HDD showing wrong capacity

anvoice

Honorable
Jan 12, 2018
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Hello,
I have a hdd that I'm trying to set up Linux on. Problem is after some tinkering, the disk is showing only about 232GB of what should be 512GB of space. I tried various ways of getting the space back to no avail.
What happened:
Broke the Linux Xenial installation on the disk and decided to switch to Debian Wheezy (I need to install LinuxCNC). Failed at installing Debian due to what I believed might be a problem with the disk (actually bad bootable USB). Attempted to fix by zeroing out sda, which at the time showed up as two partitions with LVM (each with around 232GB). Now this hard drive only shows around half capacity as if the second partition simply evaporated. I never tampered with the drive physically.
What I tried:
Using gparted on Linux. That only shows the 200ish GB of unallocated space.
Using disk manager on Windows. That still only sees 232GB of unallocated space.
Not sure what I could do to recover my lost space. Any ideas? Thank you.
 

anvoice

Honorable
Jan 12, 2018
131
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10,615

I'd probably rather buy another drive than specialty software for a one-time use. Thanks for the suggestion though.
I'd suspect that it's a hardware problem with the drive, if it didn't start right after I zeroed those two separate partitions, with one being retained and the other disappearing.
Also just speculating here, but it seems to me there has to be an area of the hard drive on which its size is stored (since the OS knows how big a disk is without scanning the whole thing). Perhaps that area on my disk says the last available block is earlier than the end of the drive, and no tools I tested bother checking beyond that area? Is there a way to change that section of memory (assuming I'm speculating correctly)?
 

anvoice

Honorable
Jan 12, 2018
131
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10,615

Thank you, I'll try there.