6400 Upgrade Hard Drive just SHRUNK . . . AGAIN!!!

Cloning a hard drive with media direct will truncate the drive and it will show as the original drive.Read this http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm. There is one way you can accomplish this,buy drivewire you can get it from dell.I used this and cloned a 100gb 7200rpm hdd to a 200gb 7200rpm and worked like a charm.It will only work with E1505 and E1705.I have a post under the upgrade hardware section about cloning with drivewire.I will try and locate the post and send you a link.

Read this post http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_upgrade&thread.id=63679.

Thank you!!!  That certainly explains it.  Here's a snippet of the article:

Some people will eventually want to upgrade their hard disk to a new disk with larger capacity. Users should be warned about a unique problem that may occur in certain circumstances. If you try to replace your hard disk with a larger disk, if you try to clone the contents of your original disk to the new disk, and if your original disk contains HPA-based MediaDirect, then you may discover your new disk's capacity becomes truncated to the size of the original disk.

Taken from.... http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm

This is just frustrating... i bought a computer to COMPUTE . . not watch Disney movies. 

I'll first need to figure out how to get my drive back to the right size.  That's proving to be difficult, and caused me to think my first drive was defective after a plethora of tries before finding these articles.  The article gives some ideas and tools.  I've already got SeaTools, but that just scans and tests.  I'm looking into some of the other tools,  HDD Capacity Restore looks good, but it's not playing nice with my BIOS settings right now.

Then i'll need to clone it through some hoops for which I'll be back to this thread.

if you can't get the transfer from the smaller to the larger, you should still be able to format the remaining space as a new partition and use it as another drive.

check out the drive in Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Disk Management

you should see unalocated space on the new drive.  you can create a new partition in that unallocated space and format it.

i've had some luck with this http://selfimage.excelcia.org/

i copied a 10 GB drive to a 13 GB drive and ended up with a 10 GB partition and ~3GB unallocated space.  the drive booted.

but... now that i've read your reference th HPA i understand.  Stupid MediaDirect

i don't remember if selfimage will clone just one partition vs the entire disk, but i think it will.  maybe that would work for you.

Thanks cwallen, though I wish it was that simple - and Disk Mgmt was the first place i went to.  The drive is showing the reduced size in every single application/utility/tool that i throw at it. 

First of all, the drive won't boot as is, it blue screens. (So even if the space was there, i can't use the drive)  I'm only seeing it when put into my desktop on a spare SATA port.   And then, its a smaller drive.  I've literally tried 8-10 different utilities to get it back but to no avail. 

During the clone/reboot, it appears that the HPA was hidden and this is getting into editing sectors and the like.  (This is mostly foreign speak to me and util yesterday, i've never heard of HPA or LBA-3 Sectors) 

This page explains it to a T: http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm

Now that i have found this thread of topics (do a search for "Unhide HPA" or "zero out lba3") and you'll see how perplexing and unique this issue is.  Most threads point to the Dell's....

So, as an update, i was able to successfully clone the hard drive.

Using the notes found here: http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm under the topic "How To Avoid the Truncation Problem" worked perfect.

1. clone the entire drive as you normally would.

2. using a sector editor (I used Roadkil SecEdit) simply zero out "LBA-3" (in laymens terms is simply the 3rd sector) on the NEW drive after cloning.  Some directions say to zero it out before cloning, but i did it after so the old drive still has the original config.

Media direct is now disabled, but honestly, I didn't even know MD was before this painful hunt.  (And further, i never even pushed that silly button out of curiousity anyway...)

Wish i would have found this stuff 5 weeks ago before i started.

Thanks to all who helped!

I've also managed to do this upgrage of a 6400 to a 320 gig SATA hard-drive, after first encountering the same problems mentioned in this series of posts.

1. I first used Acronis True Image to clone the old drive to the new larger one (in a USB caddy).
2. Then before attempting to use the new drive to boot into Windows I used a boot CD from a great little free utility called HDAT2 http://www.hdat2.com/ to expose and remove the HPA partition.
3. Then I replaced the DELL MBR with a new one (using another utility that rewrites the MBR so that it would not be looking for the HPA).
4. And then when I finally booted up into windows, everything worked!

If you go to the http://www.hdat2.com/ website and look under FAQs you'll find some interesting stuff about HPA partitions and one of the questions even mentions DELL laptops specifically.

Blake, I'm having the same problem with a Dell E1505 (same as a 6400) with Media Direct, except I now have THREE 250 GB hard drives that are all showing the size of the original drive--110GB.  I have 3 generations of drives now--'Grandfather', 'Father' and 'Son', and am currently operating with the Father (250 shrunk down to 110GB but able to boot).  I tried to clone the 'Father' to the Son, and ended up with another drive shrunk to 110 GB that delivers a blue screen when it tries to boot. 

So following your advice I used Roadkil's SectEdit to zero out the LBA-3 on the 'Grandfather" drive, since I don't use it any more, as a trial run.  Only after zeroing LBA-3 it wouldn't boot at all--never got beyond the bios screen.  I was able to replace the LBA-3 (typed in 512 pairs of digits!!) and got the Grandfather to reboot again.  But now I'm afraid to zero out the LBA-3 on either the Father or Son drives, as they probably won't boot either.

What am I doing wrong to cause the drive to not boot when LBA-3 is zeroed?  The sector I zeroed showed as "sector 3" in SectEdit, but that means it is actually the fourth sector, since the counting begins with a sector "0".  Was it "sector 2" I was supposed to zero, instead of sector 3.

I know it has been a while since you did this, but any help you can provide will be much appreciated.

Dan

Try following the instructions detailed at this link to return your hard drives to their original capacities:

http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html

Q1: I received a 40 GB drive in replacement for a 20 GB model in PC. The drive is reported as 20 GB capacity. How can i get full capacity ?

A1: If you see in 'Device List' menu at your disk drive a notice '!SET MAX: HPA IS ACTIVE', use 1. method, otherwise use 2. method.

In program HDAT2 select your disk drive and press Enter to show 'Main Menu'.

1. method:

In 'Device List' menu at your disk drive you see notice '!SET MAX: HPA IS ACTIVE'.

Select 'SET MAX (HPA) Menu', then select 'Set Max Address' and press Enter. By default is set so called native size of disk drive disku and you can just press a key 'S' to setup original capacity of hard drive and remove HPA area.

If the command is aborted, try change 'LBA mode' from 28 to 48 or vice versa (if disk supports 48-bit LBA mode).

2. method:

Select 'Device Configuration Menu', then select 'Restore' and press Enter. If you don't see any error message, in 'Device List' menu press a key 'D' to make new detection of devices or simple make restart of PC's and check capacity of your hard drive.

If you see any error message or in 'Device List' menu at your disk you see a notice '!DCO: FROZEN', then it is possible that BIOS was sent a command DCO Freeze and all subsequent DCO commands will be aborted now. How to try bypass this state see answer nr. 2.