I was recently asked by a friend to upgrade his laptop's hard drive (80GB to 500GB). I ordered a nice WD Scorpio Blue SATA 500GB and decided to clone the existing disk to minimise any inconvenience to my friend using Acronis True Image. I had done this procedure many times and not a single problem except for this time. I setup Acronis True Image to do an automatic clone of all partitions as I wanted to preserve the Dell restore partition and the Dell diagnostics. The clone went without hitch, I swapped over the hard drives and booted into a blue screen of death. Thinking this might be because of an older BIOS or chipset driver I swapped over the hard drives and upgraded all the drivers and BIOS which was several versions old. When I swapped the new hard drive back in I was shocked to see the reported capacity listed in the BIOS as only 54GB! It was a 500GB on the label! After a lot of head scratching I finally found the problem to be with the Dell MediaDirect facility which hides partitions using a weird method of messing with the MBR. Good website below on how this works, how to avoid it and more importantly how to recover from it!
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=167401
I used a tool on the Ultimate Boot CD (HDAT2) to show the 'MAX_SIZE' of the HDD but I had to use 28bit LBA and NOT 48bit LBA.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment