Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity. July 1. 9th, 2. 00. Author Dmitry Postrigan. Comments This article is a complete guide on recovering your hard drives factory capacity. At the end of this article there is a link to our program that recovers factory capacity of any hard drive. My hard drive has mysteriously became smaller How can I restore its full capacityThere are several common reasons of why your hard drive might lose some megabytes or even gigabytes Your Operating System does not support LBA4. FreeFileSync is a free open source data backup software which helps you compare and synchronize files and folders on Windows, Linux and macOS. UpdateStar is compatible with Windows platforms. UpdateStar has been tested to meet all of the technical requirements to be compatible with Windows 10, 8. Windows 8. You are mixing binary and decimal gigabytes. Your motherboard has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the BIOS binaries. Project Nomads Save Game Editor here. Your PCLaptop manufacturer has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the Operating System installation files needed for automatic restore functionalityYou have used some software that sets HPA Host Protected Area, messes with DCO Device Configuration Overlay, or switches off LBA4. You have misplaced a jumper on the drive. There was Magic involved. Now I will go through these things one by one and provide some more details. Operating System does not support LBA 4. Windows 9. 5, Windows 9. Windows ME will not support big drives 1. GB even if you install all hotfixes. There are ways to get around this problem, but since these Operating Systems are rather rare nowadays, I do not see the point of writing about them. Windows 2. 00. 0, 2. XP do not support big drives by default you will have to install the latest service pack in order to get big drives working properly on these OS. Windows Vista does not have any issue with big drives. Binary and decimal gigabytes. Hard drive manufacturers use decimal gigabytes while operating systems use binary gigabytes. One decimal gigabyte contains 1 0. So, your 3. 00 GB hard drive will show up in Windows as a 2. GB hard drive. Motherboard creates HPAMotherboard can create a so called Host protected area on your hard drive to store its data. Usually this area is not bigger than 1. PCLaptop manufacturer creates HPAManufacturer of your PC can create a Host protected area on your hard drive to store an image of the original operating system and programs. This area is used when you want to restore the original state of your desktop PC or laptop without using CDDVD disks. Usually this area is quite large 8 2. GB. In this case, to restore the original capacity of the hard drive with the HDD Capacity Restore tool that we include in this article, you may need to remove the hard drive out of its original PClaptop and temporary attach it to another PC. This is needed because most BIOSes will disable HPADCO operations to ensure that nothing can reset or damage that hidden area. Software that has the ability to control HPA and DCOFor example, MHDD. This software allows you to set a Host protected area on your hard drive, so the hard drive will report less capacity to both BIOS and Operating System. MHDD can also access DCO Device Configuration Overlay, and that allows you to not only change hard drives capacity, but also switch some hard drive functions, such as LBA4. Security commands support and others. Some manufacturers for example, Dell and HP use DCO to reduce capacity for marketing needs. Example they need to ship 1. GB hard drives, but they only have 8. GB drives in stock. They will use their own DCO tools to lock capacity to 4. GB. Jumper settings that limit hard drive capacity. Most hard drives have a special jumper setting that allows you to limit their capacity to either 3. Magic cases. These include things like HDD firmware bugs believe me, there are plenty of them. Also, sometimes a damaged Master Boot Record may cause the BIOS andor the Operating System to misdetect the true hard drive capacity. In this case you would need to use a zero fill tool. Sometimes a very broken hard drive may report wrong capacity. In this case there is nothing you can do about that. Solutions. Restoring factory capacity. Check jumpers. Consult with manufacturers instructions and set jumpers to the proper position. Check your OS, does it have all updates installed Check disk partitions. Run Windows Disk Management console and see if there is any free space that is not used by any partition. If steps 13 did not help, then we have a very cool tool that analyzes your hard drives LBA4. Download Windows 8.1 Pro Iso 32 Bit Highly Compressed Pc' title='Download Windows 8.1 Pro Iso 32 Bit Highly Compressed Pc' />Windows 8. KMS Activator Ultimate 214 v2. Free Download, Windows 8. Activator KMS Tools v2. Activation Backup,Update KMS server. Best 4KHD video converter for Windows 107 to convert MKV to MP4AVI, YouTube to MP3 also an HEVC MP4 converter, YouTube downloader, HD video editor and compressor. Windows 8 Ultimate ISO 64 Bit 32 Bit FREE Highly Compressed Windows 8 Ultimate ISO. Windows 8 Ultimate ISO 64 Bit is a newly designed operating system used by. Windows 7 SP1 Ultimate ISO x86x64 January 2017 PreActivated Multi 6 Windows 7 SP1 Ultimate 32Bit64Bit OEM ESD January 2017 Windows 7 Ultimate is ultra. HPA and DCO status and recovers factory settings see below. HDD Capacity Restore Tool. Download Windows 8.1 Pro Iso 32 Bit Highly Compressed' title='Download Windows 8.1 Pro Iso 32 Bit Highly Compressed' />Weve came up with a freeware tool that handles LBA4. HPA and DCO features. It does everything automatically it extracts the factory capacity then it restores the factory LBA4. HPA and DCO settings. Download HDD Capacity Restore Tool. Supported OS 3. 2 bit versions of Windows XPVista2. All you have to do is to run it and click Restore Capacity. The program will do the rest. Update May 2. 4, 2. Many people ask if this this tool formats the hard drive andor erases the data. No, it does not perform any kind of formatting furthermore it does not read from or write to the user data area at all including partition tables, boot records, etc. It only alters HDD firmware HPA and DCO settings. I strongly recommend to re power your computer before running this tool. That means, completely power off your computer then power on, start Windows and run the tool. If the tool fails to restore the original capacity, then the most common reason is that your motherboard is blocking HPA and DCO commands. You can check that by running BIOS Setup and looking for things like DCO or HPA. If nothing helps, try on another computer. If you are brave enough, you can also try the following run the program, select your hard drive, and then when you see the Restore Capacity button, re power your hard drive by detaching and re attaching its power cable. Warning you are doing this at your own riskAfter the program finishes working 32. PC, then wait 1. 02. I believe Ive covered everything. Download Windows 8. Pro Iso 32 Bit Highly Compressed GameIf I am missing anything, you are very welcome to leave a comment Good luck Atola Insight Forensic All in one forensic data recovery tool. In depth disk diagnostics, disk duplication and wiping, firmware and file recovery. Official Activators Windows 8. 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