Removing Cap limit on Hard Drive?

I had some trouble with my Maxtor 160GB hard drive (6Y160P0). It kept on lossing data and had to be recovered with a software. So i tried to reformat it and accidently set the jumpers to Cap limit. The hard drive doesn't have any more problems but now its stuck at about 32GB which is the cap limit. Is there any way i can recover the part pass the cap limit?

Specs:
Custum Built
AMD 3500+ - ECS Motherboard RS428
Windows XP with Service Pack 2
1GB RAM

 

something with the jumpers: read the manual

 

Quote from Maxtor's website:

"If you format the drive with the CLJ or AC jumper then the drive capacity will be limited to 32GB. After removing the CLJ or AC jumper the drive will still be recognized as 32GB. You must reformat the drive without the CLJ or AC jumper to gain the full capacity of the drive."

Here is a link to jumper settings at the Maxtor website:
http://service.maxtor.com/rightnow/images/maxtor_quantum jumpers.htm

Sounds like you will need to have the jumpers in the correct places for your system and then reformat the drive and reload your OS. I would use MaxBlast4 on a floppy if you can. I downloaded my copy from Maxtor's website and it works well for me, but any MaxBlast you have on hand would probably work just fine.

 

Thanks for the reply... I did reformat a few times with and without the jumper pins. I guess one more time won't hurt. Also what does CLJ and AC stand for?

 

CLJ is capacity limiting jumper and AC is alternate capacity.

You may want to back up or save any data you need and then remove the jumpers and when the computer boots up see what happens. Probably your OS won't work correctly but I think the bios may detect your 160gb, not sure about that.

I have a Maxtor drive that I had been playing around with and loading some different Linux OSs on and received the Vista Beta2 DVD and tried putting that on the drive and just couldn't seem to get the drive formatted correctly again. I have the MaxBlast4 on CD and used that from within XP on a different drive to format the drive I was having a problem with. Maybe something like that will work for you. I have messed some drives up to where I wasn't sure I could ever get them working again, but I did eventually get them formatted and useable again-- just proves how tough the things are.

 

Hmmm...I'm going to try deleting the partition then rebuild it from there. Let's see how it goes...I'll reply later.

 

I found the original MaxBlast 3 that came with the hard drive. But this time i disconnected the other hard drives and just connected the 160GB drive as Master. Then i booted MaxBlast, and everything worked perfectly, it showed the master drive as 160GB. But when i reboot and try to install the OS, the windows partion screen shows a 32GB partition

 

When you install XP, you will see a screen that says something about the 32gb partition and asks you if you want to install XP there (or something like that). What you want to do is to select that partition using the arrow keys and press "D" to delete the partition. After you delete that 32gb partition you should see the full size of the disk available minus some overhead space.

When you have deleted what you need to, press "C" to create a new partition. Just press enter for the default start and end points. You should have a single partition of a bit less than 160gb.

This is just fairly close to how you do that-- so don't think this is entirely accurate. Even though I just did this two days ago I don't remember too well. Fdisk is more familiar to me and on the Vista install I selected "custom". But you definitely need to check and see if you need to delete the partition and create a new one when you get to that XP install screen-- that is what I did to divide my 250gb hdd in order to have room for Vista.

Found this helpful link:
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org/how_do_i_partition_and_format_my.htm

 

I did recently delete the partition through the windows setup, but it still said the max of the partition was 32GB.

Another thing i tried was splitting the drive into about 5 partitions of 30GB...it did work but i think the Dynamic overlay thing that MaxBlast does made my comp freeze up.

Im gonna still hang in there...

 

How wierd...this time i used maxblast to format the drive, then i went straight to the Windows setup boot disc and...how bout it about 150GB...

Going through windows setup right now with the 160GB drive


Thanks for all the help...maybe this time it will work like it should

 

You do realise that for XP, you also need SP1 or 2 to enable large hard disk support? (best way is to slipstream it into the installation disc)

 

I had service pack 2 already and the 48-bit enabled for large drives, i think the problem was BIOS needed to be tricked so i could pass the capacity barrier. MaxBlast has a feature for that and thats how it was fixed. I just got back 150GB!!!

If anyone else has the same problem be sure to read this post.

 

Partitioning the drive is another option.

Anyway, well done.