WD3003FZEX wrong partition size, lost data soooo many problems with new drives

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

OK where to start i have already made a post about this issue on a usenet group so here is the link to that so you can bring yourself up to speed on what has been done so far.

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt/j_3y7QHeunY/discussion

Right i’ll start of by saying i have an older motherboard with a normal old fashioned bios NOT uefi (or whatever it’s called) Asus P5E3 Premium wifi https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5E3_PremiumWiFiAP_n (X48 chipset), I have moved over to SSD’s hence rebuilding of the computer, the problem started when i installed the new drive and it wanted to use GPT and I didn’t simply becasue i didn’t like the fact that GPT made a small 128MB partition (allbeit hidden) so somehow (dont ask me how) I was able to format the drive to a single 3TB drive.

As i started to move data around it was fine until i rebooted and it went crazy telling me something was wrong with drive G and needed to repair it and according to it saved loads of swf files but when i got back into windows i was greated with a 747GB partition that was unformatted, same has happened to another WD3003FZEX drive, so as it stands right now i’m 6TB worth of data down and well p1ssed off as you can imagine.

What is going on how can i first of all recover what i have lost? Then sort drives out so i can use them as i should be able to (I don’t mind GPT this time), I’m running Windows 7 U x64 (legal) and it’s up to date with all patches, I bought a third WD3003FZEX the other day got it this morning put it inline went to disk management in Win7 and was told to initialize the disk and format which i did this time in GPT (learnt my lesson) and bingo i still have a drive that is 764.39GB in size, something is wrong that is for sure but i have no idea what i am doing wrong i have a nasty feeling it’s my motherboard not having a uefi bios, any WD3003FZEX experts on here help me.

All1

2

Hi if bios does not see the complete hard drive size windows will have no chance . You can try   HDAT2 , HDD Capacity Restore Tool it will restore the full capacity of the drive.  This page should give you a idea what is going on.  http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_Capacity_FAQ.html

3

Right well cleared the bios and rebooted and had a nose and it’s only showing 801.6GB, Going to try the app you mentioned but i have a nasty feeling here.

All1

4

I suspect that your BIOS may have truncated the drive. Certain flavours of GigaByte and Asus BIOS try to grab a small portion at the end of the user area for BIOS backup purposes. This sometimes results in the symptoms in Q2 and Q3 of my FAQ. However, I have seen one case where an Asus BIOS cut the capacity of a drive to 128GiB (the 28-bit LBA limit). Perhaps your BIOS has some kind of 32-bit bug that cuts the capacity by discarding bit 33. If so, then the tools alluded to by Hammey should restore the capacity, at least until the next reboot. BTW, the bug seems to affect the first drive in the boot order, but not the others.

Another way to verify the capacity being reported by BIOS and by your various software would be to examine the drive’s actual response to an ATA Identify Device command. You could use a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. CrystalDiskInfo produces a text report which you could upload as an attachment or paste into your next post.

5

OK thanks for the reply fzabkar my boot order as it stands right now is 2 Samsung Pro SSD’s which holds my OS’s then normally i have about 5 drives before these 3TB but right now i have taken most out of line and just have 2 x SSD, 1 x 1TB and 1 x 3TB Blacks it’s 3am here now so i will post some results later onCrystalDiskInfo tests.

All1