19 Nov

HDD “unpartitioned” itself? – This is how you recover it!

Posted by XtraSimplicity in Hardware | Tags :, , , , , , , , , |

Hello,

I recently had a major problem where some very important files of mine were stored on my HDD, i removed the HDD, installed Windows onto a different HDD, and inserted the old HDD back in as primary slave.

It failed. The older hard drive was detected by Windows as having no partition formatted to it at all.

Curious as to how this could possibly have happened, I searched the net for a way to access the “unpartitioned” hard drive.

After a few minutes of searching, I found what i was looking for. A piece of free software called TestDisk.

I used this software, and it works perfectly!

Download TestDisk
Documentation can be found here:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Running_TestDisk

Enjoy!

14 Nov

Windows Operating Systems detect 250GB Hard Drive as 130GB

Posted by XtraSimplicity in Hardware, Software |

I had a problem recently, where i had lost 105GB of capacity from my 250GB HDD.
I could format the hdd to 250GB in linux, using GParted, but could not install windows vista or XP when it was 250GB, if i was to format the HDD using any windows OS, it would become 130GB.. I had Large LBA etc enabled, and my Bios supports 48-bit LBA.
Anyway,
I was booting in to Linux and noticed that it said:

hda: Host protected Area Detected
Current capacity: 268435455 (137438MB)
native Capacity: 488397168 (250059MB)

I was VERY confused, and spent about 3 weeks trying to fix it, all to no avail.
Tonight i came across this great software, known as HDD Capacity Restore.
Excitedly, I downloaded this software, unplugged my problematic hard drive, plugged it into a spare computer (on the Secondary IDE, as Master), and made sure no other devices were connected on the Secondary IDE port, i then started the second computer, ran the downloaded program, selected the problematic hard drive, waited a few seconds, clicked restore…… less than 20seconds later, it was shutting down the computer.
After that, i left the computer alone for about 30seconds (as recommended to do so by the manufacturers of that software), and then started it back up.
To my amazement, I had 232GB back!!
I am SO happy.. I posted this as i know that somewhere out there, someone may be facing the same problems as i have been facing, and i find that i need to spread the word of this software, in order to help people out of the same mess that i’ve been in for the last few weeks.

Here’s the link to download this awesome software:
HDD Capacity Restore

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