Not seeing all of WD10EADS 1TB drive

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I’m trying to install this known good drive as my 2nd (non-boot) hard drive to store backups, etc. on a Windows XP home computer. it has a SATA and installs ok, but all I can see is approx 530 MB (1/2 gig) it should be approx 1TB.

Thanks for all your help in advance

jackmcgann@gmail.com

2

What capacity is reported by BIOS? How many LBAs are reported by your diagnostic software, eg HD Sentinel or HDDScan?

A capacity of 530MB brings back memories of an old CHS limitation that restricted drive sizes to 528MB. This was because the old DOS INT13H was limited to 1024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors.

Other than that, was your drive ever connected to a Gigabyte motherboard with an Xpress Recovery BIOS?

Can you see any odd settings in BIOS?

3

First; thanks for your assistance.

I’m in the process of checking the things you mentioned (and learning all about HD’s at the same time)!!

I’ll respond when I have some more info…Thanks again.

4

BIOS seems to id it as a “1000.2G” drive. I took some of the ID’d settings (DMA + Ultra DMA) settings from the ID and plugged them in instead of “AUTO” but it didn’t seem to help. My Bro in law says that he FDISKed this drive from an old “universal boot disk” because it told him “boot manger missing”. He corrected that with the FDISK, but may have inadvertently caused this… I registered the drive with WD, but it still won’t let me DL the “advanced formatting” ACRONIS pgm.

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To circumvent the 528MB limitation of older 486 BIOSes, HDD manufacturers provided various utilities that made use of Disc Drive Overlays (DDO). For example, Seagate had EZ-Drive, Maxtor had MaxBlast, Ontrack had Disk Manager.

I don’t know what the “universal boot disk” did to your HD, but you should be able to undo it by using WD’s Data LifeGuard to zero-fill the beginning of the drive.

1 Like
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Great. I’ve just downloaded ithe WD DLG program, I’ll report back when I find time to try ithe “WRITE ZEROS” option…

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Well, I “zeroed out” the drive using the WD program, that only made it disappear completely from My Computer". However that was actually a step forward. Following the WD FAQ’s on their site, I had to add window hardware, reboot, and then manually “initialize” the drive. using windows management + disk init, I had to partition and then it  took 4 hours to format, and voila, I now have a secondary drive “G” at 1 Gig size…So I would say that the DOS diskette that was label univ boot disk created the problem, and your “zero out” solution, and it’s aftermath were the solution!! Thanks so much, and it was a great learning experience to boot. Next, I’d like to move my operating system to it and make it my primary drive.