How old is the notebook computer? Older hard drive controllers had the number of bits allocated for Logical Block Access to be 28 (?), limiting the size of the hard drive to 128 GB. There have been various controller limits over time. There are various sneaky ways to get around this but it involves loading drivers before they normally load. It generally involves some sort of special modification to the Master Boot Record of the large drive. The drive manufacturer generally has software for doing this.
Fred Holmes At 05:50 PM 8/11/2009, Jack wrote: >I have what appears to be a disk geometry error. > >I am migrating from a 100GB Fujitsu notebook drive to a 500GB Western >Digital. I made an export/backup image using Acronis, switched the drives, >and reloaded the old image to the new 500GB drive. That part works fine - >the partitions and everything look good. > >However, I cannot extend the filesystem on the new drive beyond 100G because >the system says there is nothing there. > >I have used a number of tools to see what's going on (Partition Magic, >parted, Linux fdisk, cfdisk, Raneesh Part Mgr) and they all report 100GB. >testdisk reports that there are hidden sectors (lots of them...) but >provides no apparent method of recovering them. An attempt to install Red >Hat or Win XP doesn't see the additional missing sectors either. > >I wonder if the Acronis restore overwrote the disk geometry info, and if so, >how can this be corrected? Is this in track 0? Or the MBR? Of if indeed >disk geometry is even the problem? > >Since the disk is new and the data is safe, I can do pretty much anything >with it in the way of recovery, such as formats and zero-fills. Any help, >gentle pointers, or painful hind-side kicks will be appreciated. > >...jeff > > >************************************************************************* >** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** >** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** >************************************************************************* ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
