Same Harddries show up as different sizes


kasm

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I have been putting my harddrives into the unraid system one at a time to move data over to the unraid computer. Today I just put the parity drive in to make all my data safe and the parity drive is showing up smaller than one of the others.  They are all the same drive though.  Disk 2 is showing up to big.

 

Parity HD: 1TB    Size: 976,761,496

Disk1 HD: 1TB    Size: 976,761,496

Disk2 HD: 1TB    Size: 976,762,552

 

How do I fix this?  It there a way to format the parity disk to fix it? It is still in wondows format.  I can't format it with unraid cause it won't let me start up the array.  If I can't fix the size issue is there a way to transfer data from disk 2 to parity and switch their positions?  It took like 6 days to move all this data into the unraid box and I don't want to have to start from stratch.

 

(Going to have to get a 1000 mbit router but I don't have the time to right now.)

 

Thank you.

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Likely caused by something called HPA (Host Protected Area).  It is a small part of a hard disk that the BIOS reserves.  Seems most common on Gigabyte MBs.

 

Read about it more in this thread.

 

There are ways to get rid of the HPA.  I am rushing out the door, but if you do an advanced search for HPA you'll find several discussions and a technique to remove the HPA.

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@kasm, I've seen this occur on my Gigabyte boards.  Doing a little research, I *think* it is somehow related to the XpressRecovery functionality of the board.  I'm not 100% sure that, that is the cause because when I was experiencing it, it occurred on some drives but not others.  I am pretty sure that it has something to do with the baords in my case because trying to get rid of the HPA (with both Seatools and HDAT2) were unsuccessful (i.e., kept getting warnings saying it was unsuccessful) until I would move the drive one of my non-Gigabyte motherboards (or add-on SATA controllers).

 

What seemed to make the HPA stop re-appearing was switching my motherboard to ACHI mode.  That being said, I dare not touch my unRAID's BIOS settings any more.  I went with the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R because of the 8 on-board SATA ports.  If I can find another "high-density" motherboard that I like, I might (very carefully) make a change this summer.  This is also encouraged by the fact that I have a GA-P35-DS3L (not my unRAID) that had its onboard NIC die which I think is a problem others complained about in the past.

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