Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi guys. I'm having a perplexing issue, and hope that someone has some guidance, as I can find no similar problems elsewhere. I have a Win7 Home Prem. machine, freshly loaded OS due to a previous 1TB disk going bad on me. The disk (a 2TB drive) that I have the OS loaded on is not the problem, but a secondary one that I have all my media files on, apparently is. HD Sentinel is throwing up the warning that this particular 4TB drive is not displaying it's correct size of 3.XX (or whatever the "true" size of a 4TB disk is), and instead is only showing 1.6XX, or something like that.

The thing is, disk manager DOES show the correct size, as does a properties check through Windows Explorer. I'm not sure where HD Sentinel is getting this info.

Other pertinent information: This computer is NOT connected to the internet. It has the basic Win7 files with no updates or other service packs. I assumed that basic disc drivers/controllers are loaded with Windows...? Also just recently I had to reload all the media files on this disk when, while trying to add to the files, all of them became corrupted and unrecoverable. I suspected a bad drive, so I did a fresh reformat on a different computer, and HD Sentinel said that the drive is 100% healthy. On my media computer, though, there's this strange report on disk size, which I now suspect is the problem behind the sudden file corruption. The OS reporting the correct disk size is throwing me off.

Any thoughts would be most welcome, and thanks in advance!

First of all, I must tell that this is a very common problem and described with details at Support -> Knowledge base -> Hard Disk Cases -> Hard disk case: capacity is not correct page, or directly at

http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_cas ... orrect.php

This is caused by an incompatibility between the hard disk (which is over 2 TB, so all 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 etc... TB hard disks can be affected regardless of manufacturer, model) and the system. In most cases, the problem is related to
- hard disk controller (motherboard chipset) driver which may not correctly manage the high capacity hard disk
or
- the USB adapter / enclosure (if the hard disk connected on USB).


> HD Sentinel is throwing up the warning that this particular 4TB drive is not displaying it's correct size of 3.XX
> (or whatever the "true" size of a 4TB disk is), and instead is only showing 1.6XX, or something like that.

The 4 TB hard disk (which is actually 4.000.000.000.000 bytes) is really 3.725 GB. The difference is that in Windows (for example Disk Management and so) 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte and so. To follow this, Hard Disk Sentinel also uses the 1024, not 1000.

But the problem is not this - but that your system can't address the complete capacity. When you'd try to copy more than 2.2 TB data on the hard disk, you'll surely lose all data as the sector address will overflow and starts counting from 0 again. This causes that the first sectors (partition table) and then the written MFT / directory / file system data will be overwritten.


> The thing is, disk manager DOES show the correct size,

No. Just for the PARTITION.
When Windows reads the partition table, it reads that the hard disk has a 4 TB partition which could be addressed.
But if you inspect in Disk Management more, you may notice that the physical hard disk size is only 1.6 TB, exactly as displayed in Hard Disk Sentinel.


> as does a properties check through Windows Explorer.

Yes. Exactly because it does not care about the physical drive size and addressable capacity, just the logical drive (partition) size.


> I'm not sure where HD Sentinel is getting this info.

Hard Disk Sentinel detects the REAL physical drive info and matches with the partition sizes.
Without the notification of Hard Disk Sentinel, all data will be surely lost from the hard disk if you copy more than 2.2 TB data on it.


> It has the basic Win7 files with no updates or other service packs. I assumed that basic disc drivers/controllers are loaded with Windows...?

Yes, it is possible that older drivers installed - which can cause this problem.


> Also just recently I had to reload all the media files on this disk when, while trying to add to the files,
> all of them became corrupted and unrecoverable.

Oh....
So you already encountered exactly this. Hard Disk Sentinel issues the warning for this, so I'm not really surprised.


> I suspected a bad drive,

No. This is absolutely not related to the hard disk itself.


> so I did a fresh reformat on a different computer, and HD Sentinel said that the drive is 100% healthy.

Yes of course. First of all, the hard disk has no health problems - that's why it is 100% health.
Also the other computer may have different drivers and there the complete capacity could be used. There you could create partition and format it without problems.


> On my media computer, though, there's this strange report on disk size, which I now suspect is the problem behind the sudden file corruption.

Yes, I'm afraid this is the problem.


> The OS reporting the correct disk size is throwing me off.

No. The OS just reports the partition size - shows what you "want" to see, but does not indicate problems with addressing.

So I can repeat that
Without the notification of Hard Disk Sentinel, all data will be surely lost from the hard disk if you copy more than 2.2 TB data on it.
as nothing else reports such problem which acts like a time-bomb: when you fill up the hard disk, you surely lost all data.

The Support -> Driver Zone ( http://www.hdsentinel.com/driverzone.php ) page designed to offer best, correctly working drivers (which may not be the latest!) for various controllers, motherboard chipsets. Please check your current controller and driver version / date (displayed on the Information page in Hard Disk Sentinel) and install the best, recommend one to improve the situation.

If you could send a developer-report with Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, I can check and advise about the best driver to be used to prevent data loss.

Thanks so much for the quick and thorough reply! I'll take a closer look at Disk Manager and see if this discrepancy was somehow overlooked, but I don't think so... I'll also go over to your driver page and see if I can't find a different driver that'll help any. I'll report back if anything helps!

Thanks again!

I think I've had some success! I found that my RAID controller (ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R/3400) is slightly different from the one on your list of driver downloads, but was able to find the correct on Intel's site here:

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/downlo ... AID-Driver

HD Sentinel is no longer giving me the size info warning anymore, though nothing has changed, info wise, on disk manager or through Explorer properties or anything else. I searched very thoroughly through disk manager and device manager and could find no reference to this half-size (1.6XX) that HD Sentinel warned me about. I'm very familiar with this problem, especially while transitioning between XP and 7, and had to resort to a number of helpful programs (SeaTools, drive unlockers, etc.) to try to restore the actual size of the disks I had, but Windows had showed me pretty clearly, back then anyway, what it was seeing. That's not the case this time around, for some reason. I was going to post the Seagate forum thread that I had posted on to show you what I dealt with back then, but they must have changed up something on their end, and now those threads are unreachable.

At any rate, the controller driver update fixed my problem, so I hope this helps someone else!

Glad to hear that now, after the driver update things are working correctly - there is no alert displayed, which confirms that now the complete capacity should be accessible.

Yes, I did some checks and found that in some cases the Windows Disk management may show the complete capacity - even if it can't be used.

If you prefer (and you'd have the original, bad drivers), you may try the follwing method which will surely detect and display the capacity, to verify that the alert displayed by Hard Disk Sentinel is really related to the limited capacity:

1) open a command prompt (CMD.EXE)
2) enter

wmic diskdrive get Caption,DeviceID,Size

The output will be the device model ID, drive number and usable capacity. For example:
Please note that for the 3 TB hard disk (the WD) the capacity is 801561761280 bytes (801561761280 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 746.51 GB).
This confirms that problem - which is reported by the alert in Hard Disk Sentinel.

Now on your system (if the driver updated correctly), it should be the total usable capacity of the hard disk.