Azuki Panda

So in my previous post I talked about how sometime during my Windows 7 install my Samsung 1 TB drive failed. What happened is one of the times Windows 7 was starting up all of a sudden my drive became inaccessible and Windows was claiming that it needed to be formatted to be used. Closer inspection of the drive showed that it was 33 MB and was apparently using the RAW file system. I know that the file system was previously NTFS and the drive size is obviously incorrect.

I’ve dealt with my fair share of hard drive problems so I started with what I usually do - check and try to repair partition tables and the Master Boot Record (MBR). I usually use Partition Table Doctor, Paragon Partition Manager and others. None of them were able to rectify the problem, which for me was becoming problematic. The data that I have on that drive is very valuable since it has all my school stuff. I really regretted not having a separate external backup drive and also for having my “backup” drive connected to the desktop while doing the install. It was too late to regret my mistakes - I desperately needed to find a way to fix this hard drive and get the data off of it.

Some of the programs allowed me to see the partition table in a partially restored state (some of it was still missing) so at this point I was considering taking as many files as I could off of the drive and just reformatting the drive. Bobby suggested that I boot it up using a Linux LiveCD to see if I could actually see the files. Using Ubuntu 9.04, I was able to see all the files. I was overjoyed that all my data was still there in perfect condition. So that eliminated the possibility of the data being corrupt. Since the partition table tools didn’t work either, I felt that this must be something different.

I made a post to Tech Support Forums:

I have a 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint drive as my media drive in my desktop. I was doing a install of windows 7 on my computer over the weekend (onto the primary 300 GB Seagate drive), but somewhere during the install my Samsung drive stopped being recognized. This is important as I made my backups of important documents to this Samsung drive. I know it was dumb of me to have it be a connected drive that I have my data backed up onto, but in the future I will definitely invest in having an external backup method.

I have tried TestDisk, Paragon Partition Manager and both of them state that the drive is being recognized as 31.8 MB (in TeskDisk the CHD is 32 32 63), but after looking around on the internet I found that it should be 121601 255 63 for the CHD. Even with that being changed in TestDisk I could not see anything more than just one folder when I go to “List”, but from other data recovery programs such as Zero Assumption Recovery I could see more of the partition table since it lists other folders (not all, but a lot more than just one). I looked through the guide posted on this forum about using TestDisk, but I was worried that since I couldn’t see anything even under “List”, writing that partition table wouldn’t work.

I have a friend who suggested that I boot from a Linux live CD to see if I can see the data, but what other options do I have?

That describes in more detail some more information about the failure including the TestDisk output. This is the original text of the post, but I actually made a typo - CHD should actually be CHS (cylinder, head, sector - physical information about the hard drive).

The response from the forum was to copy the data in Linux and reformat the drive. Along with that response there was the suggestion to look into this tool that would restore hard drive capacity. I used the tool but it didn’t work and gave the following error:

Hard drive is not accessible or damage in some way. Therefore factory capacity cannot be recovered. Please try to run this program on another platform.

This was disheartening since I thought this tool would for sure solve the problem. After reading the comments section of that article, I found out that a lot of people were having problems with the Samsung Spinpoint 1 TB, specifically Samsung HD103UJ, and many people were having it be recognized as somewhere around 32 MB. The fact that everyone had the same problem meant that someone else was probably able to fix it meaning that I would be able to fix it. Some people said that the tool worked but there were many other people who had it fail (like me) and they were able to fix it through other means.

Samsung came out with a tool where you could change a setting which would change the hard drive size, but people claimed that it was a non-reversible process. The setting is turning off 48-bit LBA mode. At the very least, the same tool couldn’t change it back, but the Atola tool could fix this.

[Information about the 1 TB issue from the Seagate forum]

The one that finally worked is something that I would never have thought of - updating the BIOS on my motherboard. Apparently the Gigabyte motherboard (and possibly other Taiwanese ones) had some problem with this and they had a BIOS update to fix this problem sometime late 2007. My motherboard BIOS was from July 2007 and was before this update. After updating the BIOS and rebooting my hard drive was recognized and everything was in perfect shape!