Greg I remember this weirdness from some years back. The Seagate <http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/1TB-1000MB-Dr ives-shrinked-to-31MB-32MB-33MB-causality/td-p/7687> forum post that particularly amused me was this one (I happened to find it again quite quickly) -
The only reason for getting such phenomena is the usage of a Mainbord with yellow(orange) and purple(lilac) SATA connectors where taiwanese BIOS coders were unable to do there job well in the past. Drives can be reactivated on a board from other vendor, by seatools running Advanced Features/Set Capacity to MAX native. BIOS update is essential before plugging it to the gaga board again. (ignore the primary-school standard spelling and grammar) The remedy is probably the same that you found to work. I'm not sure about the technical explanation for why it occurred! _____ Ian Thomas Victoria Park, Western Australia _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Greg Keogh Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2012 4:58 PM To: 'ozDotNet' Subject: [OT] 1TB disk shrinks to 32MB fix Folks, Last year I purchased a brand new 1TB drive, brought it home and plugged it to find it was a 32MB drive. I took it back for a replacement drive which did not have the problem. Yesterday I took a Seagate 1TB drive out of an old decommission Vista machine and plugged it into my server and found it had shrunk to 32MB. I estimate I burnt up at least 2 solid man hours trying the drive in different machines and using different BIOS tricks to get it back to 1TB again without hope. It's a popular problem during web searches. Hundreds if web pages later I find advice to install SeaTools for Windows, but it's a waste of time as it doesn't repair problems like this and just does scans. Then I found an ISO CD image of SeaTools for DOS (SeaToolsDOS223ALL.ISO) which you boot from and it has a surprisingly pleasant screen where you can "Set capacity to MAX native". This put the drive back to 1TB and it's now recognised as such over in my server where I originally wanted it. Just in case this helps others avoid the suffering I went though. Greg
