HDD Capacity Restore

HDD Capacity Restore extracts the factory settings from your hard drive and uses that data to restore your hard drive to its original factory capacity, completely automatically at the push of a button.

Features:

• Recovers LBA48 modes
• Works with DCO and HPA
• Freeware
• Works on 32-bit Windows XP, Vista and 2003

HDD Capacity Restore resets the drive to its factory capacity automatically with a single button.

A hard drive can show less space than its label promises when part of it is hidden. Some computer makers create host-protected areas (HPAs) on the drive to store recovery files, a device configuration overlay (DCO) can limit the capacity reported by the firmware, and an old BIOS or operating system may leave the LBA48 addressing needed for drives over 137 GB switched off. When a drive is moved to another computer or the recovery data is no longer needed, these areas stay hidden and are unusable by your system.

With HDD Capacity Restore, you can recover all of this missing storage area and return your usable hard drive capacity to what it was when it rolled off the factory floor. HDD Capacity Restore automatically detects connected drives, determines their size, serial numbers, security state, and original factory capacity. It then uses that information to automatically restore the drive to that factory state.

The user interface is intuitive and simple: displaying the hard drive's model and serial number, current capacity, original factory capacity, and the difference between the two (the "lost" disk space). A simple push of the "Restore Capacity" button will recover that lost disk space automatically by restoring the original LBA48, HPA, and DCO configurations in a few seconds. On completion, you are instructed to power off the computer completely and then turn it on again.

HDD Capacity Restore changes the HPA and DCO settings stored in the drive firmware; it does not format the drive and does not read or write the user data area. As such, the use of HDD Capacity Restore is not recommended for novice or casual computer users. The drive must be connected directly to an IDE or SATA port: USB enclosures and RAID controllers are not supported. HDD Capacity Restore may not always be able to restore a drive to factory capacity if the motherboard is blocking HPA and DCO commands. The tool was made by Atola Technology and is no longer developed; Atola now offers the free MultiDrive utility.