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

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

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

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


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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

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'.

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

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

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'.

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'.