How to Restore Factory Capacity of Hard Drive?

How to restore factory capacity of hard drive This post is a complete guide on recovering your hard drive’s factory capacity.

Reasons why hard drive might lose some megabytes or even gigabytes:

  • Your Operating System does not support LBA48 addressing mode
  • You are mixing binary and decimal gigabytes
  • Your motherboard has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the BIOS binaries
  • Your PC/Laptop manufacturer has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the Operating System installation files (needed for automatic restore functionality)
  • You have used some software that sets HPA (Host Protected Area), messes with DCO (Device Configuration Overlay), or switches off LBA48 support
  • You have misplaced a jumper on the drive
  • There was Magic involved

Solutions to Restore Hard Drive Factory Capacity :

  1. Check jumpers. Consult with manufacturer’s instructions and set jumpers to the proper position.
  2. Check your OS, does it have all updates installed?
  3. Check disk partitions. Run Windows Disk Management console and see if there is any free space that is not used by any partition.
  4. If steps 1—3 did not help, then we have a very cool tool that analyzes your hard drive’s LBA48, HPA and DCO status and recovers factory settings

Useful Tool: HDD Capacity Restore v1.2

License: Freeware
Author: Atola Technology
Supported hard drives: all hard drives
Supported OS: 32-bit versions of Windows XP/Vista/2003

HDD Capacity Restore Tool allows you to restore factory capacity of any hard drive. It does everything automatically: it extracts the factory capacity; then it restores the factory LBA48, HPA and DCO settings.

In some cases this program allows to actually increase the capacity of a hard drive (if it was limited by the distributor; for example, Hewlett-Packard sometimes sells 80-GB hard drives but sets a 40-GB limit. You can restore the full 80-GB capacity in this case).

Download Now: HDD Capacity Restore V1.2