1TB WD drive reports as 33 mb

I’m posting this here as a fix I found to help anyone else that might have the problem. Some motherboards (particularly gigabyte MBs) have a bug in that they write incorrect HPA data to the drive upon install and then report the wrong size in BIOS and OS. 

I ran into this problem  with a new WD Green 1TB hard drive (WDBAAY0010HNC) and my Gigabyte GA-8KNXP MB. The only other post on here I found that described the problem of incorrect reporting  was at http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-Portable-Drives/WD10EARS/m-p/234270/highlight/true

The solution was found with a small program called HDD Capacity Restore and can be found at http://hddguru.com/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Restore-Tool/

It’s a windows tool so doesn’t help those on Mac or Linux. Install the problem drive, boot into windows normally (or from a boot CD) and run it. Select the drive that’s reporting wrong and tell it to restore capacity. That’s it. Reboot and the BIOS and OS should now see the drive’s full capactiy.

Great, thanks for sharing the info.