Although studying is considered a legitimate scientific nowadays, it is still a very young one. In the early 1970s, a psychologist named J. Guilford was one of the first academic researchers who dared to conduct a study of creativity. One of Guilford’s most famous studies was the nine-dot puzzle. He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. Today many people are familiar with this puzzle and its solution.

In the 1970s, however, very few were even aware of its existence, even though it had been around for almost a century. If you have tried solving this puzzle, you can confirm that your first attempts usually involve sketching lines inside the imaginary square. The correct solution, however, requires you to draw lines that extend beyond the area defined by the dots. At the first stages, all the participants in Guilford’s original study censored their own thinking by limiting the possible solutions to those within the imaginary square (even those who eventually solved the puzzle). Even though they weren’t instructed to restrain themselves from considering such a solution, they were unable to “see” the white space beyond the square’s boundaries.

Buy 512MB RAM Memory for QDI Superb 4/533 (PC3200 NonECC) Motherboard Memory Upgrade by US Seller: Memory - Amazon.com ✓ FREE DELIVERY possible on eligible purchases. With all due respect, Professor Boyd, your argument is not at all compelling. It seems that you are taking the 'thinking outside the box' (TOTB) metaphor much more.

Only 20 percent managed to break out of the illusory confinement and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots. The symmetry, the beautiful simplicity of the solution, and the fact that 80 percent of the participants were effectively blinded by the boundaries of the square led Guilford and the readers of his books to leap to the sweeping conclusion that creativity requires you to go outside the box.

The idea went viral (via 1970s-era media and word of mouth, of course). Overnight, it seemed that creativity gurus everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box. Consultants in the 1970s and 1980s even used this puzzle when making sales pitches to prospective clients. Because the solution is, in hindsight, deceptively simple, clients tended to admit they should have thought of it themselves.

Because they hadn’t, they were obviously not as creative or smart as they had previously thought, and needed to call in creative experts. Or so their consultants would have them believe. The nine-dot puzzle and the phrase “thinking outside the box” became metaphors for creativity and spread like wildfire in, management, psychology, the creative arts, engineering, and personal improvement circles. There seemed to be no end to the insights that could be offered under the banner of thinking outside the box.

Speakers, trainers, training program developers, organizational consultants, and university professors all had much to say about the vast benefits of outside-the-box thinking. It was an appealing and apparently convincing message. Indeed, the concept enjoyed such strong popularity and intuitive appeal that no one bothered to check the facts. No one, that is, before two different research —Clarke Burnham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisberg—ran another experiment using the same puzzle but a different research procedure. Both teams followed the same protocol of dividing participants into two groups. The first group was given the same instructions as the participants in Guilford’s experiment. The second group was told that the solution required the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box bordering the dot array.

In other words, the “trick” was revealed in advance. Would you like to guess the percentage of the participants in the second group who solved the puzzle correctly? Most people assume that 60 percent to 90 percent of the group given the clue would solve the puzzle easily. In fact, only a meager 25 percent did. What’s more, in statistical terms, this 5 percent improvement over the subjects of Guilford’s original study is insignificant. In other words, the difference could easily be due to what statisticians call sampling error. Let’s look a little more closely at these surprising results.

Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Yet participants’ performance was not improved even when they were given specific instructions to do so. That is, direct and explicit instructions to think outside the box did not help. That this advice is useless when actually trying to solve a problem involving a real box should effectively have killed off the much widely disseminated—and therefore, much more dangerous—metaphor that out-of-the-box thinking spurs creativity.

After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between thinking outside the box and creativity was a myth. Of course, in real life you won’t find boxes. But you will find numerous situations where a creative breakthrough is staring you in the face. They are much more common than you probably think. *From Copyright 2014 Drew Boyd.

There are many theories of creativity. What the latest experiment proves is not that creativity lacks any association to thinking outside-the-box, but that such is not conditioned by acquired knowledge, i.e., environmental concerns. For example, there have been some theories such as those of Schopenhauer (see his remarks about Genius) and Freud (see his remarks about Sublimation) that propose creativity is something more like a capacity provided by nature rather than one acquired or learned from the environment. Rather than disproving the myth, in other words, the experiment might instead offer evidence that creativity is an ability that one is born with, or born lacking, hence why information from the environment didn't impact the results at all.

It's an interesting experiment, but the author's conclusion cannot possibly follow from the results of it. I conduct soft skills training and outbound training for Corporates and individuals. To enhance creativity we motivate the participants to approach the problems from variety of vantage points. Even repeatedly checking the boundary conditions we are able to come up with variety of ways of solving the problem.

This is akin to checking the walls of the box. Looking inside the box for additional information, additional resources also helps. Looking at the box from bird's eye view triggers some different creative solutions. Let us not get tied down to the mechanics but free ourselves to find the solution. I will give an example. You are playing football with family and friends at a distant ground and someone gets bruised badly.

No first aid kit is available. Your priority is to get the person to a hospital ( at a distance of 2 hours ).

The wound is bleeding and needs to be kept clean and bacteria free till the person reaches the hospital. What will you do?

Think of a solution. It is quite close to you. With all due respect, Professor Boyd, your argument is not at all compelling. It seems that you are taking the 'thinking outside the box' (TOTB) metaphor much more literally than it is intended (or, at least, as I and may others infer). Let me point out a few false and/or negligent statements that you make: 1.

To refer to TOTB as 'dangerous' is naive, at best. I, personally, have seen the positive, tranformative effects of not only the 9-dots exercise, but also the occasional use of the term to remind individuals after-the-fact about the value of thinking differently. The experiment you refer to doesn't even come close to proving what you suggest that it does.

To use the term 'proving' in an argument like this is laughable. In real life, you absolutely WILL find boxes.that is, if you understand what the term 'box' refers to. Here, the term is not literal; rather, it refers to a mindset, a perspective, a belief, or an assumption. It is precisely how the human mind works. We all think in boxes all the time. The 'sin,' if you will, is not in thinking inside of a box.but the neglect to readily switch from one box to another, nimbly (see Alan Iny's new book, 'Thinking in New Boxes'). A different -- and very healthy, positive, and productive -- way to think about TOTB is to understand that it merely represents an insight that can remind an individual to consciously become aware of limiting assumptions.

And, upon such awareness, to open ones mind and imagination to actively explore new possibilities beyond the obvious or initial answer. If you don't regard this as valid contribution to creativity, then I suggest you consider spending a bit more time outside of that 'box' that you've presented here. I couldn't have said it any better.

TOTB is a beautiful skill to have. We are born into multiple boxes that are created upon social agreements (e.g. Illustrated by the hermeneutic circle) but the ones who dare to think outside of what is considered as social or scientific correct (all the boxes together) are the minds whom are absolute free and open towards new moralities, paradigms, innovations and creativity in general. Saying that TOTB is a negative thing is a very conservative statement and someone who has such a belief is scared of change, scared of diversity and scared of anything that is abstract and out of order.

I'm all about TOTB and the best way to TOTB is to fully understand the box in the first place and why some people are scared of TOTB hence also lacking the ability to do so. Fold the paper so all the dots ovelap. Use four lines to connect four dots. Hold the folded paper up to the light.all dots connected; Thinking outside The Box. For that matter, you could fold the paper until all the dots overlapped and you would not need to waste any pencil lead; Thinking outside The Box. Use a very wide pencil lead or charcoal block for that matter, connect all the dots in one fell swoop; Thinking outside The Box. Forego a pencil altogether and use a bucket of paint to create a huge blot over all the dots; Thinking outside The Box.

Question the dots and why they need to be connected in the first place; Thinking outside The Box. Erase the dots; they are a distraction to Thinking outside The Box.

Create your own dots and lines in any fashion you desire; Thinking outside The Box. People that say, it's a misguided idea,, do not know how to think outside the box, I can look /listen/ at anything an tell you how to fix it. I play chess with my pc, an beat it all the time, and the reasoning is I do not think logically, like the pc does. It has a set of rules that it was programed with an you were in college, I do not play by the rules, I can play without the queen.Also when you go the a school that teaches how to think about something, that is all you know how to do.I have had engineers come to my deck, hand me a set of blueprints, because that was the way they were taught. They are never taught to look at it, in there mind to see it working. What I do is show them how wrong they are, an ask them what tool in the world can cut a square hole inside the middle of two long tubes. They can not think outside the box, that they were taught to do.

If was going to tell you about an airplane the TR-3B, it travels a little bit under light speed, an it uses nuclear fusion, which turns into plasma an powers the craft, that was built outside the box. An if you do not believe me type it into your search engine, you can also look it up at the library of congress under new patients. You my brother, do not have the inkling of understanding to think outside the box.

That's why you are a psychologist an nothing more.

July 19th, 2007 Author: Dmitry Postrigan This article is a complete guide on recovering your hard drive’s factory capacity. At the end of this article there is a link to our program that recovers factory capacity of any hard drive. “My hard drive has mysteriously became smaller! I was always led to believe that the reason a drive is set at the capacity you buy (200gig), was because this is the reliable test size for the drive. In other words it was not reliable enough durning tests at more that the 200gig size. Therefor it gets set at 200gig and sold at that.

Also i have tried this type of restoration before using ghost, and found the drive to become very unstable in saving data. Especially getting windows delayed write errors the higher up the drive as you fill it. (back to my first paragraph). Just my comments – good tool though. On August 15, 2007.

Thanks for making and releasing this! I was removing the evil Dynamic Drive Overlay from a 120 GB IDE drive by zero-ing out the first sectors of the hard drive. That seemed to get rid of DDO, yet the BIOS still said the drive was only ~32 GB. This tool allowed me to reset the drive to its full capacity, sans DDO. One side note: The tool requires that the drive you’re resetting be on its own IDE channel. In my case I was using a dual drive system with both drives on the primary channel, so I had to move the drive in question to be Master on the secondary channel for the tool to work its magic. On August 27, 2007.

My previously useless hard drive [mysteriously reporting to windows as 33GB unformatted instead of 160GB 80% full of stuff] has been resuscitated in two clicks by this program. I spent two weeks trying to recover the data with half a dozen programs, and purchased partition recovery software, only to find this simple program could fix my drive. One point though, an error initially suggested I should try it on another platform, and check the BIOS for HPA settings. This was not necessary – but the error dialogue in the next version of the software should ask users to check that the drive is a) on its own channel and b) set as master on that channel, by jumper if necessary (Cable Select wasn’t working) Brilliance! On September 14, 2007. I have a Western Digital 250 Gig drive that when originally installed, I think on XP with Service packs 1&2, automatically shifted to 137.

I’ve been using it, but am heading into a large editing job, and while I could just go buy a big drive I hate wasting the left over part. Thing is that my OS is on this drive, and using your tool it says I must disconnect this from computer. Right now I am doing a copy of the whole C disk, OS, programs and all so I can do this, but before I commit to this can you let me know if on disconnecting the OS disk from the system then your program will not work? On September 23, 2007.

Hi Dimitry I need some help with my disk a Maxtor 250GB SATA2, under Win-XP + P4 it shows 120 GB capacity? I instaled Service pack 1-2 and even 3, no luck? Then I downloaded and ran your Capacity restore tool, and it showed the correct HD capacity difference so far so good! Then when I clicked this warning poped up? Device is in use and can’t be removed. Please Remove Manualy in Device Manager and try again! I dont fully understand do I go to system-hardware-device manager and uninstall the hard disk driver or actualize it, what do I do from their?

What do they mean by remove manualy? Please help me, Thanks Ed on October 10, 2007.

HI, I have a common problem. I had a seagate 250g hard drive on an older computer which required a DDO to recognize the full 250g. The computer died and I am trying to install the hard drive on a different computer. I had a problem loading win xp that is related to the DDO.

I tried everything, including zeroing out the entire drive (took 24 hrs0 and the damn DDO is still there. How do I set this hard drive up in as a second drive on another computer in order to use your program and restore the full capacity? What does it mean to install it on it’s own IDE channel?

Once I put it on it’s own IDE channel, can I boot from the primamry drive and run your program on this drive? Thanks on November 13, 2007. Excelent Software!!! Thank you so much for freely distributing this siftware.

It is the only tool (out of 12) that I was able to get working to restore the original size of my HD. I tried using MHDD but it kept telling me to re-power the drive. So I tried to unplug the power right before I typed y to continue, but that didnt work. (Note: I had to do the “At your own risk” method of unplugging the power to the drive right before clicking the restore capacity button. Once I tried this it worked like a charm!) Thanks Again, Jo on November 25, 2007. My computer came with a single 40 gig hard drive.

I was given a brand new hard drive which did read 60 gigs when I first installed it as a secondary drive. I came up with an idea to clone my original hard drive to the newer one. After cloning the 40 gig drive to the 60 gig drive, it started to read it as a 40 gig drive also. I downloaded this tool and I am getting a message when I click on the desired hard drive, that there are two devices on a single channel. I won’t be able to run my pc with the new drive alone cause I reformatted it and it still reads only 40 gigs, when it should read 60 gigs. Can I temporarily use a cd rom IDE to run the second hard drive on?

Scribblenauts Unlimited Download Mac Italics. Will restoring capacity erase any data in case I want to try it on my original hard drive as well? Both hard drives are Western Digitals. On November 25, 2007. I also forgot to ask. My brothers computer is getting and error message at start up. “Explorer.exe file missing, must reinstall windows.” He doesn’t have the windows 98 installation disk, but does have the start up disk.

Is there a way I can restore it back so it will run again without having to buy an installation disk? MY pc is running Windows XP and that was my Idea to clone my drive and put it in his computer... It didn’t work. I know it’s an old operating system, but he would like to get his computer running again until he can afford a new computer... On November 25, 2007. Please help me!:( I decided to make some adjustment in the partition of my HDD using Partition Magic. Then suddenly it hang in the middle of “Moving Partition” operation.

I decided to restart my PC and then the terrible thing happen. Now it keeps saying “Hard Disk Failure”. I tried every HDD Diagnostic tool i found but still I cant recover my data or even my hard drive. I even tried wiping it but it doesn’t work. One thing I noticed using HDAT2 tool is that my drive HPA is enabled and it is FROZEN. Is this the reason why i can’t wipe my HDD?

Is there chance to recover my files or HDD? Please help me recover my hard drive!

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thank you very much! On December 7, 2007. I have a Western Digital 320 GB drive that I have moved from an old PC and converted to an external drive. It is only being detected as 137 GB. I have tried everything that I could think of, Jumpers, reformat, Partition Magic, plugging in to PC via IDE and nothing has worked. Then I discovered your tool and had hope.

Unfortunately, after install (v 1.2) and running your program it does seem to be working properly. When it launches, I see a window that states “Please Select the Drive”. There is nothing else within the window (i.e., no drives to select). The design of the window appears to look a bit different than what is pictured in your screen shot? Do I have the right version? I’m running XP SP2.

Any help you can provide will be most appreciated. On December 11, 2007. I have a new 320gb Wester Digital drive which is currently only displaying 130gig under WinXP. The drive has nothing on it and has been installed on it’s on channel. When I run your program it is detecting my primary drive and the trouble one (displaying correctly as 320gb). When I attempt to use HDD Capacity Restore, it tells me the drive is in use and should be removed manually. I have done that and rebooted.

The drive shows as not being in use under Device Manager, but I still receive the program message that it is in use. What can I do? Best Regards – Kris on January 27, 2008. I recently bought a new WD10EACS 1Tb WD Drive that i tried to clone with Acronis. After the clone the disk showed as a 32Mb Drive. I tried every possibe HDD Utility (boot sector editors etc.) but i was unable to see the whole 1Tb.

I turned the disk back and got a new one, just to realise that after the cloning, happened the exact same thing. A little google searching brought me here I really really really really really really really really want to thank you You did a great job sharing this tool with the rest of the world. It restored my 1Tb Disk instantly. Thank you my friend Really thank you on February 1, 2008. Hello Dmitry. I have a Seagate ST380021A 80gig hard drive with Windows 2000 SP3 (or it is SP4?) installed on it. Several days ago it started crashing the machine and dissappearing from the BIOS, only to be detected again after disconnecting and reconnecting the drive (I thought it was caused by bad contacts and eventually changed the IDE cable).

Yesterday the OS stopped booting, complaining that the device was not accessible midway thru the booting process, and from that moment on the BIOS detected only 69GB. Installing the drive on other computers detected the same capacity, and the partitions didn’t show on those other computer “MyPC” (but the drive itself is shown on Device Manager). Enter your wonderful program (thank you and thank google!) and it inmediately detected the wrong 69GB capacity, the correct 80GB, and allowed me to restore it.

After a power cycle all the partitions came back with the data intact. Only that, back on its original PC, the OS complains again while booting and somehow the drive BIOS capacity goes back to being 69GB. I have restored the correct capacity twice, only to have it returned to the same wrong capacity when I try to boot from the disk. Do you have any suggestion that does not imply reinstalling the OS? Thank you in advance! On February 10, 2008.

Okay, my computer’s 80GB Toshiba HDD is having some problems. After I ran the system recovery DVD (for my HP Pavilion dv6500t notebook, which runs Vista Home Premium), my PC only recognized the ~20GB Windows partition and would automatically shut down after a while. After I ran Active@ Partition Recovery (part of Active@KillDisk freeware bundle), it found out that ~50GB of hard disk space was unallocated. Will this program work to fix that, or do I need something else? Thanks, Joe on March 15, 2008. Hi Dmitry, I have a unique issue with my HDD, I have Samsung 40 GB IDE HDD on Desktop, one fine day it started showing MTR missing, I took the HDD to other Desktop. It started showing the capacity as 5.28 GB.

The other desktop HDD also became the clone of this one and it started showing 28 MB rpoviding all the data loss. Suggest if Capacity Restore will help to restore the capacities of both these HDD. Is OS necessary to be installed on the HDD first before running the tool and is there any chance to get the data recovered from the other HDD. Please suggest. Thanks, SySaAzm on March 17, 2008. Many, Many thanks, Dmitry My 250 Gb Fujitsu was locked after Acronis recover preinstalled version of Dell software – disk was limited to 60 Gb.

Only your tool fixed problem. By the way – I used my PCMCI SATA adapter to connect locked HDD to another notebook.

It was performed with STLab SATA adapter and ESATA portable HDD box (and SATA-ESATA cable). I think, it will work with any SATA adapter (Express Card too). Many thanks again PS. I spent more than 14 hours, and your tool made it in a second:) on March 23, 2008.

When running the program, it’s showing both of my SATA controllers, but under each Channel #x, it shows “Unknown device” for all 4 channels (though i have 3 drives connected.) When clicking the link, an error pops up saying “No device has been selected. Please select a hard drive from the list of drives.” Is this the issue of swithching the type of SATA ports in the BIOS? I haven’t tried it yet, but don’t want to be tweaking BIOS settings if i don’t have to. The drives are on an Intel 631xESB/632xESB SATA AHCI ontrollers. On March 28, 2008.

What if I have a Hitachi/IBM harddrive that is a 60GB (can be read on the label with the exact geometry of the drive) but factory default only reports 31 GB. Even the Hitachi tool fails to set the correct geometry. As far as I can tell there is no limiting jumper setting that I use (even though the drive has such features). I have used it with a computer that probably dont like bigger than 31 GB hard drives so I have probably done some magic back then. There is some OnTrack software on the drive which kicks in at boot and that is probably why I have been able to use it fully. Does anyone have any idea how to resolve this issue? The HDD Capacity Restore Tool can only restore the factory default but since that one is wrong it doesn’t work for me.

On May 2, 2008. Hi Dmitry, I have a Gigabyte Mother board and as in other cases above my 1TB Samsung drive is only recognised as 32MB in the latest Bios, and 7.87 in Windows XP. The motherboard has 4 sata ports and attached i have 3 750GB WD drives which work fine. And the Samsung which isnt showing its full capacity When i try and use your tool and click on the Samsung drive it tells me that the drive must be on its own channel to use the tool. But the drive will not allow me to format it so i cannot install windows XP onto the Samsung drive.

What can I do to get the program to work on the drive?? Please help me on May 9, 2008. Hi Dmitry, Did you write this utility, I noticed that its Copyright is Atola anyway thanks to Atola for allowing me to download it and if you wrote it a big thanks to you. I been surfing days looking for a utility that would reset my SATA drive WD2500aaks LBA code.

It all started. After I built the system BIOS set to IDE and loaded a upgrade version of Vista which allowed me to do a clean install but denied an upgrade presumeably because I did not have XP home installed yet I cann’t remember whether Vista indicated at the time that it would not validate? Anyway the load went perfectly even rebooting okay. Now was the time to do the final load on the other disc setting the BIOS to AHCI the other options on the board are IDE and RAID I think my problem started because I did not relize that the AHCI driver also loaded other RAID drivers or are they the same. Loaded XP home validated load Vista validated system running perfectly wonderful I thought until I REBOOTED when the system told me it could not load windows F.

Checked BIOS my disc was now showing 33.8gb instead off 250gb. Managed to reset disc first by zeroing it with WD utility followed by old Maxtor utility used this method twice unfortunately on the third attempt it failed to work whether I had set some thing differently, I don’t know or whether first two times were reset by some else I had done? Anyway thats when the surfing started until I accidently came across your site which solved the problem in the time it took me to load your program. I’m not sure why the disc kept changing but I think loading AHCI requires two discs? As if it had been set to RAID. Any ideas I would love to know what was causing the size to change. Thanks again JIM Ps.

Sorry I couln’t make any shorter. On May 26, 2008. I wish this tool would work for me:( I screwed with all four of my 750GB samsung drives LBA48 settings, and the samsung ES tool does not work to turn the LBA48 bit back on:(. Damn buggy samsung. So I had to pull out an old PATA hard drive, install windows XP32bit on it, install SP3, install the latest nvidia force3 drivers, and hdd capcity restore. Unfortunatelly, the drive does not show up in windoez at all, not even in device manager, and neither does it show up in your tool, even though it shows up fine in during boot time (on the pre-boot screens) and in shows up fine in linux on the same exact machine (well, as a 137GB drive).

The drive is plugged into the main (sata1) sata nvidia controller. Is there any other things I should try? On May 27, 2008. Hi, I have a Fujitsu MPG3102AT-E hard drive connected to one (of my early PCs) Pentium Socket-7 (QDI P5I430TX) and I had no particular problems for 8 consecutive years. Except a strange “clack” at every boot!!!!! So, I decided to apply a firmware update (found from Compaq, SP16768) in case I got read of the strange clicks and clacks. The firmware was indeed for MPG3102AT-E and the firmware was updated to ver.9211.

BUT, after powering down and powering up I enter the BIOS of my motherboard and,to my surprise, I found my HD capacity short of 243 megs!!!!!! BEFORE the update the geometry of the disk was CHS –>19857 / 16 / 63 OR LBA –>1246 / 255 / 63 AFTER the update the geometry went down to CHS –>19386 / 16 / 63 OR LBA –>1216 / 255 / 63 I.e from 9773 actual megs to 9539!!!!!!!!!

Although the BIOS screen “screamed” it was 10248 megs (which I knew was NOT true). I tried your tool (after installing WinXP on it, which took me about 1 hour and a half) and the window read: Reported capacity: 10,005 MB Factory capacity: 10,005 MB Capacity difference: 0,0 MB I wonder if there is any way to regain the actual capacity on my Fujitsu.. Or is too late??????

Thanks in advance. On May 28, 2008.

Hi Dmitry Mine is a similar story to many others here. Bought a brand new Seagate Barracuda 500Gb PATA drive and after playing around with it, the drive became a 137Gb drive. I think connecting it to a Win XP SP2 laptop via an old Maxtor OneTouch I USB enclosure was to blame. I tried the SeaTools for DOS that Seagate said would fix it. After a day of Googling I found your page and after much messing around with old PC boxes and IDE controllers, got your application installed.

Worked like a dream where all others had failed. Killer app dude, I thank you Dmitry, great work. On June 3, 2008.

Hi Dimitri, I’m more or less desperate: I have set LBA mode of my Samsung HD753LJ (750Gb Sata2) to 28 bit, but now I cannot restore the HHD to the LBA 48 bit (the Samsung HDD tool, ESTool, gives me an error). The native size is now set to 137Gb and also “HDD Capacity Restore” shows me a Factory Capacity of 137Gb and so it restores only this size. If I run “Config” command in MHDD it say me that the HDD does not support config changes (or something like this). If you have any idea how to restore the LBA48 mode, please help me. Thanks on June 10, 2008. HDD Capacity Restore doesn´t work, following constellation: I want to restore my PRI MASTER IDE drive after a mistake with SeaTools option “Set capacity to ” I´ve removed PRI SLAVE IDE drive and started Windows XP from a third drive. There I´ve installed HDD Capacity Restore.

When I start HDD Capacity Restore and choose my PRI MASTER IDE drive (that is a WD1200JB) to restore, it says me: “The drive you choosen is used and cannot be deactivated. Go to the device manager and do it deactivate manually. When I this do, I must restart Windows, before the deactivation is made. When Windows will be restarted its first activity is to reinstall the drive I want to deactivate.

It is a snake biting in her tail. On June 13, 2008. Thank you, Dmitry. I’ve reformatted more IDE drives than I can remember, and I never knew that capacity reduction is a drive option. W/R/T the comments early in your article about Windows 2000 not supporting drives larger than 137 GB, I’d like to issue a warning.

Don’t install W2K directly to such a drive. Not even if it’s been slipstreamed with SP4 or later, and the EnableBigLBA option is set. Windows installs, but neither partitioning nor LBA handling is correct. At some future date it fills the first 137 GB, and (I speculate) the LBA addresses wrap around, and the drive silently corrupts itself.

This looks exactly like a BIOS 137 GB problem from outside. The giveaway is that the BIOS does know how big the drive is, and displays it during the prestart. I tried slipstreaming SP6 and presetting the EnableBigLBA registry fix. Didn’t work; I don’t know why. I found an easy workaround is install on a smaller drive, install SP6, set EnableBigLBA, then make a backup with Acronis True Image (google for “free acronis true image.) Then attach the large drive to the secondary controller, and restore the Acronis backup to the large drive with partition expansion enabled. Now the system is on the large drive and you’ve got a safe backup as a bonus. So if you think you’ve got a BIOS 137 GB problem on a scratch install of Windows 2000, it’s quite possible that’s not the real problem.

On June 15, 2008. Hi Dimitry, in addition to my first reply: Today I´ve tried run HDD Capacity Restore on another PC, to restore my boot drive. But it was the same procedure as before: First Vista installs the standard volume and the driver for my WD1200JB HDD. After restarting OS I started the HDD Capacity Restore, choose the WD1200JB (Master on SEK IDE) and run the tool. After a short time came a pop up window: Device is currently in use and cannot be removed from the system.

Please remove it manually in the Device Manager and try it again. Device Manager says: You must restart. After restart the first action is to new install the drive. This seems to be a general failure of the program. On June 18, 2008. I reduced the capacity on my four Samsung HD103UJ (1TB) by switching off the 48-bit LBA mode with the software provided on the Samsung homepage. Unfortunately, this process doesn’t seem to be reversible, as none of the Samsung tools (ESTool or HUTIL) nor HDat2 were able to switch it back on.

And all HDD Capacity Restore has to say is: “Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform” -which I did, as well as on others of the four drives No progress. Couldn’t find much about the Drive on the net, as it’s relatively new, but I strongly advise anyone who owns one of these little frackers to never ever switch off the 48-bit mode It’s a one-way-street! In the meantime, any tip would be highly appreciated – It’s some 500 Euros worth of Harddisks, and Samsung say it’s not their responsibility, since switching off the 48-bit mode with software provided by Samsung is not the “intended use” on July 4, 2008.

Same problem as Thomas Abercrombie: I reduced by error my samsung hard disk HD502IJ/Y with estool to lba 48bits to no, and now I am blocked to 137 Gb! I am getting mad, even this tool doesn’t work: Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered.

Please try to run this program on another platform”. I didn’t contact samsung, but I have asked a refund to go on seagate disk (forget about samsung).

Bby the mean time, if anyone has a clue, that would help a lot of people. On July 7, 2008. I purchased a new Samsung Spinpoint 1TB drive a month ago to put into my music studio computer (I constantly run out of space with all the samples and high quality audio I use).

It worked perfectly. Bought the same drive today and it said it was 33Mb. I was ready to send it back as faulty, but this program fixed it first time! Thank you so much! Do you have a paypal donate option? A few bucks is a bargain for this free utility. Why was is shipped from Samsung like this?

On July 15, 2008. Encountered odd problem and tool didn’t even recognize drive. Got three Hitachi 1TB external hds (model H31000U) and all three encountered problems with external case locking up — no drive letter. Had to power off, power on.

From online forums, apparently problem with the case. Removed drives from two cases and used in other cases. Third drive kept using in original case and went through the lockup/power off/power on procedure until it no longer showed up.

Computer Management->Disk Management now shows the drive as “UNALLOCATED”. Is there any way to get the drive letter to show up again without INITIALIZE DISK? I’m afraid I’d lose my data. If I INITIALIZE DISK with Computer Management->Disk Management, but not FORMAT, is there a tool to recover what was on the drive? On July 19, 2008. Hi, i have a 80GB western digital disk, model WDC-WD800BB. I used it in a PIII with DDO with windowsxp and linux.

Now i instaled it on a motherboard ASRock K8NF&G-VSTA and it only reconizes 33GB on bios, on windowsxp the disk doesn’t appear, on linux the disk shows it’s full capacity. When i run your program, on windowsxp, as i get to the point to restore the disk capacity I get the message: Reported capacity:33.820GB; Factory capacity: -1 Bytes and cappacity difference: -9 Bytes. I haven’t clicked restore capacity yet. Is it normal to appear this Factory capacity message? Hope you can help me. On August 2, 2008. Okay, here’s another Samsung F1 1Tb rescued.

Been running linux on f1 750gb for quite a while. Fast, silent, liked it. When it came to building a htpc, the choice was obvious: f1 1000gb + vista ultimate (played with mythtv and vdr, didn’t like it). Now, everything ran smoothly until i tried to install dvb-s card driver. Got a bsod and here we go!

The drive of 33megs. Your tool brought it back to life.

Still, i’m kind of puzzled: is this vista or samsung i should blame? Anyways, don’t think in any case drive should crash that bad! On August 7, 2008. >Sorry, you will have to remove the hard drive from the >laptop and attach it to a desktop PC. USB mass storage is >not going to be supported since it simply does not allow >the protocol that we are using to access the hard drive.

>Dmitry I don’t think you are correct. I tried cloning my disk using EZ Gig 2 software with my new 250GB drive attached via a USB adapter and it was able to change the new drive’s size.

It now reads 93GB instead of 250GB. So, if it can get into that state via a USB connection, it can get out of it using the same connection. Chandramukhi Tamil Movie Free Download Dvdrip on this page. If you don’t want to support USB drives because you don’t know how that’s one thing.

But don’t say it can’t be done, because it can. On August 16, 2008.

Hi Dmitry, While attempting to clone my laptop HD (60Gb) into one with more capacity (200Gb), the software I used apparently locked the new HD’s capacity to 60Gb. I’ve tried reformatting the new drive but can’t seem to get it to its factory capacity. Both HDs are S-ATA but I’m connecting to the larger drive via USB. I would love to hear any thoughts on how to address this you may have? I’m considering installing your utility in a bootable CD with Windows XP, installing the larger drive into the laptop and then trying to restore capacity with your software. Would this make sense?

Tanks much, on August 25, 2008. Excellent sounding tool however it’s not working for me. I have a Gigabyte GA-8i915MD-GV Mobo and a Samsung 1TB Hard drive BIOS flashed to newest version but still reports 33MB and in Disk Management reports 7.87GB, and won’t format properly. I installed The utility, and restarted Started up the utility, and it reported that i DO have 1000GB Drive, and it did it’s thing, and asked me to power-down. After I started up again, Disk Management still reports I only have a 7.87GB Drive What am I doing Wrong??? Please help me! On September 11, 2008.

D/l the utility. Haven’t tried it yet but could have used it back in May when my 160 gig went wonky and I lost data. After reformatting assuming that having W2kP SP 4 was good enough. I only got 128 gig.so since the machine that it happened on is a old HP VL400.I then set to format that drive on the eMachine/Gateway unit that came with XP Home pre-installed and got my 149GB back. The loss of data was no big deal.with the Gateway as the primary I use both as DVR/PVRs so all I lost were a few TV season finales which have been repeated this fall anyhow. Still perplexed as to what happened as even the drive letter disappeared from windows explorer[My Computer]. On September 16, 2008.

Oh.limited space eh! Continued Now I’m an XP hater.I don’t like that activation nonsense and I don’t care for the built-in spyware.[WGA etc]. For the computers that I build and upgrade I prefer W2kPro, generally 2000Pro has been more stable for my everyday use, worms and trojans can’t hide because there are no restore points. So I read where you broke off with HDDGURU.therefore I ask.what utilities does Atola offer that I can run on Windows 2000 Professional? It uses the same NT5 kernel that XP and Vista wraps around on and the only advantages I see in XP is faster bootup[no waiting for the ‘preparing network connection’ dialogue box] and different handling of USB devices.not worth the cost when I can just drop in my W2kP CDs. Klahn talking about?

There has never been more than SP4 for W2kP If there is an SP5 and SP 6 I’d sure like to see them. On September 16, 2008. Ok, I guess I included too much information and was unhelpful, sorry about that. What I’m getting at is, 1) Can I run the utility on a HDD in an external enclosure (reading above tells me no, but I’m not versed in this program) and if not, how do I get the utility to function? Also, once I try to run the program for a HDD installed in the machine, the utility wants me to manually remove the device from Device Manager, which prompts a restart. Will I get system functionality in this case? Sorry to be so ignorant, this is a frustrating voyage of discovery for me.

On September 19, 2008. Hi, I haven’t try your utility yet, but I’ll try this evening (my WD1001FALS is recognized as 32MB instead of 1Tera). My question is: my system worked fine until windows said that the hardware was changed and it was necessary to reboot the system. After the system never booted up. Could it be a virus or an unwanted application that runs silently and brakes the bxxs?;-) I don’t want that after the repair the HD will fall again in the same situation. Windows was installed on another HD (Seagate 250Gb) and works fine. This problem happened when I cloned the Seagate partition with Ghost 9.0 on my new WesternDigital partition to replace it Any suggestion?

Thanks a lot on September 30, 2008. Since every hard drive has to be hooked up to a single cable for the program to work, I hooked up a 80 gb HD to the cable that I disconnected from the CD Rom. The program says that the HD already has full capacity and no restoration is needed. But MyComputer, drive E, says that it’s only 21.3 gb. Again, your pogram’s screen says: Channel 0 Master Maxtor 30 gb [that’s correct for one of the HD] Channel 0 Slave Unknown device. Then Channel 1 Master WDC 80 gb, Channel 1 Slave Unknown Device. What am I doing wrong?

Is the HD faulty, is the jumper set wrong? Your help will be appreciated. Thanks for the free program, Dmitry! On October 3, 2008.

Hi, I have the same problem as others on here, and I haven’t seen a solution for when HDD Capacity Restore gives you a drive not accessible/is damaged error. I tried two of the Samsung HD103UJ 1 TB SATA2 drives, with the 32 MB of space/7.97 GB unallocated/can’t format or use problems and they both get errors in the program.

What is the problem here? I run a fully updated XP, have a Gigabyte P35-DS3L, and am using a SATA 500GB WD as my primary. And does unplugging and plugging back in the power source work? What will it do?

Thanks for what seems to be a great tool, just wish it would work. On October 8, 2008. Thanks again. I do not want to hijack the thread thus taking up your valuable time and precluding you from helping others.

Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. I have two hard drives on my PC.

One is 30gb and registers just the right capacity on your program. In it I have my OS. No issues with that drive.

I am trying to connect a second hard drive for storage, just one big 80gb partition. Your program tells me that this specific 80gb drive does not need to be resized. However, when I look at it from MyComputer it shows not 80gb but 23.3gb.

If I understood you well, I must partition tis additional (slave) hard drive since I can’t use a whole 80gb partition. Maybe I am wrong. I appreciate your free program and all your help. On October 8, 2008. Fist of all thanks for all who wrote her/his experiences about this subject and congratulations to the prof Dmitry! I have a External 1 TB HD brand: Smartdisk (inside a Samsung HD103UJ ). After a powerloss i got only 38 Mb instead of 1 TB!

I tried several methods like formating this small partion, delete it etc. But it doesn’t help, untill i found this Excellent tool BUT: I got the HD out from its case and connected it to my Desktop (Because this tool can NOT recognise USB Mass Storage devices) I restart my pc and run the tool: I get my 1000GB back (actually 931,51 Gb and it says%100 Free space)! The PROBLEM is now: 1-) I had 600 GB data on it and i think i loose all of them. Some people here wrote, that they get their capacity + all Data back! 2-) I am still at the moment to make a the big decision: a-) Format it! Otherwise i can’t use it ( so i will have a clear 1 TB HD but loose all my data) b-) I am waiting a suggestions from some experts.Maybe there is still a solution? As i wrote before, i ONLY formated the 38 MB part before i use the tool and i hope someone can help me before i shoot myself:-) Thank you in advance.

On November 1, 2008. I had tried to upgrade my Dell Inspiron 1705 hard drive and didn’t know about the difficulty with that due to the HPA issue until my new Seagate hard drive was resized and no utility I could undo the change (Seagates, Magicboot, etc) until this one. The one thing I did discover I needed to do was to format the partition (even though it was the wrong size) before the utility would see the drive – but once that one done the full size was restored in seconds (However the partition remained at 95 gig – but that was easy to resize using another utility.). On November 2, 2008.

****************************I Need Urgent HELP!**************************** Fist of all thanks for all who wrote her/his experiences about this subject and congratulations to the prof Dmitry! I have a External 1 TB HD brand: Smartdisk (inside a Samsung HD103UJ ). After a powerloss i got only 38 Mb instead of 1 TB! I tried several methods like formating this small partion, delete it etc. But it doesn’t help, untill i found this Excellent tool BUT: I got the HD out from its case and connected it to my Desktop (Because this tool can NOT recognise USB Mass Storage devices) I restart my pc and run the tool: I get my 1000GB back (actually 931,51 Gb and it says%100 Free space)! The PROBLEM is now: 1-) I had 600 GB data on it and i think i loose all of them. Some people here wrote, that they get their capacity + all Data back!

2-) I am still at the moment to make a the big decision: a-) Format it! Otherwise i can’t use it ( so i will have a clear 1 TB HD but loose all my data) b-) I am waiting a suggestions from some experts.Maybe there is still a solution? As i wrote before, i ONLY formated the 38 MB part before i use the tool and i hope someone can help me before i shoot myself:-) Thank you in advance. On November 3, 2008. Excellent Utility – Direct and to the Point – It reminds me of the days 20-25 years ago when the simplest programs were some of the most useful programs you could have!

I have been using an “old” Alienware machine for a 2TB media Server using TVersity for the past year and a half. I recently built a new gaming machine and converted my old gaming machine as the new media server.

When I did this, I installed a new WD 1TB Caviar Black drive. It worked perfectly for a month until this problem occurred (33 MB in the BIOS, etc.). Fortunately, I had the right mind to not fool around with the data and search for answers. This utility fixed the problem. I appreciate your explanations at the beginning of the page of the causes of the problem.

One question though for future reference – Does this utility work with Windows Vista 32 bit? What about 64 bit OS? Thanks and superb work! On November 22, 2008. I have had both these errors errors 1/ Device is in use and can’t be removed. Please Remove Manualy in Device Manager and try again!

2/ ” More than one device detected on the channel with the selected device. The device has to be single on a channel” problem solved on my pc i had the ide cable for the hardrive[ system board end] connector inserted into the secondary slot of the motherboard, changed them round as they should be, ide cable [system board end] to primary slot on motherboard thanks for the tool on December 3, 2008. Many thanks for providing this utility and web page. It took me 5 hours from the first size reporting error, forum searches,arrival here, system reconfiguration (to set up Windows on another SATA drive so I could run the fix) before my stupid Samsung HD103UJ 1TB/Gigabyte P35C DS3R combination could be ‘repaired’, but finally I’m there. Samsung do themselves no favours by not recognising this problem on their support pages, even if it does only occur with some motherboards and may or may not be entirely their ‘fault’. On December 18, 2008.

Hi Dmitry, First thanks a bunch for the tool. I had a hard drive whose capacity was mysteriously shrunk from 160GB to 23.1GB, and thanks to this tool I recovered the full use of my hard drive. New Samsung 1000GB HDD, installed on an XP machine, formatted and reported the whole drive size as being available. I used Acronis to do an image of my Operating System shortly after not sure what happened or what I did but I couldn’t see the Acronis image any more and the Samsung reported its size as being 33Mb / 7.8Gig. Tried absolutely everything have probably wasted some 20 hours downloading progs/images to blow to a CD, to boot from to change this that and the other and then eventually came across you. Ran CR first time and got a weird report that CR thought the size would be actually less than 33Mb and made the factory capacity out to be less than zero – strange, on running and a restart it reported 7.8G. Anyway ran a second time and it declared that the factory capacity would be 1000GB, ran CR, restarted machine, used XP Disk Management to partition = all present and correct!

You are a GOD, it would seem from all the surfing I have done on this topic you are the only one who seems to understand the problem and is prepared to help out with a solution that is easy for the average guy/gal. I would have thought you would have been extremely rich by now with every disk manufacturer wanting CR on their utility disk? Once again many, many thanks for ending my nightmare. On January 11, 2009.

I have WD 80 GB SATA boot drive. When I tried to use Partition Magic (wihout any action) the program reported that there is a problem wih my partition table and that it may correct it.

Like a fool I clicked OK and as a result – my disk simply disappeared from my computer. In detail – the disk is seen by BIOS correctly, but it is not seen by XP.It is very strange to me that:1) the XP starts from the this disk( it means that the computer sees the boot.ini file and ntldr), but after several seconds computer reboots 2) no program can be started flom the floppy, when tihis faulty HDD is installed. I checked it with CD-boot rescue program and it reported that there are no faults on my disk!! When I started my XP from another disk, the computer worked fine, but my faulty disk was still not seen. To my opinion there could be the problem with Master boot record or partition table. I have discussed my problem with several my friends and they treated it as unsolvable, because all repair programs are working under Windows installed on another disk – but as I already mentioned any of the the operating systems do not see this disk!!!! Do you have any idea what could be the reason and wherecould I find a remedy program working e.g under boot CD with Linux which could simply format the whole disk to make it visible to Widows.

I do not care very much about my files there, I want my disk working! Than you for your assistance Wlavek on February 13, 2009. Hi there, I have been going round & round here and getting very frustratedhere’s my problem.I have a Dell laptop.I copied my 60 GB HDD to a new 250 GB WD Scorpio Blue HDD using EZBackup.worked like a charm, I could even boot up using the new, larger HDD in my laptop, but it only showed as a 60 GB drive.ok, enter your fantastic programwhich restored my drive back to 250GB.

Then I used Windows Disk Management to partition my 190GB (actually 187GB) and then I installed it back in my laptop, turned it on, only to receive the BSOD, stating something along the lines that my hard drive has a problem, etcit will not boot with the new drive. My BIOS reports that my HDD is 58GB and that this field is not changeable, period. I know it also has to due with the Media Direct hidden partition, etcthat Dell puts on here. The questions I have are, 1.how can I get my computer to boot with my new drive installed? And 2can I remove Media Direct at all, seeing as I’ve never used it in the 4½ yrs I’ve had this laptop? TThank you in advance on February 22, 2009. I had a new western digital 1 tb hdd I bought last week and it’s been working great, I decided to reinstall windows.

I loaded up BartPE moved some of my old folders and when I rebooted my bios (and my pci sata card) both detected my 1 tb hdd as 33MB, I used your tool and it WORKS GREAT,. Thank you so much, everyone that has helped out and put in time is wonderful thanks a lot for all your hard work. TLDR: HDD Capacity Restore Tool restored my wd 1tb hdd showing 33mb back to ~937gb and I powered it off, rebooted and everything was there and working great. Only thing I had to do was disconnect the sata cdrom on the same channel because it wants only one device on it which is understandable.:) on March 7, 2009. I have had 2 WD SATA 1T drives in my system for some time now. And was startled when i found out one of them started coming up as 33MB.

After running a few recovery programs to try and find out what was going on. Discovered that the drives CHS was coming up incorrectly.

Went to the bios to check what was going on but unable to set those settings manually in these newer computers. I knew i had to try and find a program that would allow me to set these values manually and hopefully override the bios’s settings. I did find one but after 3 days of pounding the drive i gave up on it.

I was almost going to take the drive back to them but decided to do a google search. Your page was the first thing that came up. And withing minutes my drive was working the way it should again.

Now just seing if the previous programs didnt damage the existing data on the disk. Brilliant program! On March 16, 2009.

Hi, I have a 40GB HDD, a virus somehow manage to infect my HDD (Notebook IDE) and now I cant even format my HDD, It is always delayed write failed on an enclosure (plug into other pc), It has no bad sectors at all, but miraculously I manage to format it and divide it into two partitions, I thought it was a Thank God I restored my HDD physically, but the bad news is, when I tried to put it back into the laptop to install windows in it, but it is sad to discover that the HDD is cannot be accessed by the windows installer cd.I tried to use different CD installers but it is always the same result. So, my question is, is there anything that I can do to revive this HDD?, I need it so bad on March 23, 2009. Sounds like an extremely handy program for many people, unfortunately not me It simply kept giving me the error ““Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform” – Which I did, but windows, bios, and other recovery tools very stubbornly would only see a 32mb disk or nothing at all.

I tried other PC’s, and even replaced the Mobo on mine with an MSI figuring even if it didn’t make this tool work, I would need a replacement anyway after my anger at this Gigacrap board would have forced me to repeatedly drive over it in my car. Just when I was coming to the conclusion: Gigabyte GA-945GM-S2 Mobo + Samsung 1TB Hard drive with all family photos = Divorce waiting to happen. I came across. Booted with the free iso, did the easy steps in the answer to Q1 – method 1 in the FAQ (luckily the command didn’t abort as I wouldn’t have wanted to do the steps it says to do if it does abort. I think moving to method 2 would have been a wiser move at that junction).

Then rebooted, disk back to normal with all my data eagerly awaiting me to set up that backup solution I had very stupidly been putting off doing. On March 27, 2009. Add another Thank You to the list, Dmitry Postrigan. As a web developer for free software I (/we) see alot of downloads and installs with little feed back except for the “can you add this” or “theres a bug here”; so with respect to your time and knowledge, you have been a big help to me, thank you. Just recently i started to play around with VMware’s ESXi Server and somewhere along the lines a 1TB drive was changed to 33mb.

This drive had around 200GB’s of important information and another 500GB’s of misc stuff which was only partly backed-up. After trying a few other “recovery” software to no avail, your program brought the drive back to life will allfiles intacted and working like normal. Thank you again. On April 5, 2009. Big thanks to the author for this tool. I have a WD WD10EACS 1TB, full of important, but backup up, data. After a MB bios update, the drive would only be recognized as 33mb, and in need of a format.

Thanks to google and your tool, I was able to quickly restore my drive to believing it was 1TB. Now, my big question is: Why does Microsoft not buy/license your software and incorporate into Windows so it can recognize this issue and fix it on the fly? It would save many people who do not find your tool the heartbreak of losing photos and the like. Cheers, and thanks again! On April 10, 2009.

Hi, I am upgrading my brother’s Dell Inspiron 6400 120GB hard drive. I put in a brand new Samsung HM500LI 500MB drive, and it was magically truncated to the original drive’s size. After browsing a lot and trying various utilities, including Samsung’s own utility, and nothing would restore the drive to it’s correct size. Every utility that issued a command received a “command aborted”. Fortunately I ran across a post about your utility. In about 60 seconds, I downloaded, installed, and ran it with the result being that the drive size was correctly restored. Thank you very much!

On April 13, 2009. My problem was with a Samsung HD103UI 1TB, similar to others above.

The drive after purchase only showed/allowed a 32MB partition. Problem was solved with the utility, despite it giving an error at first. I followed the advice about disconnecting the power cable – despite having a brain fart and doing the SATA cable instead, but the result was the same.

So as a headsup to people, if you get an error that it can’t fix the drive, run the program again and when the “restore capacity” button appears, disconnect the power or SATA cables from the drive, reconnect, and try again. Worked perfectly fine for me. NOTE: My drive was empty since it is brand new, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to anyone who has information already stored on their drive that could be lost. On April 28, 2009. I have two 120 gb Maxtor HDs with the exact same problem at the exact same time (not likely hardware failure).

They were recently in a TIVO, installed by me, and they were “married” as a dual drive. The TIVO went bad, so since these were new (3 months) and worked OK in the TIVO, i wanted to reuse them in a PC. Both report 10.24 mb (not gb) capacity. No tool I tried can get them back to 120 gb, They will not zero fill because it is less than 65556 sectors reported, I see no partitiions on either. Seatools, recommended by Seagate/Maxtor, passed the test for 10mb, and did not restore them. I tried your restoration program, it reports it sees the manufacturer’s capacity of 10 mb (that is, it did not restore the 120 gb). What shall I try next, I don’t know what to do, both fail in the same manner at the same time after working OK in the TIVO?

Any suggestion is welcome. On May 13, 2009. RE: Samsung HD103UI 1TB The instructions in this comment got my entire drive full of data back: “the drive only showed a 32MB partition. Problem was solved with this utility. If you get an error that it can’t fix the drive, run the program again and when the “restore capacity” button appears, disconnect the SATA cable from the drive, reconnect, and try again.” That you to the utility author and thank you to the commenter above. Dmitry, please put a PayPal button up, I have $20 with you name on it. Thanks, Dan on May 20, 2009.

I have a 300 Gb WD VelociRaptor drive that I installed Win 2000 Pro on. And which has a ceiling of 137 Gb.

I then did an XP upgrade and then partitioned the drive into three more drives as I plan on multi-booting the drive with XP, Vista, and Server 2003 and a fourth drive. I formatted the partitions and attempted to install Vista on the second drive. When it asked to install on a specific partition, I selected the second drive which should have been D: drive. An error message stated that all drives, not just the three partitioneds that I did in disk management stated that they all were either unformatted or damaged. This is a brand new drive that I received less than two weeks ago new. Will this program be able to correct my problems and allow the drive to revert back to its full 300 Gb capacity? On May 26, 2009.

It’s great to read of others’ successes, so I’m wondering if this program could help in my situation I have a 250GB WD Caviar SATA drive (2500KS) that now thinks it’s a generic 8GB ROM drive due to firmware corruption. Since the capacity restore tool extracts the factory capacity, will it report my drive as a 250GB (by scanning the drive itself) or 8GB (by reading the firmware).

Before finding this site, my only other option was expensive data recovery (AU$1,000+!!!) – Backup drive died two weeks ago and I hadn’t got around to replacing it. Any thoughts would certainly be appreciated. Thx on May 28, 2009. Arnie: If your hard disk firmware is corrupted (one simptom is it doesn’t correctly report its model on BIOS), you can try Repair Station (also developed by Atola) available here: This software can repair most of firmware problems on most hard disks for a very reasonable price ($49.95). You can download for free to check if your drive is recoverable before paying for the recovery. I used it once and worked well for me (a drive that identified correctly on BIOS, but reported all its sectors as bad, and no smart information). After using Repair Station, drive was accessible again (though I received some scary warnings about inminent drive failure because of many bad sectors) but I also had to use data recovery software (EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional) to recover files, because file system was damaged.

In my opinion Repair Station is a very useful tool because allows PC technicians and advanced users to recover data from drives (with corrupted firmware only) which otherwise would require the services of a data recovery company (very expensive). However, it’s not a one click solution for the ordinary PC user.

If your data are valuable and you are not sure of doing it for yourself, contact with a PC technician to do it for you. On May 28, 2009. Arnie: If your hard disk firmware is corrupted (one simptom is it doesn’t correctly report its model on BIOS), you can try Repair Station (also developed by Atola) available here: This software can repair most of firmware problems on most hard disks for a very reasonable price ($49.95).

You can download for free to check if your drive is recoverable before paying for the recovery. I used it once and worked well for me (a drive that identified correctly on BIOS, but reported all its sectors as bad, and no SMART information). After using Repair Station, drive was accessible again (though I received some scary warnings about inminent drive failure because of many bad sectors) but I also had to use data recovery software (EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional) to recover files, because file system was damaged. In my opinion Repair Station is a very useful tool because allows PC technicians and advanced users to recover data from drives (with corrupted firmware only) which otherwise would require the services of a data recovery company (very expensive). However, it’s not a one click solution for the ordinary PC user. If your data are valuable and you are not sure of doing it for yourself, contact with a PC technician to do it for you. On May 29, 2009.

Arnie: If your hard disk firmware is corrupted (one simptom is it doesn’t correctly report its model on BIOS), you can try Repair Station (also developed by Atola Technology) available here: This software can repair most of firmware problems on most hard disks for a very reasonable price ($49.95). You can download for free to check if your drive is recoverable before paying for the recovery. I used it once and worked well for me (a drive that identified correctly on BIOS, but reported all its sectors as bad, and no SMART information). After using Repair Station, drive was accessible again (though I received some scary warnings about inminent drive failure because of many bad sectors) but I also had to use data recovery software (EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional) to recover files, because file system was damaged. In my opinion Repair Station is a very useful tool because allows PC technicians and advanced users to recover data from drives (with corrupted firmware only) which otherwise would require the services of a data recovery company (very expensive). However, it’s not a one click solution for the ordinary PC user. If your data are valuable and you are not sure of doing it for yourself, contact with a PC technician to do it for you.

On May 29, 2009. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You This issue was annoying me so much. When I get my life managed again, I will have to make a donation to the creator. I had the problem with Dell. If you try to clone a media direct HDD.

So my new 320GB drive was stuck at 75GB and dell support claimed it couldn’t be fixed. With the aid of another site for parts, I bought a IDE to Sata converter, hooked it up to an old computer and ran this. Took maybe 1 whole second. After I just had to go to disk management and format a new partition with the 230+Gb of space I now have.

On June 9, 2009. You my friend are wonderful!

I tried restoring my Samsing F1 1Tb hard drive which had the 32MB error on Windows 7 64 with no luck, and tried it again on Windows XP 32. I had the same drive is in use error, but powering down the drive and on again (just before repairing) worked. Restarted, and there we go! All my files back – over 400GB’s worth!! Not too sure what caused the problem, but Im guessing it was something caused by the power out I had. Lets just hope that it doesn’t happen again! Once again, MANY THANKS!!

On on June 9, 2009. I did exactly how many of you didbut my Samsung HD103UJ couldn’t be “resized” or even recognized just after trying HDD Capacity Restore Tool. My mobo is a Gigabyte GA-MA69VM-S2 For those who did like this “the drive only showed a 32MB partition. Problem was solved with this utility. If you get an error that it can’t fix the drive, run the program again and when the “restore capacity” button appears, disconnect the SATA cable from the drive, reconnect, and try again.” is it safe to disconnect and REconnect SATA cables with the cpu ON?!

On June 16, 2009. This program didn’t work for me. I installed it on my laptop, and ran it with the hard drive in the laptop. It came up in the list within the program, but when i tried to continue it said the hard drive was in use so it wouldn’t work. So i thought, ok that makes sense, i need to put the drive in an enclosure an plug it into a different computer. So i did that, but now when running the progam with the drive in a enclosure plugged into my mum’s computer, it wont recognise the drive, i think because it’s connected via usb.

In device manager the drive is displayed as Generic USB storage device. So how can i use this program i wonder?

The only thing i can think of is running it from a boot disc, but there’s no mention on the site of needing to do that, and the software is designed to run on windows, so i’m just wondering how to use it. On June 23, 2009. Hi, It didn’t work for me either;-) I have a WD Blue Scorpio 320GB [2.5inch] reporting as 98GB. I suspect it was my fault using it in an external box that only supports up to 160GB when trying to migrate my system from the old drive using Acronis Easy Migrate I have removed it from device manager. It is recognised in Disk management [computer management]. It makes no difference which of these I ‘remove’ it from [or both].

I have shut the program down and restarted – and also rebooted – no joy. Thanks on June 27, 2009.

Spent all day trying to resolve my issue as per 3 posts above. Tried fresh window install and then install of HDD capacity restore – still reported as locked. Tried good old DOS debugging. Then I found this Seagate tool work on WD drives:-) This info especially SeaTools for DOS Manual on how to do that. Set Capacity ———— Occasionally, a disc drive may be too large and its size needs to be reduced to a lower capacity. Similarly, a drive with a reduced capacity may need to be reset to its native maximum capacity.

Three choices are available under this section: S – Set 32GB Capacity. A common setting for older systems.

R – Reset to Drive Maximum. Full capacity is restored.

M – Set Manually. Allow you to set a specific size. Hope this helps folks!

G on June 27, 2009. HI, im from brasil, sorry my poor english, but i’ll try to explain what happened to me, i have an hd seagate DT980310AS, 80GB, and in laptop, with Xp, y can see 76 GB, iinstaled HDD CAPACITY RESTORE, AND APEARS TO ME (SHOW ) Channel#0, master st980310as SERIAL 5ST09FY6 SIZE 80GB Security: NOt Locked when i confirmed i get a wrong msg, what i did wrong? Can u help me? I really need to recover my full hd. It’s an dell laptop thanks thnak this operation will determine factory capacity on July 2, 2009. I am trying to use this on a Dell laptop.

I upgraded the SATA hard drive from a 100 GB drive to a 500GB and remaged the old drive onto the new drive using Acronis True Image Workstation. I now get 100 GB max capacity on the new drive. I tried using this utility, but it wants to unmount the drive, and of course it can’t because the Windows XP is running on the drive. How can I get this utility to run and free up the remaining 400 GB on the drive? I know the BIOS can see the entire drive, because when I first installed the drive (before I imaged it), the drive was showing 500GB. Thanks in advance.

Thank on July 19, 2009. I tried to use this software on my Samsung HD103UJ 1TB (1000GB) HDD, but not worked for me. It is showing 33mb on BIOS and 7.87Gb on Windows (non allocate space). The following message appears: “Hard drive is not accessible or damage in some way. Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered.

Please try to run this program on another platform.” I already tried to do that trick, pull of the power cable and put it back again, still not working. I think the problem is my current motherboard, a Asus P4C800 Deluxe (not the same motherboard where the HDD was messed up, it was on a Gigabyte mobo). On August 12, 2009.

Aww, this was great. I had taken my computer apart for blowing it out with some compressed air.

I do this occasionally and always ensure I write down which drive the sata cables were in and even which position in the case they were in, as sometimes that weird magic thing happens where something is wrong even though nothing should be. Well even after putting everything back in the same way it came out, powering it on caused me to notice something. My 1tb Samsung (about 700 gigs full, one of 4 internal drives) was reporting that it was not formatted, and something about 7.87 gigs. Long story short, your program just saved the universe from complete destruction tonight. So yeah, good job. On August 28, 2009. Dmitry, I have read through all the posts and seem to have a problem that is slightly different to that most have experienced.

I recently cloned a 160MB HDD to a 320MB HDD, and the new 320 HDD shows up on Windows XP as a 160 MB drive, nevertheless, it shows up as a 320 MB HDD on HDD Capacity Restore, thus when i have run the program it simply says there is no capacity to restore. It also shows up as a 320 HDD on my BIOS and on Drive Manager in Windows, but when i explore the drive it shows up as a 160 MB one. Have tried putting the drive on various different PC`s but the result is always the same, for some reason XP reads it both as a 160 MB and a 320 MB drive, and I have not been able to find a way to make Windows XP explore or see it as a 320 MB drive. On September 24, 2009. Hi everyone, I have a problem with my secondary 1TB hard drive. Here are the symptoms in the order that they occured, and how I have responded thus far. 1) My 2nd hard drive suddenly stopped getting read by Windows 7.

It said that it needed to be formatted in order to be used and for some reason, it said that it was in FAT32, even though it was NTFS last i checked. 2) I looked on the internet and found that even if I quick formatted it (in an attempt to get it back to NTFS) the data would still be on the hard drive as long as I didn’t write anything more to the hard drive. 3) So I did that, with the plan of using some sort of software program that could retrieve data after a format of the hard drive. 4) After that, Windows started reading the drive as an NTFS hard drive.

But it said that it only had 32MB of hard drive space. Which was obviously not right. So i looked on the internet again and found out about a common problem (probably what most people here are having) about hard drive caches being read instead of the actually capacity – or something like that. 5) So i got this atola hdd capacity tool from here, however when I try and select the drive, it says that the device is in use and that I need to manually disable it from device manager. I tried this, restarted my computer as instructed, but it still said the same thing. The settings in the device manager didn’t indicate any changes (still offering the option to disable the hard drive). 6) I have a LOT of reaaaally important documents and files on this hard drive.

If anyone can provide any help, suggestions, solutions, etc, I would be extremely grateful. I’ve been at this for about 4 hours now.

And am getting really worried about losing my important information Please offer your advice. Thanks on September 28, 2009. I can’t say how much I’am thankful for your tool, Dimitry. Your software safed so much money, a few thousand euro maybe. All my files are back, after I finally made the tool run with that “if you’re brave enough-trick”. I have learned (hopefully) to make regular backups from now on.

I am using XP with SP3, it is the 1 TB HD103UJ from Samsung together with the Gigabyte 965P-DS4 Rev. 3.3 F9 (Now F12b) Mainboard. The old BIOS version destroyed the hdd within a few seconds (hopefully the new one is fixed), when I connected the 1 TB hdd to the first channel on that mainboard. It is the typically Gigabyte Bios bug so many people report about. I don’t know what I would have done if my files were lost for ever. Thank you so much on October 24, 2009.

Tried to clone a Dell 80 GB drive into a Toshiba 320 GB drive then somputers would only recognize it as a 78 GB hard drive (the 320 GB toshiba) none of the tools available on the Internet fixed it as this tool. I have to say Thanks. Now I will install it from zero not cloning. Something very common with dell computers. Thanks again. At first the tool did not work on an Intel DG33 aso I installed it on a 965 asrock and just great.

By the way always good to have an asrock option. On November 5, 2009. Wow, I thought I had lost almost a terabyte of information the other day – my 1TB hard disk was showing up as only 32MB in Windows 7! Windows kept saying that the drive had not been formatted and did I want to format it now?

As a computer engineer I had an inkling that I might be able to get my data back and did not format it. After a little Google search of “hard disk only shows 32MB” I found HDD Capacity Restore. I downloaded the program and ran it on a different computer (with my HDD attached) and then restored the capacity of my hard disk – all data is still there! Great program and I will recommend it to all my collegues if they ever encounter the same issues! On January 8, 2010. So I had a pair of WD10EADS 1tb drives that I recently moved to a new PC. One is correctly detecting at 1tb, and the other at 32mb.

This is an especially big problem as they were part of an extended drive, so at this point neither will operate. On the PC i moved them to (with W7), the application does not see any drives. So, as suggested, I tried it on another (which happens to be a Vista box). There the app can see it. The first time I try to run it, it shows the drive at 1TB, but off by 1mb. Then I run the app, and it says “Hard drive is not accessible or damaged in some way. Therefore capacity cannot be recovered.

Please try to run this program on another platform” I noticed it was removed from the device manager successfully, so I try running the app again. This time it appears at 33mb, but I get the same error message.

So now I’ve tried it on two PCs with different results, neither positive. Any thoughts? Thanks on January 11, 2010. I’m running into a problem is there anyone that can help me. I cloned my laptop hard drive onto my new hard drive and now it shows the same hard drive space of 80gb instead of 500gb.

I tried using this program but it wont let me because Device is currently being used and cannot be removed from the system. The read some of the comment and it said to remove the hard drive onto a Desktop computer. I on the other hand dont have a desktop computer. Is there another other way to fix this. Or if i were to put it onto a desktop do i need any kind of special tools? On January 12, 2010.

Edwin, Thanks for the help. I now have the drive inside a case and I’m getting new problems.

THE CRT detects the drive and says it is 163 GB meanwhile windows still says it is 31.4. When I select the problem drive on the opening screen I get a pop up saying Quote: This operation will determine factory capacity of the drive. If the device is detected in the system, it will now be removed from the device manager. This is needed to avoid conflicts with the operating system. Detected in the system, it will now be removed from the device manager.

This is needed to avoid conflicts with the operating system. This is needed to avoid conflicts with the operating system. Then I select “OK”, the other option is “cancel.” Quote: device is currently in use please remove it from the device manager manually So I uninstall it I disable it, everything requires a restart and the drive is auto detected again and I’m back where I started. On January 23, 2010. An hour ago I rebooted my system and was met by the horrible sinking feeling in my stomach that only comes with catastrophic data loss. My 1tb hitachi drive was now 32mb and windows wanted to format it.

An hour of google searching a some grey hair later i found your program, and it worked like magic. Really, I need a better phase than that, because ‘works like magic’ usually takes about a day and this took five minutes! You have earned yourselves some massive geek good karma, thank you so much!

On January 27, 2010. I have a 1.5Tb Samsung HDD, that only shows up as 465Gb. When running HDD Capacity Restore, it says; Uninstall the HDD in the device manager. After doing this, the PC has to be restarted for the uninstall to be completed. After shut down and restart, the HDD is automatically reinstalled by Plug&Play.

So nothing accomplished. Then I disabled Plug&Play, uninstalled the HDD and did a required restart.

But now the window of HDD Capacity Restore is empty and does not show any drive at all (I have 2 internal drives). I am running in circles with this. Anyone have any suggestions? On January 27, 2010. Hi my WD WDC10EADS 1TB HDD showed up only 32 MB after a restart.After a search i met your soft.Previously my os was win 7 Ultimate 64 but your soft ignored working then i uninstalled win7 and reinstalled a 32 bit XP.then soft restored my HDD capacity back. But it was showed unallocated HDD and my 2 partitions got lost. Now, is it possible recover my partitions and data back?

And if yes what shoud i do? Warning: when on win7 accidentally i formatted that 32 MB area once.Does this change the situation. Thanks in advance on February 9, 2010. This worked a treat on my samsung HD103UI when it showed 1TB as 33MB, had some probs with 64bit windows but if you install the program and run it straight away you don’t get the driver error. I had nearly filled my HD when this stupid problem happened and this program fixed it in 20sec after days of trying to find a solution. No data lost, everything is perfect, only problem is that I had to put the drive into a computer as the program does not run via USB to external case.

Thanks so much on April 24, 2010. I have a Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 1Tb Sata HD. After a power outage, the drive now shows up in both the BIOS and OS as only 32mb. I have alot of irreplacable data on it. My system is running Win XP SP3 32bit. Primary HD is on an IDE channel. My Hitachi is on it’s own SATA channel by itself.

Mainboard is GA-K8NF-9(rev.2.0) nForce4(-4X) chipset. I tried to download the HDD Capacity Restore Tool, but the program doesn’t see my SATA drive. I can’t find any settings in my BIOS which will allow me to change my SATA config to “Norm”,”Compat”,or “Legcy”. The only option I have is either Auto, or LARGE. Both settings have the same results. What can I do to get the program to see my HD?

Can anyone help? Sorry about the muliple posts. I check back for a relply and my post keep disappearing. On May 25, 2010.

For those who cannot run this because they are running 64 bit windows, but you do have a copy of linux handy (even a live cd like knoppix should work), hdparm version 8.0 and higher will work for this. Download the hdparm tar.gz file from sourceforge to your linux machine.

Tar –ungzip -xf hdparm(version).tar.gz cd hdparm(version) make if receive errors, you may need to “yum install gcc gcc-c++” to get a compiler going. If you still have errors, your linux kernel may be too out of date for the program now, from the same directory:./hdparm -N /dev/(hard drive device) this will show you if you’ve got that damn HPA going on. It will also show you the true maximum number of sectors. Then you can run:./hdparm -Np### /dev/(hard drive device) where ### is the maximum number of sectors as we found out previously. This will set your drive back to normal size.

(hard drive device) may be sda, sdb, sdc, hda, hdb, hdc, etc, depending whether the drive is sata or ide, and depending which disk it is on the system. On August 7, 2010. I think you are talking here about 2 different things: 1. Recovering factory HDD capacity hoping to get more space than it is on the HDD’s label;) – this program “HDD Capacity Restore Tool’ is really good 2. Recovering HDD capacity lost due to usage of the disk – if your HDD shows less capacity then it should show as left for usage, then there are 2 things you can do to force the disk to show true free capacity. A) run software named Total Commander 7.5.

In menu there is button named Configuration/ Options/ Display – here click onto Show hidden/system files (for expert only!). If you click on it make Apply. Note: This action shows hidden files that you probably deleted in the past and those files take capacity off your HDD.

Open your HDD in Total Commander by clicking onto name of the drive. If you see on your HDD folder named RECYCLER then enter it and delete as many files as you can. Probably you will not be able to delete the file named “log” but it makes no problem; it has small capacity. Deleting the files from folder RECYCLER is safe because it is kind of HDD’s trash basket.

In this folder you may find the files you deleted in the past; just click on the random one to find out what I mean. These tips worked for me in 100%. Secondly, one tip: each disc before usage should be formatted in deep level,- it may take even few hours depending on the HDD capacity you format.

This kind of format can help even to fix the disc in some cases. Mac from Poland on August 28, 2010. I have downloaded your HD Capacity Restore 3 times. I tried to use it on Win& and Vista macines without success. It keeps telling me I have a driver error, and the next screen opens up and shows only one HD. I have at least three HD hooked up using USB. The one drive I want to recover was originally 200GB, but while I was reformating it we lost power and when I reformatted it only 132 GB is shown.

Do you have any suggestions on how to install the program so it sees the drives hooked up via USB, and help me figure out how to get rid of the ‘driver error’ problem. I hope you can help me. Thanks Bill Sheff on August 29, 2010. Hey I’ve been going through hell trying to get my new 2.5 500g Seagate HD to work on my laptop. I brought this cloning program with attachment hardware to transfer all my info to my new hd, but what I didn’t know was that cloning only transfers the original amount for my first hd which is only 60g. Now my 500g hd looks like 60g.

I finally found your program but for some reason when I go to reset vaules on the new hd it keeps me from completing. I’ve scanned to new hd for errors clean as can be. I’ve even used the seagate disc wizard program and even that won’t allow me to reset the hd capacity.

Really confused but I know I’m really close, PLEASE HELP!!!!! On August 31, 2010. I attempted to launch Ghost 2003 to image a drive. The ghost software hung after the reboot when trying to launch in the single-user mode.

I attempted to launch it several times – same result. After eventually getting my PC to reboot into Windows XP (SP3), I found the following damage: 1. The boot disk (160 GB IDE) would not boot properly (something appears to be wrong with the boot track). I attempted to fix with repair console (fixboot and fixmbr), but there is still a problem, but no data lost from this drive. My 1 TB SATA drive had been resized to something ridiculously small (8 MB?).

Windows reports it as RAW drive, and disk manager says it has no free space. Data recovery software cannot access the area which contains my data.

I tried to reset the reported capacity with CapacityRestore.exe. It sees the true factory capacity, but gives an error when attempting to reset to factory capacity. I prefer not to do a low level format – I want to try to recover data! On September 20, 2010. It saved my data on a Samsung HD103UJ.

After some partition operations (on another!! Harddisks in my PC) my backup drive was unaccessible and had a size of 32MB. (Windows said this is a “RAW partition”.) I tried the original Samsung ES-Tool under DOS. This program can theoretically restore the factory size, but it FAILED. (“Sector1 ID not found” or similar.) Yes the __tool from the manufacturer__ was not able to correct this issue.

My luck was, that I don’t manipulated this 32MB partition. (Because the trial versions of the recovery tools doesn’t support “write”.) So, I tried this Atola tool, and it worked by me and saved my important data. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!

On October 9, 2010. I could not get this program to work for me; I could not get my HD’s to show up on the list when I ran the program, no matter what BIOS settings I tweaked.

ButI would like to pass on a tip that did help me. My hard drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 250GB that was only reporting the infamous 30GB or so.

I found a tool on the Hitachi website called “Feature Tool”. I used it to change the drive capacity to “maximum capacity”, and now I can see the lost area as an unallocated section of the HD! Still need to alter the partitions, but it’s a start! On October 18, 2010. Thank You So Much!!!! I Have A Dell Inspiron E1705 Laptop And I Replaced The Factory 60G HD With A 250G.

I Used Norton Ghost 14 To Back Up Old Drive. I Installed The New Drive, And When Ghost Tried To Restore Onto The New Drive, The Software Just Locked Up.

After A Few Tries At The Restore, I Gave Up And Decided To Installed A Fresh Copy Of Windows. I Stopped The OS Install When I Noticed The New Drive Was Now Only 60G Not 250G. I Used Every Tool I Could Locate To Try And Fix This Problem To No Avail. I Took A Chance And Installed Windows On The 60G Partition, Figuring I Could Fix The Problem With The OS Installed. This Tool Worked Perfectly!

I Used A Desktop Computer Running Winxp Pro, And After A Few Reboots To Get My New Laptop HD Connected On A Separate SATA Channel From The Boot Drive As Per The Instructions In The Program. I Then Had To Disable The Laptop Hard Drive In Device Manager Also As Per The Instructions In The Program. I Ran This Tool And Presto The Additional Space Showed Up! Then I Used Partition Magic On My Desktop To Make The Entire Drive As 1 250G Partition. I Returned The New Drive To My Laptop, And All Is Working Well.

Thanks Again For Such A Great Tool!!! On November 8, 2010. HUGE THANKS FOR THE TOOL! For those with the “device is in use” problem just go to Device Manager and remove/uninstall the affected HDD. Close the tool and then re-run it as administrator since I found that not explicitly selected “Run as Administrator” caused the information in the tool to be all jibberish. After that just try and run it again and all should work and then power off. Note that I had to power off again manually for it to be properly detected since it was reading 1TB RAW instead of NTFS Confirmed and works with Windows Vista 32bit and HDD works when shoved back into my original Windows 7 machine which couldnt run the tool.

On November 14, 2010. I am looking actually the very opposite!

I have 3 bricks of 750GB Seagate 7200.12 series HDDs. I made a RAID 0 set with them. But the total capacity reached 57GB more of the 2TB limit. Not only partitioning problems, here god bless WDC’s latest Acronis HDD tool, which supports over the 2TB limit + Raid 0 + divided 2 or more partitions on greater than 2TB partitions, but this time I have more specific issues with Windows XP.

–>I DON’T WANT TO USE THAT 57GB ON WINDOWS XP, I WANT TO DISMISS (DO NOT WANT TO SHOW) 19GB FROM EACH HDD! HOW CAN I DO THAT? Thank you so much for all of this info and the Capacity Restore tool! I just spent about a day trying to figure out why my brand spanking new WD1001FALS (Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB) was showing up in my BIOS and in XP as a mere 32MB drive.

I thought it was a BIOS error for most of the day since my mobo is pretty old (but the BIOS has been updated) and I was really hoping the problem wasn’t a defective HDD. I am so happy and relieved that this has been resolved prior any expensive/unnecessary upgrading or me hulking-out on my computer. Again, thank you so much!!! On November 27, 2010. Dmitri, there is a great need for a utility like this.

After much searching, this is the first site that actually described and dealt with the protected partition/table problem. My problem is that at the moment I only have two laptops to work with.

So the disk drive in question is tethered to the other machine via USB, and HDDCR does not load the USB drivers. The only possibility that I can see it to find a desktop with which to work, on somehow to get HDDCR onto a boot disk and work from the optical drive. On December 21, 2010. Hi I have a Hp Laptop, 120G SATA HD and 2Gb Ram. I wanted to repartition it to install it a linux OS.

I partitioned it in 100G NTFS and 20G ext3 with a Partition Magic 8. Then I decided to free space to the NTFS partition to give it some more to the recovery partition HP installs on each laptop has around 1.5G. Then I used a Bootable Active Partitioner and did exactly what I mentioned before.

I resized the 100G partition to 85G. Then I created with the rest of 15G a new partition. I didn’t format it but after creation it turned in to a FAT32 by itself, the n I tried to deleted and it didn´t. Then I decided to deleted the 85G NTFS in order to make it both just one again.

The Active Partitioner didn’t read the HD again. I tried to boot it with partition magic 8 again but it says there was no installed HD. I checked it with Win98SE’s Fdisk and it only showed the ext3 partition, I mean there was 85G lost. I reinstalled the whole system with an Original HP’s manufactures CD. When it was done I could tell the HD was only 115G. I mean, even though it recovered that lost partition, 6G were still lost. My questions are the following: Can I get those 6G back again with HDD Capacity Restore Too l?

How can I do it with just a single HD? I read above that it’s possible to remove it and attach it to a desk top.

Can I do this? Have in mind it’s the laptop’s is a sata one and I have two sata ports in my desktop´s main board. On June 9, 2011. Hello thank you for the site, its the only place on the web that seems useful to fix my problem, but its still above my head. I am running win XP, I just bought a Samsung HD 103sj terabyte hard drive and its showing up as a 127 gig hard drive. I tried running the program but it tells me that the device is currently in use and cannot be removed. Someone on here said to remove/uninstall my hard drive through device manager?

This is my c-drive, windows is running on it, if I uninstall it, how will I get anywhere? I don’t understand. Does the program need to be on a different hard drive and it can’t be on my c-drive for it to work? On July 6, 2011. Hi, the issue of a WD 1Tb drive shrinking to 32Mb happened to me a few days ago and the usual panic of losing data stepped in until I discovered your tool. However, the 1st thing is that though the BIOS and windows reported 32mb, your tool reported the original size less 1mb (drive difference).

I applied your tool, shutdown for a few mins and restarted. The Bios now reads 1000Gb but windows still reads 32mb and no data to be seen. I ran the tool again and it reported that the drive’s full capacity is available but disk management says otherwise. On August 19, 2011.

I am having hell trying to just use this program. The disk I want to fix is always “in use by the operating system” no matter what services or programs I disable.

I disable in XP device manager, and I must reboot, then XP just auto-reinstalls the driver for the disk and I get “In use” again. Tried in safe mode but can’t use the program in safe mode. I tried installing xp to another machine but it only has 1 IDE channel, so I am stuck yet again. I have tried for 8 hours just to get your damn program to be able to work! Isn’t there a way to run this program as a standalone.exe or in safe mode?!

On December 21, 2011. I wanted to thank you VERY MUCH for your posted free HDD Capacity Restore program. Drive worked perfectly for 5 years until last week. I spent at least 20-30 hours on my own and with various tech supports, no one had the correct answer.

Even Western Digital support had no tool to restore my drive to the original size! However, knowing it was a size reporting issue rather than corruption helped me word my Google Search and voila, I found your software. It was simple and solved the problem!

Is there somewhere I can donate something as a thank you? In performing a back up I received many error messages in my log: Failed to copy source: Cannot copy file (23): Data error (cyclic redundancy check).

The ones I checked so far are all mp3 files and when I go to play the originalcontinued Note in on January 11, 2012. I downloaded a free Click Cleaner program in my brother’s laptop without knowing properely how to do it and what was it exactely supposed to happen, then the laptop stoped,then I turned it on and on a black screan appeared “press F11”, which I actually did without knoing what thats mean, but later started some factory settings in proces which (alarmed) it couldn’t be stoped at all even if I pressed the stop buton or tryed to unplug the laptop.

It just kept continuing its process. So, in the end it reinstaled the Vista windows, but what is worse is that there are no programs anymore and all my brother’s very important informations from hard disks dissapeared completely, the hard disks being totally erased. Is there something that could be done in order to fix this problem and recover everything he lost? With all due respect. Serban on May 1, 2012. To add something to the helpful comment of Gabriel R. (August 7, 2010 5:26 pm) I even had cases when this hdparm option FAILED.

There is still one way out to restore your hard drive to factory settings. If possible by any way, PLEASE MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR DATA FIRST. Then do this: # hdparm –yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing –dco-restore /devsd[whatever] (could be /dev/sdb, or /dev/sdc etc, it depends on your setup) Use-case: my Samsung HD400LD.

I was stupid enough in assuming it could be made faster (from UDMA/100 to UDMA/133) by using Samsung’s HUTIL! I ended up with a drive unusable on native controller (worked fine on external PCI card). This was the only way out, because HUTIL did no longer recognize my drive.

On September 16, 2012. I have a samsung 830 256GB ssd. I migrated my partions from my 100GB hdd. 2 were dells hidden restore partions and the 2 others were active OS and a storage partions. I used Norton ghost to migrate them. Everything was ok at this point. Disk manager showed the 4 partions i migrated plus the unallocated space left.

I then restored the OS back to using Dell restore function,which was Norton Ghost using the hidden partions. After the restore was done eveything woeked except my ssd capacity went from 238GB to the 100GB.

Exactly the same as the old hhd. Disk manager shows the 4 partions i copied but now it doesnt show any unallocated space. So i basically have a 100GB ssd now.

My compter runs XP media edition 2005. Showed the full capacity before i restored it. Does this program work on ssd? On December 8, 2012. Great Tool – I had a Toshiba laptop hard drive mk5076GSx 500GB hard drive that only showed up as 50gb – this happened after installing the drive into a laptop that couldn’t accept the full size – somehow this truncated the drive into only being detected and using 50GB somehow this set the max address to a small number of sectors. On my XP Dell desktop this tool wouldn’t run because it said that it was sharing a sata channel with the OS drive so I grabbed a server from work (with SAS drives), installed windows 7 on it, connected the single sata port to the toshiba drive and the power from a different workstation to the toshiba sata power connector (server didn’t have a separate sata power connector) and then ran the program with compatibility and “runas” administrator – then finally this awesome tool restored my drives capacity to 500GB. THANK YOU!!!!

On December 31, 2012. Many thanks for this nice piece of software – it really saved the day. I’d just installed a WD blue 1TB drive and formatted and partitioned and copied data to it, and it seemed fine. However a couple of days later I powered on and saw a generic volume in Explorer and got the Windows ‘drive is not formatted.; message.

What the hey. Re-booted and went into the bios setup and it showed the drive as 32mb. Tried various bios options but it wouldn’t recognise it other than 32mb, so I thought where’s the bin. Did a bit of searching on the net and found your tool, ran it, and now everything seems fine as it’s back to 1TB and Windows (both XP and 7) seem fine with it. I’m still a bit apprehensive as to whether the problem will re-occur, so I won’t load anything critical on it for a few weeks until I’m happy it’s ok. Very nice piece of software. Many thanks for it.

Regards, Terry on July 31, 2013. I have just used the HDD Capacity Restore Tool after trying to put an extra SATA drive into my machine (which didn’t turn out too well at all) but apparently my p35ds3r motherboard doesn’t accept more than two (?).

It worked brilliantly and did exactly what I hoped it would, I lost no data at all and all my files were still there and working as normal, it really made my day to be honest, fiddling round with drives and your PC when it goes wrong can take ages to fix and this took no time to get around to fixing the issue I had. Thank you very much for the download and it’s a bloody awesome tool. If I could rep or donate I would. Aside from that, if anyone can help me find out if I can actually have more than two SATA drives in my PC (motherboard p35ds3r) then that would probably just make my month. Brilliant tool and such an easy fix for a perplexing issue.

Thanks again! On August 12, 2013. This program really saved my sanity:) I made the mistake of trying to replace a 40gb drive with a 250gb to install XP on. Needless to say it was a huge mistake, and afterwards my 250gb drive showed up as 31GB in the BIOS of my controller card, and writing zeroes to the drive didn’t help.

After I zeroed my drive a second time, I used the tool and YAY! The controller card BIOS said 232GB. I ended up pulling the drive out and hooking it up as a USB HDD to get Disk Management to “see” the unallocated space.

A final format and all 250gb were restored to the drive, and said HDD is now being used as a internal storage drive for a PVR:) Thank You!! On August 12, 2013. Glad to hear of this app, but cannot seem to make it work. My aging Dell Inspiron 1505 came with a stock 40 GB HDD and swapping out a 160 GB, using (Acronis?) Disck Clone, I believe, gave me just a clone of the 40 GB and now the 160 GB HDD looks to BIOS as the old 40 GB drive. I understand DELL, in its usual love of going proprietary, messes with simple disk cloning (DSR), so running this app while in the DELL does not seem to work.

I also tried running it as an external drive from a SATA USB dock, which would not recognize the drive. So I have now tried running the app from another notebook (an HP) with the stunted 160 GB HDD from an external SATA dock. Still not recognized. I readabove, how another user had success in removing the drive and running it again as administrator. Not sure how to even get there. A little help? On August 26, 2013.

Hi Dmitry, Just tried your tool because I’ve been having trouble getting windows to format at anything but 31.4GB for an 80GB drive that I purchased. Found out old bios doesn’t like anything above 32GB and without updating BIOS, tried to install it as a USB device. Windows still wanted to format at 31.4GB.

Tried it on another machine. BIOS recognised it at 80GB and installed fine. But still windows wanted to format at 31.4GB.

I’ve done everything (besides formatting it). Your program even said it was at full capacity! So I formatted it at 31.4GB. Low and behold afterwards when I tried to reformat it, it came up with 74.5GB. Seems problem solved – but I’m gonna keep your program just in case I get a weird drive again.

This might help others if they’re having similar problems. Cheers Pete on February 3, 2014.