[CS-FSLUG] 80Gb disk claims to be 2.2Tb disk

[Tim Young]

Hi,
I believe there are two places where the heads and cylinder 
information, in the partition space, and on the drive itself (in the 
chipset).  When the drive first connects, if there is no information 
in the partition area, it gets the partition and cyllinder 
information from the disk bios.  But that can be overridden by the 
partition information.

Assuming you do not have any information on the drive, the first (and 
simplest) thing to do is to write a ton of zeroes to the start of the 
drive, overwriting the partition info.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[DRIVE] count=2048 bs=1024
(where DRIVE is sda, sdb, sdc, or whatever your drive is)
After you do this, you should disconnect the drive and reconnect it 
(or reboot) to ensure that the drive information is re-read instead 
of being used from memory.

The second thing you can do is to check to see if there is an updated 
firmware for the drive.  (many drives have had updated firmware that 
you can download and install).  After the firmware update, I would 
zero out the start of the drive (like I mentioned above), disconnect 
the drive, and reconnect.  Then try to repartition.

Finally, if you have a Windows box handy, you can try plugging it 
into that to see if it recognizes the correct information.  If so, 
have Windows partition it for you, then move it back to the Linux box 
and see if that recognizes it now with the right info in the partition.

If it is still not reading it properly, then it is most likely an 
issue with a dead drive (the chipset that holds the 
heads/tracks/cyllinders is not returning the proper information, and 
could be bad.)

     - Tim Young

On 9/7/2013 7:43 PM, davidm at hisfeet.net wrote:
> I've been struggling for hours with this thing, and getting nowhere.  How
> it got so messed up, I don't know.
>
> fdisk (linux) gives me this in answer to "p"
>
> Disk /dev/sdd: 2199.0 GB, 2199023255552 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 267349 cylinders, total 4294967296 sectors
> Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> Disk identifier: 0xc57f4e2d
>
> And then follows up with suggestions of how to deal with such a large
> disk. But it isn't that large.  It is an 80GB disc  #WD800BEVE
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Dave
>
>
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