I have a Dell Inspiron computer. I wanted to upgrade my C:\ 80Gb drive to a 500Gb drive. When I used Norton Ghost to clone the drive it made an exact duplicate, including the size of the drive. The new drive booted fine but when I went to the Windows disk manager it did not recognize the rest of the drive space. After much search I found a very easy solution posted on these forums:
I've made this new post with different wording so that folks with the same problem in the future will have better odds at finding the solution. It took me many hours to find the correct solution that only takes 5 min to implement.
The problem is that Dell protects the drive using a "Host Protected Area" in disk sector 3 (see http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm). As suggested in other forums I tried killing the data in sector 3 using RoadKil sector editor but that didn't work. The only thing that worked is the following method (cleaned up instructions from original post).
There is a problem of incompatibility on some hard drives (e.g. Seagate) when you are using 48-bit command for removing Host Protected Area (HPA) created with 28-bit command.
48-bit command cannot remove HPA created with 28-bit command and vice-versa. Following solution is for disk supports 48-bit LBA mode only and if you have HPA greater than 127 GB.
I've cleaned up the instructions below:
Get the hdat2iso_48.iso and make a CD from the ISO.
1. Power-on PC, boot and start HDAT2.
2. In 'SET MAX (HPA) Menu' select 'Set Max Address'. Change 'LBA mode' from 48 to 28-bit LBA mode and press 'S' key to set maximal address for 28-bit LBA mode (127 GB).
3. Power-off PC (Important !), power-on PC, boot and start HDAT2.
4. In 'SET MAX (HPA) Menu' select 'Set Max Address'. Leave the selected 48-bit 'LBA mode' Change 'LBA mode' from 28 to 48-bit LBA mode and press 'S' key to set maximal address for 48-bit LBA mode.
5. After restart you should get the full (native) capacity of hard drive.
After restart I went into the Drive Manager and the extra drive space was listed as unalocated space. Right click the unalocated space and select make new partition. This will make a new partition using the extra space.