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[Help me confirm] Resizing HDD that are not Seagate, and not using Seatools.

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First post, by brostenen

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It has been up here a couple of times, and for most of the part, people have said that Seagate drives and Seatools are the only way to modify a 120gb, 80gb or 20gb drive into something else... In other words, unless you have a Seagate drive you are out of luck.

My search for changing stuff on a harddrive, let me to some really interresting tools, and I have probably succeded in modding a Toshiba 20gb drive into a 1gb Toshiba drive. The bad part is. That the drive is a 2.5 inch laptop PATA drive, and none of my retro machines are really hooked up, as I am in the process of fiddeling with an Amiga600 these days. So... Can people try this, and confirm if this is actual real or there are issues that makes Seagate drives the only working drives, to do this on? Anyone up for some modding and testing? 😀

As people can clearly see by the model number of the drive, I have here in the pictures, a 20gb drive running as a 1gb drive.

I have used a program called "HDAT2" that can be found on Hirens Boot Disk. The results so far are in pictures below.
If I have to be honest. It looks like it is possible to do this with drives other than Seagate drives.
(Sorry for the flash being on)

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Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
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Reply 1 of 7, by gdjacobs

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I believe you can size limit Western Digital drives as well by creating an HPA. Seagates and Samsung drives are much easier to do this with, though.

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Reply 2 of 7, by clueless1

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I have installed DOS 6.22 on 20GB hdds without doing anything special. DOS just makes a 2GB partition and leaves the rest of the drive unpartitioned. Is this different than what you are trying to accomplish?

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Reply 3 of 7, by brostenen

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gdjacobs wrote:

I believe you can size limit Western Digital drives as well by creating an HPA. Seagates and Samsung drives are much easier to do this with, though.

I have no idea if other drives will be able to be resized. But yeah. Samsung/seagate can be resized to 32gb in one click, compared to using the custom size in seatools or using this tool, you need to enter a number that you have calculated.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

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Reply 4 of 7, by brostenen

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clueless1 wrote:

I have installed DOS 6.22 on 20GB hdds without doing anything special. DOS just makes a 2GB partition and leaves the rest of the drive unpartitioned. Is this different than what you are trying to accomplish?

You know... Sometimes you can only get drives larger than 250gb and sometimes you do not have any seagate (or samsung) drives at hand. That is the reason for me posting my findings. As there are no dedicated tool from makers of harddrive, that can do a resize of the drive, in the same way as Seatools can. The bios will only see my drive as a 954 megabyte right now. In other words. The computer thinks that it is a 954mb and not a 20gb drive. This is why it is a bit different. Finally.... You sometimes have a computer that will require a drive that do not exceed a certain size.

Anyway... If I am 100% wrong in all what I have stated above, I will simply just remove this post all together again.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

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Reply 5 of 7, by clueless1

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brostenen wrote:
clueless1 wrote:

I have installed DOS 6.22 on 20GB hdds without doing anything special. DOS just makes a 2GB partition and leaves the rest of the drive unpartitioned. Is this different than what you are trying to accomplish?

You know... Sometimes you can only get drives larger than 250gb and sometimes you do not have any seagate (or samsung) drives at hand. That is the reason for me posting my findings. As there are no dedicated tool from makers of harddrive, that can do a resize of the drive, in the same way as Seatools can. The bios will only see my drive as a 954 megabyte right now. In other words. The computer thinks that it is a 954mb and not a 20gb drive. This is why it is a bit different. Finally.... You sometimes have a computer that will require a drive that do not exceed a certain size.

Anyway... If I am 100% wrong in all what I have stated above, I will simply just remove this post all together again.

No, no, don't do that. I wasn't thinking of BIOS limitations. Your method may well be a good workaround for that. Maybe someone will test it and confirm.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 6 of 7, by Jorpho

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brostenen wrote:

Finally.... You sometimes have a computer that will require a drive that do not exceed a certain size.

You do..?

Reply 7 of 7, by brostenen

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Jorpho wrote:
brostenen wrote:

Finally.... You sometimes have a computer that will require a drive that do not exceed a certain size.

You do..?

Not at the moment. I am in the process of testing other stuff, so I can not do it at the moment. Perhaps I will have the opertunity to do it 2 or 3 weeks from now.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

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