Hitachi 1 TB hard disk turning into 32 MB brick on Gigabyte motherboard
I am a pretty big user of hard disks, and have had all sorts of troubles with them. Normally I buy value for money kind of disks losing which is not big of a deal, but when you buy top of the line hard disk - Hitachi 1 TB worth £250, and then lose it, then it makes you angry! At least 3 out of 20 turned into bricks that BIOS thought to be 32 MB (or 33 MB) big! Apparently this is a bug in Gigabyte motherboard, but no fix for my BIOS (even mobo is recent), and Hitachi’s feature tool that supposedly can fix it was crashing. All was saved however by a great little utility for Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity, it is free and it worked! Even all data on disk was not damaged, so today ended up with a smile on my face 
This is going to be the last Hitachi I bought I think, I said it couple of years ago when discovering click-o’-death in some of my disks, and only had to go for them this year because there was no choice at the time…
June 13th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Hm, found this site when looking for a solution to this proble,
Very annoying as you said considering I just spent just shy of £1k on computer parts 2 of which dislike each other. I read someone else (on a parts forum) this was a batch issue with the MB so maybe we are just unlucky enough to get the same combo.
This is the first (and likely last) Hitachi I got too, I usually go Seagate but they have had some b ad press recently so I tried someone else.
I’m checking out the link you provided now though so fingers crossed.
Also keep working on the google killer
Will always be nice to see them down a peg.
October 25th, 2008 at 12:04 am
Re “Hitachi 1 TB hard disk turning into 32 MB brick on Gigabyte motherboard”. I had exactly the same problem. My 1Tb disk was a Samsung F1 with a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard. Your solution worked and was dead easy. Previously I had updated my motherboard BIOS and played with the BIOS SATA settings which did not work.
Thank you very much for posting your solution.
July 1st, 2009 at 11:53 am
This is not a hitachi issue, i had the same with a 1tb samsung drive. All u have to do is set everything on IDE mode in the bios.
July 1st, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Yes, it seems more of a motherboard (Gigabyte) BIOS issue - not sure how setting everything to IDE mode will help if the hard disks are SATA.
July 27th, 2010 at 11:44 am
Thanks for pointing me to the right direction!
That really helped me.
I thought gigabyte has reliable bios, what with their dual bios or whatever.
I still don’t see why just disconnecting my harddisk when my computer is off could cause it to shrink. Back then I did it while the computer’s still running, but the harddisks are still fine.