART all return no errors.

HDTune only recognizes 33.4MB, no errors, health OK, able to read temperature.

and so forth.

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RMA'ing will only get me another hard drive, not fix this one.

People have told me formatting will just cause me to lose the data.

Maybe I or WD could replace the chip? The platters itself should be ok?...

Use testdisk to manually set the 'geometry' (Cylinder-Heads-Sectors) of the drive, although I don't know them. May ruin things more?

IT SEEMS that the hard drive is OK, but something corrupted the data on how large the drive actually is, thus denying me the option to access further in the drive. Or maybe just the 33 megs is still alive Sad

sunnydreamspace · Deadharddrive regular +5 Joined: 04 Jan 2009 Posts: 540

hi,
i can handle it. please contact me by email or MSN if you need help. i think platters is ok. it may be got firmware even head problem.
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provide Hard drive PCB,entire drive/ Data Recovery service.... big HDD resource. talk to me immediately! sunnydreamspace@hotmail.com
skype: sunnydreamspace

harddrivespecialist · Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2010 1:13 am Post subject:

One of the heads on your drive seems to be dead.
That is why you can read portion of your drive and other portion is unreadable.
You will need a pro service to get your data or get a new drive and move on.
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www.datarecoveryne.com

twojay · Officially active! Joined: 21 Mar 2010 Posts: 2

could freezing or toasting the drive temporarily fix the problem so I can get the data off? I'm not willing to spend more than $50-100 on this drive

harddrivespecialist · Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2010 12:18 pm Post subject:

fzabkar · Deadharddrive regular +3 Joined: 02 Apr 2010 Posts: 210

Do you have a Gigabyte motherboard with Xpress Recovery BIOS?

If so, then see this thread:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Creating-Partition-in-Windows-XP/m-p/14593#M860

As explained in the thread, Gigabyte's BIOS attempts to store a backup copy of itself at the top end of the drive. However, it has a bug that causes it to miscalculate the size of the drive, causing 1TB drives to be truncated to ~30MB, and 1.5TB drives to be reduced to 500GB. I suspect that, when one of your drives disappeared, BIOS discovered the next drive in the boot order and did its Xpress Recovery thing.

An alternative to HDAT2 is the HDD Capacity Restore Tool:
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Restore-Tool/

I would also upgrade your motherboard BIOS.

I would also be on the lookout for file corruption. The BIOS obviously wrote to your drive, so whichever file was occupying that space, if any, will be corrupt.

dataminer · Active contributor Joined: 18 May 2010 Posts: 6

Did the steps in the above post actually work?

fzabkar · Deadharddrive regular +3 Joined: 02 Apr 2010 Posts: 210

I didn't receive any feedback on that occasion. However, the diagnosis and solution have been confirmed many times at Seagate's forums, and recently at HDD Guru. In fact I have answered the same question about 10 times in the past 2 or 3 weeks, in several forums.

I first became aware of the bug about a year ago when someone posted his analysis to Seagate's forum.

Expect to see a lot more problems as Gigabyte owners upgrade to 1TB+ hard drives.

dataminer · Active contributor Joined: 18 May 2010 Posts: 6

And I'll confirm as well. I got a gigabyte mainboard, one of the new ones, and HDAT2 brought my drive back to the proper size. So before you shop for a logic board, or pay a small fortune for a data recovery ninja. HDAT2... does the trick on Gigabyte shrunken drives.

Have a great day everybody!

HDFleischer · Posted once Joined: 06 May 2011 Posts: 1

Hey, everyone! Quite aware about the age of this post, but I wanted to come on here and personally thank all of you for your advice. While I can't say it did the trick (haven't tried fixing my own hard drive issues yet), but I'll certainly try out those suggestions! Of course, if all else fails, I'll take harddrivespecialist's advice and get a new hard drive. Has anyone here ever went to hh gregg to buy hard drives?

Either way, thanks guys! You're all a heck of a lot smarter than I am when it comes to this stuff. Wink

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