First a little background. I am a certified Tech and I own a store in Lake Havasu City, Az
I have been fighting with this problem for 2 days and I am totally perplexed. I have never seen this happen before so maybe someone else here has and can help.
I have a customers Dell Inspiron E1405 that is running XP media center. The original 80gb Hard drive failed whist he was in Cali. He had a shop ther clone the old drive to a new Hitachi 500gb Model HTS725050A9A Travelstar. After cloning the 500GB showed up as 78.2GB. but was functioning just fine with a loss of 400GB. I get the machine and look into the bios. says 78.2GB. using Hitachi's tools I find that the hard drive has been modified. returning it to 500.11GB says it took and reboot.
After rebooting it says 78.2GB again. Called Hitachi and they said I need to use a partition software to extend the c: or D: drive into the unallocated space. only there was no unallocated space. jus 78.2gb. using the tools again I change the drive back to 500.11GB then pull the drive and slave it on a test/recovery machine. 500.11GB shows and I can now usr Partition magic to expand the drive.
Place the drive back into the dell and BSOD, XP repair reports 78.2 gb RAW.
Using the tools yet again I chang it back to 500.11GB. Check the Bios after shutdown and it sees a Hitatchi 500.11GB hard drive as primary drive and dvd rw as secondary. reboot from bios and Wham BSOD again.
check with recovery console and the bois and I once aghain have a 78.2gb Raw drive.
Tools again and I am now scanning with several antimalware and antivirus as we speak. (or write as the case may be lol)
My question I guess is what could be happening at boot up into windows that would actually change the drive to the 78.2GB?
Would a RSV be able to do this? if so is it a fault or vunurability in Hitachi drives? I have not seen any tools for WD, Seagate, Toshiba ect that would actually allow you to write to the flash prom on the drive to chage reported sizes. but Hitachi does? Why? Hitachi says it's for Lagacy use, but that is a load of hoowee. If you Laptop does not support more than 80GB why would you waste 400gb?????
Lastly I have Checked with Dell and Checked to make sure the latest Bios was flashed and it was. and as I said before the Bios will see the 500.11GB befoer it boots into windows.
Well there you have it, and as you might imagine I am totally frusterated with this problem. I have cloned, partitioned, formated many many drives with os's from win3.1 to7 and Linux, mac ect.
this is unique to me
please help if you can
Thank you for your time
*steps down from crate*
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