I have a WD3200BEVS drive that I bought to expand my 80GB drive on my laptop. When I first tested the drive the entire drive was visable. I have a hardware disk cloner that I wanted to use to clone my existing disk with all software onto the new drive and then I anticipated using Disk Manager or Partition Magic to extend the primary partition. After cloning the 80GB drive onto the 320GB drive the 320 drive only shows the 80GB drive capacity (anticipated). Disk Manager and Disk Part both only see the 80GB. Even the Acronis utilities only see the small portion of the drive. I cleared all partitions and reinitialized the drive but am still missing the rest of the drive.
I am runing Windows 7 Professional and it doesn’t have fdisk anymore. Is there a utility that I can run under Windows or cmd window to make the entire drive visiable again?
Do you have a Dell laptop with Media Direct? If so, then Dell’s non-standard MBR code has truncated your drive after bootup. In this case you need to replace Dell’s code with a standard Microsoft MBR using FIXMBR. I don’t know about Windows 7, but you could do this from the Recovery Console of a Windows XP CD.
After doing the above, you can then restore the full native capacity of your drive using the HDD Capacity Restore Tool or HDAT2.
http://hddguru.com/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Restore-Tool/
http://www.hdat2.com/
http://www.hdat2.com/files/cookbook_v11.pdf
http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html
To “change the native size” of your HDD, see page 5 of the HDAT2 cookbook.
For an explanation of HPA, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area
References:
Understanding the Dell MediaDirect Partition:
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm
HPA Problems When Upgrading Hard Disk:
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm
