IDE HDD is 160GB and not its actual 250GB help

[GKandRiven]

I have a Samsung SP2514N/CE HDD that says on the front sticker as a 250GB drive but when its connected to a PC it says its a 160GB drive, it shows in the bios as this and when I used a bootable Hirens boot cd and used the dos program to check for bad clusters it says its 160GB too, I read somewhere that this type of "CE" drive is missing the firmware chip and has a slightly different PCB. I contacted Samsung but they said to contact Seagate but I cant use Seagates online support page for contact as the serial number field in their requirements is not recognised, does anyone know how to fully unlock this drive? I dont think its a partition problem but I am now going to delete all partition/s on it and see if its still 160GB I just got the drive today and im going from what the bios says and Hirens.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Post screenshot from disk management.
That drive is like 10 years old. Why do you need to use it?

 

[gasaraki]

I would delete all the partitions and do a low level format of the drive to fully clear the disk.

 

[The Paladin]

1. make sure the Master pin is set properly.
2. it is probably partitioned, load windows cds, when asked to install yes, then looks at the hard drive I bet it will show a unused partition of 90gb, delete both, and reinstall fresh it should be fine.

 

[GKandRiven]

Ok everyone I used GParted and deleted the only partition and made a new one and yep its still only 160GB, thanks for all the common answers like jumper settings (set to master) and partitions but I knew it might have been a partition problem but now its not and the bios and programs Ive used to check the drive health all say its 160GB so this drive has some other way to make it at its full 250GB the only problem is how?

 

[RolandJS]

Is there a way you could post a screenshot of that sticker? I'm wondering if that sticker is a "hand-me-down" sticker from another source and that it is incorrectly reporting HD's available byte-space.

 

[Paperdoc]

Re: your comment about "I read somewhere...." that some such drives have this odd capacity, I found this thread

http://www.austech.info/showthread.php/17477-samsung-250Gb-hdd-issues

About ¾ of the way down, the post from Colin 2905 has more detail that may help you identify whether or not your particular unit has this characteristic. IF it does, the info appears to say there is no way to get access to the full 250 GB because the unit's controller board cannot do that.

 

[GKandRiven]

I will try and get a happy snap for you later RolandJS but right now I might call seagate and find out what they say, Paperdoc that link is the same one I read so I might have a unusable drive but would it be good to use in an original Xbox with a softmod? I dont know where this drive came out of it might of been a DVD recorder but why on earth would Samsung put stickers with wrong storage capacity on them?

 

[junkeymonkey]

maybe some of the reasons why they sold that part of there company to Seagate internal issues and crap quality control uncaring workers , did not give a crap on platter drives and focused on ssd's only ,,ect...

may try this and see if you got any recourse left on it use like for a rma ?

http://support.seagate.com/customer/en-US/warranty_validation.jsp?form=0