Boot up failure

[garthwight]

My computer shut down normally, the next day when switched on the computer would not boot up, I tried all the bootup progams I had from Seagate, Ontrack and various others to no avail. The HDD showed up as 31Gb instead of the original 80Gb's. I installed a new HDD and reinstalled XP and later W7, both new systems started the computer up and showed my 2nd drive (the corrupt 80Gb HDD), on boot up the new system advised me to reformat the 31/80 Gb HDD! Which I have not done as I need the info (files) on this HDD.
I tried "RecoverMyFiles", which showed the corrupt HDD as a 31Gb drive, but RecoverMyFiles could find nothing on the 31/80Gb HDD.
Any help out there will be greatly appreciated.

[GDH]

Hi,

If you type "hard drive 31gb" into Google you will see you are not the only one who has encountered this problem.

From reading of the different posts, iIt seems that there are several causes, but essentially it comes down to the hardware not knowing correct size information about itself.

We had a drive with this problem come into our office last year. It turned out to be because the drive had reset its protected area to 0, and the only size seen was the 32mb on board cache. It was solved by locating a program from the hard drive manufacturer which reset the drive parameters.

What is the make of the drive? You may find the solution by trolling around the manufacturers website.