# Samsung F1 1TB Drive only 32mb???



## twicksisted (May 3, 2009)

Hi guys

Ok I have googled this all day and found quite a few other people with the same issue.
Samsung 1tb drive that when you install it shows up as 32mb only.
These drives have 32mb cache which leads me to believe that the spinning disk part isnt working and its only reading the onboard caqche as part of the drive size.

Sent ite back to ebuyer and was sent another and guess what!!! same problem!
I have tried this in 2 rigs so far, one with a gigabyte P35C-DS3R motherboard and on my main asus P5K-E board both running Vista SP1 (32bit & 64bit). 

In Windows Disk Manager the drive was not initialised so I initialised it and tried reformatting to no avail. Its not a software / OS issue as it shows up in the bios like this too (32mb big).

I am going to send it back and get a 750GB Western Digital Caviar Black series drive instead, but wanted to know if anyone else has had similar issues.
really pissed me off


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## MilkyWay (May 3, 2009)

dosnt seem like the hard drives fault i mean why would multiple drives have the same problem unless the disk has a desgin flaw?

seems like a mobo fault or windows error


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## FatForester (May 3, 2009)

That's odd, I haven't heard of that problem with these drives before. No problems here and I have the 1TB and 750GB running on an ASUS P5K-E just fine in Enhanced, Compatible, and AHCI modes. If it's the second drive, I'd either blame an accident during shipping (UPS has done that to me in the past), a random BIOS setting, or bad luck. The 1TB is a great drive, but so are the Western Digital Blacks, they're just more expensive usually.


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## twicksisted (May 3, 2009)

Aaah im an idiot... i never suspected the motherboard being at fault as it did it in my asus p5k-e motherboatrd (with up to date bios) ... but

I think I may have solved it...!!!
Heres from samsung:
* Cause
At some mainboard, Host sets the LBA value automatically.
* Solution
The solution is that you can update the mainboard BIOS as newest version.

So what do you know on the gigabyte website under the bios updates:
F8 bios update: Fix: Some of 1000 GB (1TB) HDDs will be detected size error. 

Im getting the machine back tomorrow so will give this a crack, hope it works!


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## twicksisted (May 3, 2009)

FatForester said:


> That's odd, I haven't heard of that problem with these drives before. No problems here and I have the 1TB and 750GB running on an ASUS P5K-E just fine in Enhanced, Compatible, and AHCI modes. If it's the second drive, I'd either blame an accident during shipping (UPS has done that to me in the past), a random BIOS setting, or bad luck. The 1TB is a great drive, but so are the Western Digital Blacks, they're just more expensive usually.



strange part was that i tried it in both machines... and RMA'd the first drive thinking it was faulty... only to get another new one sealed packaging with the same fault!
googling it many people have this same issue, infact samsung drives have pagesw upon pages of issues in google result pages which is surprising as i usually love their drives


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## CyberDruid (May 4, 2009)

Crazy. I just pluggedin an F1 TB I had cloned all my backup data on using a DFI board into my Gigabyte board and got the same error just now. Talk about a weird coinky dink.

Your thread just saved me endless hours of troubleshooting.

Thanks!


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## CyberDruid (May 4, 2009)

No Dice. Just updated the GA x38-DQ6 to F8 BIOS and still only sees 32MB

That sucks.


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## CyberDruid (May 4, 2009)

Updated to the Beta F9 still the same. I guess the Samsungs will not play on the G board.


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## DaedalusHelios (May 4, 2009)

CyberDruid said:


> Updated to the Beta F9 still the same. I guess the Samsungs will not play on the G board.



Would putting it into an eSATA enclosure resolve this issue?


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## mudkip (May 4, 2009)

I think it is because your samsung hard disk has an old firmware version.
I don't know for sure if you can upgrade the hard disk firmware , but i think so


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## Mussels (May 4, 2009)

i have four of those drives without this issue.

Holy crap tho, i got a good laugh at 32MB hard drives.

If theres a jumper on the back of the drive, remove it.


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## newtekie1 (May 9, 2009)

The issue is with Gigabyte motherboards and many 1TB drives, but mainly Samsungs.  

Here is how I had to resolve it:

1.) Update BIOS on motherboard to latest version.
2.) Run this tool on the drive.(Making sure to remove all other drives from the computer first...you know the precautions).
3.) Reboot and the drive should be read properly, and it shouldn't happen again thanks to the updated BIOS. If you simply run the tool, without updating the BIOS on the drive first, the motherboard will just screw the drive up again.

From all my research, the problem _seems_* to be with Gigabytes way of writing a small recovery section on every hard drive connected to the board(something about making the motherboard's BIOS easily recoverable should something bad happen, it would simply read the good BIOS image from the hard drive).  With most samsung 1TB drives, where the motherboard writes this recovery section to, completely screws up the drive. Once the drive is screwed up it will report wrong on every motherboard/controller it is connected to until the repair tool is run. If you don't update the BIOS before running the tool, after you reboot the system, the motherboard will re-write the recover data to the same spot on the hard drive again, and screw it up again.

*I say seems because I haven't found any real evidence to back this up, nothing official from Gigabyte or anything, this is just the common explanation that most people seem to come up with.


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## twicksisted (May 9, 2009)

yeah that makes perfect sense as to why it diddnt work on my asus p5k-e afterwards....
at any rate ebuyer has been really good at taking back both screwed up drives (hopefully they will put something on their site to warn other gigabyte users as they are aware that its happening a lot).

We decided to go for a WD 750gb black drive instead... so hopefully this will not be an issue, at any rate I think a bios update before i connect the new drive is a good idea.


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## lemonadesoda (May 9, 2009)

newtekie1 said:


> The issue is with Gigabyte motherboards and many 1TB drives, but mainly Samsungs.
> 
> Here is how I had to resolve it:
> 
> ...



Good effort at trying to solve this. 

People: if this affects you, report back!


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## InnocentCriminal (May 9, 2009)

If you don't succeed with newtekie1's method, give this a shot. I think the only difference between this method and the Samsung method is that Atola is a Windows application. Better to have more than one way of doing things than one or none. 

Which everyway it goes, I hope it works.


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