Hard Drive problem

[71chevellejohn]

Before I shoot a brand new hard drive, I'd like to try and fix it.

Background:
I am replacing the HDD in my Dell M1710 Laptop, it has a 120GB 5400rpm SATA WD HDD in it now. I purchased a 500GB 5400rpm SATA WD Scorpio a few months ago. Finally got around to install it about 3 weeks ago. I had some issues after cloning and it turned out to be a defective drive, no biggie - shipped it to WD and they sent me a new one. No Fuss, No Muss.
Problem:
I received the new one Wednesday and proceeded with cloning via Acronis Migrate Easy. I ran this through on manual and setup my partitions with the FAT16(~50MB) and FAT32(~5GB - I think) partitions just slightly larger than they are on the 120GB HDD. Everything else went into the NTFS partition(400+GB). Everything appeared to be fine, reboot the system and it came up fine and with the 500GB still in the external enclosure I could see everything that it cloned. All appeared to be fine.
I pulled the 120GB and installed the 500GB, boot and BSOD. Error 0x0000007b - which is listed as being either a Boot Sector Virus, corrupt boot sector/MBR, hard drive driver problem or a few other things. It recommends rebooting(no change) or running chkdsk. CHKDSK said there is one or more"unrecoverable problems", other than that it shows no stats.
I checked the Bios and it does see the drive as 500GB WD drive. I don't think it is a virus as the original HDD has no problems. I tried FIXMBR to fix the boot record and it said it was successful but it still returned the same error. I'm guessing it is a driver problem but I'm not sure.
At this point I pulled the 500GB and reinstalled the 120GB - verified that everything is working. Reconnect the enclosure with the 500GB and now it doesn't show in the tree. It showed up in Disk Management as 110GB unallocated space. I can format that space and make it show up as drive E:/ but I cannot find the other "missing" space on this HDD.

How do I go about making it "showroom stock"? I want to start over with this drive and will be using Ghost to clone it. Formatting is not working because it is only allowing the 110GB to be formatted. Unlike the first HDD I haven't lost the ability to see this drive and want to bring it back to "new" before I do something dumb.

5.0CJ did tell me to use Ghost for the clone. I didn't use it this time because I believed the problems the first go-around to be caused by the bad drive. The more reviews/complaints I read about Acronis ME, the more I realize I should have read before using it... twice... and then used Ghost... once.

Thanks in advance

[Tx Redneck]

http://www.partition-tool.com/

[71chevellejohn]

Tried Partition Tool this morning and it didn't help. It allows me to format the drive, but doesn't format more than 110GB of it, which is what I was getting with XP's disk manager.

I found a program called HDD Capacity Restore which is supposed to do what I need, but it doesn't work via USB. I installed XP on the 110GB/500GB drive and loaded the cap restore on it, but it can't work on the partitions while it is the main booted drive. I tried booting from my original drive in the enclosure, but apparently XP doesn't like booting via USB and it froze.

My GF recommended using Disk Director to format sector by sector, but I haven't had a chance to try this yet.

[Tx Redneck]

http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/help/resizing-and-moving-partition.htm#1

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
What you wanna do it delete/resize the partition(s).

[Hunt4m3x]

you sure you don't have a jumper set wrong. they have 120 limit jumper settings

[71chevellejohn]

When I delete the partition it shows 110GB unallocated and doesn't allow me to resize larger than 110GB.


Hunt: According to WD, their SATA drives only require jumpers if it is used in a enterprise application. Also the original drive(WD) doesn't have any jumpers.