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#1
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Hard drive requires explanation
Picked up a nice little 733MHz Compaq Deskpro small form factor box at a
corporate yardsale recently. Original specs of 128MB, 10GB, 48x CD, Win 2000 Pro. Upgraded to 256MB. Nice computer. Opened up the chassis and saw a Western Digital WD400BB disk drive in it. Looked up the specs at the WD web site. Yep. 40GB. Great! More than I'd bargained for. Went into the computer's BIOS setup pressing F10. The BIOS reported the drive manufacturer and model correctly, but showed the capacity as 10GB. I downloaded the last 3.13 BIOS for the beast, and flashed the BIOS. Still 10GB capacity. Ran WD's DLGDIAG drive diagnostics which showed a capacity (hold your breath now) of 10GB. Next, I hooked up another 40GB drive and the BIOS reported it correctly as 40GB, which ruled out some sort of BIOS limitation on hard drive capacity. The WD400BB drive has a large drive sticker (typical WD) showing a Compaq part number. It also has an HP sticker on it, and a Compaq spare part number sticker. The drive was manufactured in July 2003 (just out of warranty), so I'm speculating that it was a replacement drive for a system under extended warranty, because the original was made in 2000. So what happened here? One possible explanation: By 2003, WD (and Maxtor and all the rest) had stopped producing 10GB drives, and HPaq needed spares as replacements. So HPaq contracted with WD to cobble up 40GB drives with drive firmware allowing only 10GB to be used. Sheesh! The least they could have done would have been to paste a 10GB sticker on the drive. Any other explanation? HP has done similar things in the distant past, but I would be digressing. Any idea how to use the entire 40GB capacity? Anybody have a WD400BB which suffered a head crash? Swapping circuit boards could do the trick. Anybody know how to reprogram hard drive firmware? ... Ben Myers |
#2
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I doubt if Compaq/HP was that devious. I'd ignore the BIOS and try to
figure out the underlying problem. For example, what does Partition Magic say about the drive? And the obvious question. Are you sure there are not two partitions? Or one 10GB partition and 30GB unpartitioned? Tom ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net (Ben Myers) wrote in message ... Picked up a nice little 733MHz Compaq Deskpro small form factor box at a corporate yardsale recently. Original specs of 128MB, 10GB, 48x CD, Win 2000 Pro. Upgraded to 256MB. Nice computer. Opened up the chassis and saw a Western Digital WD400BB disk drive in it. Looked up the specs at the WD web site. Yep. 40GB. Great! More than I'd bargained for. Went into the computer's BIOS setup pressing F10. The BIOS reported the drive manufacturer and model correctly, but showed the capacity as 10GB. I downloaded the last 3.13 BIOS for the beast, and flashed the BIOS. Still 10GB capacity. Ran WD's DLGDIAG drive diagnostics which showed a capacity (hold your breath now) of 10GB. Next, I hooked up another 40GB drive and the BIOS reported it correctly as 40GB, which ruled out some sort of BIOS limitation on hard drive capacity. The WD400BB drive has a large drive sticker (typical WD) showing a Compaq part number. It also has an HP sticker on it, and a Compaq spare part number sticker. The drive was manufactured in July 2003 (just out of warranty), so I'm speculating that it was a replacement drive for a system under extended warranty, because the original was made in 2000. So what happened here? One possible explanation: By 2003, WD (and Maxtor and all the rest) had stopped producing 10GB drives, and HPaq needed spares as replacements. So HPaq contracted with WD to cobble up 40GB drives with drive firmware allowing only 10GB to be used. Sheesh! The least they could have done would have been to paste a 10GB sticker on the drive. Any other explanation? HP has done similar things in the distant past, but I would be digressing. Any idea how to use the entire 40GB capacity? Anybody have a WD400BB which suffered a head crash? Swapping circuit boards could do the trick. Anybody know how to reprogram hard drive firmware? ... Ben Myers |
#3
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Tom,
There are NO partitions on the drive as reported by FDISK. Another step I could take to unravel this mystery would be to zero out the drive using the WD DLGDIAG utility. This would blow away the MBR, partition tables and any other fakery written at the beginning of the drive by drive overlay software (e.g. WD's Data Lifeguard Tools), had it been used to set up the drive. With native BIOS support for a 40GB drive already in this system, it would have been unnecessary to use WD's software to set up the drive with the drive overlay junk. If this had been a retail drive, the drive would have had a WD diskette in the box, and some unwitting person could have run it to set up the drive overlays. BUT (a bit BUTT!), this is clearly a drive supplied by HPaq, not a retail drive, and very likely a replacement under warranty. DLGDIAG also reported 10GB, and DLGDIAG does its inquiry to the drive for drive capacity directly thru hardware registers, not even using DOS calls, hardware INT 13h. One reason why HPaq may have been devious. Federal government and other contracts are a two-way street. They committ the vendor to selling and supporting certain models for a fixed number of years, albeit at ridiculously high prices given the usual price erosion in this business. "Support" often means providing EXACT spare part replacements over the life of the contract. I have been there in the past with US Govt contracts. If the contract says you will provide a 10GB spare drive, you better do so or find yourself in violation of the contract, even if the "violation" ends up giving the govt agency more than originally bargained for. (For years, I have gotten and still receive emails and phone calls from spare parts clearing houses looking for EXACT part numbers when I know darn well a generic commodity substitute will work just fine.) I'll run DLGDIAG again to see if zeroing the drive fixes the situation, but I am dubious. I still think the drive firmware got cobbled up. In the meantime, any other ideas about this drive would be much appreciated. .... Ben Myers On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 07:33:41 -0500, "Tom Scales" wrote: I doubt if Compaq/HP was that devious. I'd ignore the BIOS and try to figure out the underlying problem. For example, what does Partition Magic say about the drive? And the obvious question. Are you sure there are not two partitions? Or one 10GB partition and 30GB unpartitioned? Tom ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net (Ben Myers) wrote in message ... Picked up a nice little 733MHz Compaq Deskpro small form factor box at a corporate yardsale recently. Original specs of 128MB, 10GB, 48x CD, Win 2000 Pro. Upgraded to 256MB. Nice computer. Opened up the chassis and saw a Western Digital WD400BB disk drive in it. Looked up the specs at the WD web site. Yep. 40GB. Great! More than I'd bargained for. Went into the computer's BIOS setup pressing F10. The BIOS reported the drive manufacturer and model correctly, but showed the capacity as 10GB. I downloaded the last 3.13 BIOS for the beast, and flashed the BIOS. Still 10GB capacity. Ran WD's DLGDIAG drive diagnostics which showed a capacity (hold your breath now) of 10GB. Next, I hooked up another 40GB drive and the BIOS reported it correctly as 40GB, which ruled out some sort of BIOS limitation on hard drive capacity. The WD400BB drive has a large drive sticker (typical WD) showing a Compaq part number. It also has an HP sticker on it, and a Compaq spare part number sticker. The drive was manufactured in July 2003 (just out of warranty), so I'm speculating that it was a replacement drive for a system under extended warranty, because the original was made in 2000. So what happened here? One possible explanation: By 2003, WD (and Maxtor and all the rest) had stopped producing 10GB drives, and HPaq needed spares as replacements. So HPaq contracted with WD to cobble up 40GB drives with drive firmware allowing only 10GB to be used. Sheesh! The least they could have done would have been to paste a 10GB sticker on the drive. Any other explanation? HP has done similar things in the distant past, but I would be digressing. Any idea how to use the entire 40GB capacity? Anybody have a WD400BB which suffered a head crash? Swapping circuit boards could do the trick. Anybody know how to reprogram hard drive firmware? ... Ben Myers |
#4
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Ben Myers wrote:
Any idea how to use the entire 40GB capacity? Anybody have a WD400BB which suffered a head crash? Swapping circuit boards could do the trick. Anybody know how to reprogram hard drive firmware? ... Ben Myers Ben, I don't have a lot to offer, but do you know of 'Spinrite', http://www.grc.com ? It will offer you another option on working on hard drives and does directly access the drive regardless of OS. Its not too expensive and its really worth it! -- Jim ----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==---- http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 100,000 Newsgroups ---= East/West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =--- |
#5
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An update. Consider once again the possibility of HPaq deviousness.
First, FDISK shows no partitions at all. Partition Magic would show the same. Second, WD's DLGDIAG identifies the total drive capacity as 10GB, even after it zeroed out all the supposed drive sectors and I rebooted the system. Third, the Hitachi/IBM Drive Fitness Test identified the drive capacity as 10GB. Both these and other manufacturer disk diagnostics bypass the motherboard BIOS completely and rely on low-level port in and out commands to read the block of drive information present on all IDE/ATAPI disk drives (except maybe the first ones ever). Likewise, the Compaq BIOS has to resort to low-level port commmands to get the drive info. After all, that's what a motherboard BIOS is for. It shields higher level software from having to know the details of exactly how to access drive information and read/write data. So far, the drive walks like a 10GB drive, it looks like a 10GB drive (except for the misleading WD400BB sticker), and it quacks like a 10GB drive. Until I can come up with some other things to try, I have to assume that a 40GB drive has had its firmware crippled by HPaq (or at their request) so that it believes it is a 10GB drive. Now if I only had another WD400BB with a known good circuit board to swap... Ben Myers On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 07:33:41 -0500, "Tom Scales" wrote: I doubt if Compaq/HP was that devious. I'd ignore the BIOS and try to figure out the underlying problem. For example, what does Partition Magic say about the drive? And the obvious question. Are you sure there are not two partitions? Or one 10GB partition and 30GB unpartitioned? Tom |
#6
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On the seventh day, ben_myers_spam_me_not wrote...
I'll run DLGDIAG again to see if zeroing the drive fixes the situation, but I am dubious. I still think the drive firmware got cobbled up. I'd bet the mystery is going to solve itself when you zero out the MBR. Look forward to hearing from you... -- mit freundlichen Grüßen/with kind regards Christian Dürrhauer, Institute of Geography, FU Berlin If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'. |
#7
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På Wed, 03 Nov 2004 02:17:43 GMT, skrev ben_myers_spam_me_not @
charter.net: Opened up the chassis and saw a Western Digital WD400BB disk drive in it. Looked up the specs at the WD web site. Yep. 40GB. Great! More than I'd bargained for. Went into the computer's BIOS setup pressing F10. The BIOS reported the drive manufacturer and model correctly, but showed the capacity as 10GB. I downloaded the last 3.13 BIOS for the beast, and flashed the BIOS. Still 10GB capacity. Ran WD's DLGDIAG drive diagnostics which showed a capacity (hold your breath now) of 10GB. snip Any idea how to use the entire 40GB capacity? Anybody have a WD400BB which suffered a head crash? Swapping circuit boards could do the trick. Anybody know how to reprogram hard drive firmware? ... Ben Myers I've had a similar experience with a hdd. (I cannot remember, though, how it showed up in the BIOS.) The drive had been dual-booting Windows and Linux. Later Linux hadn't been removed properly. I didn't know the history of the drive then, and used all the tricks you've been mentioning. I finally succeded using a small program called "Slate". It removes everything, and I mean *everything* on a hdd. (Warning! Be sure which drive you choose to delete.) Afterwards the drive showed up as it should. -- JP Loken Using M2 - Opera |
#8
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I downloaded slate, copied it to a boiotable DOS floppy and ran it. Same
result. The WD400BB still shows up only 10GB in the system BIOS. This is what I thought would happen, because the WD DLGDIAG diagnostic did the same thing by writing zeroes to all sectors on the drive, including the MBR and partition table. I'm going to pull the drive anyway, and replace it with a 20GB Seagate to sell to a client. Thank you for the suggestion, even though to no avail... Ben Myers On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 20:13:23 GMT, "JP Loken" wrote: På Wed, 03 Nov 2004 02:17:43 GMT, skrev ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net: Opened up the chassis and saw a Western Digital WD400BB disk drive in it. Looked up the specs at the WD web site. Yep. 40GB. Great! More than I'd bargained for. Went into the computer's BIOS setup pressing F10. The BIOS reported the drive manufacturer and model correctly, but showed the capacity as 10GB. I downloaded the last 3.13 BIOS for the beast, and flashed the BIOS. Still 10GB capacity. Ran WD's DLGDIAG drive diagnostics which showed a capacity (hold your breath now) of 10GB. snip Any idea how to use the entire 40GB capacity? Anybody have a WD400BB which suffered a head crash? Swapping circuit boards could do the trick. Anybody know how to reprogram hard drive firmware? ... Ben Myers I've had a similar experience with a hdd. (I cannot remember, though, how it showed up in the BIOS.) The drive had been dual-booting Windows and Linux. Later Linux hadn't been removed properly. I didn't know the history of the drive then, and used all the tricks you've been mentioning. I finally succeded using a small program called "Slate". It removes everything, and I mean *everything* on a hdd. (Warning! Be sure which drive you choose to delete.) Afterwards the drive showed up as it should. -- JP Loken Using M2 - Opera |
#9
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Christian,
No luck. I've done that several times. Again, the BIOS (that's BIOS) AND DLGDIAG report a 10GB capacity. The motherboard BIOS setup does not read the MBR at all to determine drive capacity. It uses register-level commands to access the hard-coded (flash or EEPROM) block of data which describes the characteristics of the drive. At least, that's what a normal BIOS does, as do low-level utilities like DLGDIAG. For other reasons, I'm coming to the conclusion that the DeskPro EN BIOS is not quite what it seems. A Pentium 3 BIOS should be capable of handling drives with a fairly large capacity. Several things I've done since installing a 20GB Seagate lead me to wonder about how the DeskPro EN BIOS interacts with it. Possibly the problem is a BIOS one, but I still doubt it. However, does anybody have any information based on specs or real world use regarding the BIOS limits of Version 3.11 or 3.13 of the 686P3 BIOS in the DeskPro EN small form-factor computer? Thanks much... Ben Myers On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 20:14:55 +0100, Christian =?ISO-8859-1?Q?D=FCrrhauer?= wrote: On the seventh day, ben_myers_spam_me_not wrote... I'll run DLGDIAG again to see if zeroing the drive fixes the situation, but I am dubious. I still think the drive firmware got cobbled up. I'd bet the mystery is going to solve itself when you zero out the MBR. Look forward to hearing from you... -- mit freundlichen Grüßen/with kind regards Christian Dürrhauer, Institute of Geography, FU Berlin If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'. |
#10
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So the 20GB worked correctly? I think that would rule out a prob with the
BIOS although some P3's will have a 32GB limit. I don't see anywhere if you tried the drive in a different machine. Do you get the same result? I'm sure you checked already, but be sure the capacity is not clipped by a jumper setting. 10GB would bee an odd limit anyway.. You might try over in comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net (Ben Myers) wrote in message ... Christian, No luck. I've done that several times. Again, the BIOS (that's BIOS) AND DLGDIAG report a 10GB capacity. The motherboard BIOS setup does not read the MBR at all to determine drive capacity. It uses register-level commands to access the hard-coded (flash or EEPROM) block of data which describes the characteristics of the drive. At least, that's what a normal BIOS does, as do low-level utilities like DLGDIAG. For other reasons, I'm coming to the conclusion that the DeskPro EN BIOS is not quite what it seems. A Pentium 3 BIOS should be capable of handling drives with a fairly large capacity. Several things I've done since installing a 20GB Seagate lead me to wonder about how the DeskPro EN BIOS interacts with it. Possibly the problem is a BIOS one, but I still doubt it. However, does anybody have any information based on specs or real world use regarding the BIOS limits of Version 3.11 or 3.13 of the 686P3 BIOS in the DeskPro EN small form-factor computer? Thanks much... Ben Myers On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 20:14:55 +0100, Christian =?ISO-8859-1?Q?D=FCrrhauer?= wrote: On the seventh day, ben_myers_spam_me_not wrote... I'll run DLGDIAG again to see if zeroing the drive fixes the situation, but I am dubious. I still think the drive firmware got cobbled up. I'd bet the mystery is going to solve itself when you zero out the MBR. Look forward to hearing from you... -- mit freundlichen Grüßen/with kind regards Christian Dürrhauer, Institute of Geography, FU Berlin If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'. |
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