2TB WD20EARS showing up as 1TB

Hi,I bought a WD20EARS and it’s showing up as a 1tb drive. I tried setting the partitioning scheme to GUID instead of MBR but that didn’t solve anything. I also sent an email to WD customer care but apparently they don’t support Linux. Any ideas?

uname -a

Linux debian 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Fri Aug 6 00:38:23 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

smartctl

smartctl 5.40 2010-07-12 r3124 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (local build)
Copyright © 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital Caviar Green (Adv. Format) family
Device Model: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1
Firmware Version: 80.00A80
User Capacity: 1.000.227.396.608 bytes
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Tue Aug 10 14:35:16 2010 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x80) Offline data collection activity
was never started.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed
without error or no self-test has ever
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: (43980) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 255) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes.
SCT capabilities: (0x3031) SCT Status supported.
SCT Feature Control supported.
SCT Data Table supported.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 100 253 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 175 175 021 Pre-fail Always - 8225
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 10
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 8
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 7
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 15
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 115 115 000 Old_age Always - 37
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]

SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

I suspect that you have a Gigabyte motherboard with an Xpress Recovery BIOS. If so, then a BIOS bug has truncated your drive. See the following thread for more info:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Other-Internal-Drives/wdidle3-broke-my-wd10ears-hard-disk/m-p/40589#M404

I have a Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H motherboard with BIOS version F1. I noticed version F3 has this fix: “Some of 1000 GB (1TB) HDDs will be detected size error.” so I downloaded it and put it on a USB flash memory to update the BIOS. However it couldn’t detect the usb drive so I rebooted in order to double check the instructions. Then I noticed the 2tb drive is showing up as 2tb. Here’s what I tried unsuccessfully: rebooting, formatting the drive, changing partitioning scheme from MBR to GUID back to MBR. Problem solved… by itself. Thanks for the link! Somehow this got solved before I read it but I’ll bookmark it just in case.

Hey wd20ears!

Are you 100% positive, that after the next reboot / shutdown - powerup your drive will still show as 2TB?!

I have exactly the same stuff happening with my WDC WD20EARS drive on SLES 10.

I installed the driver, booted up the server and it shows 1TB… After a few reboots i decided to check the drive in an other server and it was recognized normally as 2TB. I’ve put the drive back to the original server and look at that - 2TB! Nice, until we had a little power shortage :-(, now it’s on 1TB again and needless to say all data on the drive is lost.

It’s an Intel system:
Base Board Information
        Manufacturer: Intel
        Product Name: S5000PSL
        Version: Not Specified
        Serial Number: QSSL91000369
        Asset Tag: QLR-DD1
        Features:
                Board is a hosting board
                Board is replaceable
        Location In Chassis: Not Specified
        Chassis Handle: 0x0000
        Type: Motherboard
        Contained Object Handles: 0

Bios is up-to-date.

I have tried HDAT2 but it fails to run… Any other Ideas on how to deal with that?

Would really appriciate any advice, i’ve exhausted all knolege i had :-(.

Regards,

D.