Hitachi Hard drive problem

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mohavepc

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Jul 15, 2010
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Hello,
I have a friend with a 2 year old laptop running XP, he had the hard drive upgraded from 80gb to 500 gb, the new drive is a Hitachi 7K500-500 500GB according to the label. However even when slaved to my Win7 Ult machine it shows a total of 80GB. 3 partitions formated in NTSF and 1 Partition in FAT32 at about 400MB
Could this be a defective drive or did whomever set this drive up fail?
 
The drive is okay, it's the operating systems or the limits of the BIOS on your computers won't recognise drives or partitions above a certain size. Make sure you have SP3 update on XP. See if there's BIOS or chipset driver update for your computer(s) from the maker.
 
I am afraid thats not the reason. I have slaved 500gb WD and Seagate to this machine and had no problem seeing all 500gb, I have a Seagate Barracuda 320gb sata 3.5" that has my music stored on it as an external drive. I have slaved this hitachi drive to 3 diffrent machines now and all show the same thing.
 
Also to note I am running Windows 7 Ultimate on my personal machine, not xp. and the work machine I use is XP Pro SP3, I have scnned many drives on that machine and the only one that gave me trouble other than this hitachi was a 1.5 TB and only because it took forever to scan, but it saw the 1.35TB Available
 
Well, then I'd contact Hitachi -- they may have a software solution.
 
Well, then I'd contact Hitachi -- they may have a software solution.
Click to expand...

Alright then, I thought I would try here first. I have a call into Hitachi now but no answer as of yet. I have not run into this problem with a drive on NTSF before. I have seen Fat and FAT32 cause these issues but not this drastic. It's almost like someone took a label from a 500GB drive and put it on an 80GB oem However the model number internally matches the label.
Thanks for trying
 
Well as a follow up so far. Good luck getting anything from Hitachi. Thier web form is broken so you cannot submit via email and thier phone support tells me theres nothing that can be done because they believe someone "cloned" the drive and therefore it is out of warrantee. I was not Asking for a warrantee but the tech support only covers warrateed drives????
 
I can't find a 2.5" model 7K500 at Newegg:
this one is a 3.5" form factor:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145336&Tpk=N82E16822145336


Is it this one -- Hitachi Travelstar 7K500?

http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/mobile/travelstar-7k500


Here's what I would do:

put the 80GB back in

buy this neat kit (which is always good to have handy):

http://www.amazon.com/USB-2-0-SATA-5-25-Adapter/dp/B000J2GUS0

connect that new Hitachi 500GB to a USB port,
using the latter adapter

if there is no data on that Hitachi,
try to format it with XP's Disk Management utility

review results


MRFS
 


Thanks for the idea but, this drive is a 7k500-500 or HTS725050A9A364 Used by Dell as an OEM disk. I have used An external Drive caddy and the drive shows 80GB. I then switched to the internal Sata cable on my tower and.....Well same results. I think it may have been either damaged by cloning that the other shop did or it's defective. I just dont get it. Also I downloaded and made a disk for for the hitachi tools they recommend. Ultimatley the tools tell me there is no Hitachi drive installed. Go figure
 
tough nut to crack :)

I note that there is one of these Hitachi models
with an automatic encryption feature.

Is it possible that this encryption feature is malfunctioning?


> I have used an external Drive caddy and the drive shows 80GB.

Yes, I read that.


Call Hitachi!


MRFS
 


Anything is possible with these drives I suppose. I have tried contacting Hitachi and I will try again.
here is the specs on this drive from hitachi's website
Hitachi Travelstar 7K500
2.5 inch SATA hard disk drive
Drive
name
Model Number Type Max data
transfer rate
(Gbps)
Capacity
(GB)
Height (mm) Rotation speed
(rpm)
Travelstar
7K500-500
HTS725050A9A364 TS7SAA500 3.0 500 9.5 7200

so although it does not say "Travelstar" on the label it is indeed a "Travelstar" Drive.
 
I have tried to use the Hitachi Feature tool which allows you to change the reported size of the drive for legacy applications. However even though it says it saved the changes it still reports the drive as 78GB after a reboot. I am really frusterated with hitachi now as they still have not returned any calls.
 
Ok drama so far:
Contacted Hitachi again, They told me to try the Feature tools again only this time do not reboot. When tool is finished pull the drive and slave it to another machine. then using a Partition utility expand whichever patition you want to fill the unallocated space. It seems that even though the tool worked Windows xp changed it back as it thought there was an error in reporting?? (odd if you ask me)
I Used the tool
Shut down and slaved the drive
Found 400GB Unallocated space :^)
Using Easus Partition Wizard I have expanded C: to use the 400GB unallocated. at this point it is 35% done and more than likely it seems it will take most of the rest of this afternoon to complete. I won't use a usb next time I run into to this (knock wood I never do)
I will post in the next couple of days and let you know if this solved the issue. I guess the shop that "cloned" the drive hid the 400GB??? Not sure why as this is not legacy equipment. Poor practice maybe.
Also as a side note I havent recieved a confirmation email from the forum yet. can anyone point me to the right place to have it resent?

Thanks to all that have tried to help
 
Sad to report but Failure seems to be this Hitachi's model name
Was able to Change the C: to include 400GB unallocated.
read/Write and chkdsk passed all with flying colors
Place back into laptop and boot
heres the failure
BSOD says hardware failure
Pull drive it says it is now a 78GB RAW
??WTF??
Data unrecoverable
Chkdsk says Unrecoverable errors
*sound of head banging on wall*
I dont know if the Bios could be suspect but it sees 500gb
only failed when XP tried to boot
could this be a boot sector virus???????
Seriously???
 
Ok I am at a loss here. I will try a few other forums as well. Just to let you know that I used the Hitathi tool to change the HDD back to 500GB. All the data is there
!Whew! I am going to create a backup of the data again just to be safe.
What I don't understand is if the laptop bios sees 500gb and the slaved drive shows 500gb what in the world is happening at boot that switches it back to 78GB?
I'm not a noob at this I have a shop and have partitioned drives before. there has got to be a simple answer but darn if I know what it is.
I am going to scan the drive with several utilities and see if it could actually be a BSV but I'm not convinced thats the case either.
Thanks to all
 
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