I have been attempting to upgrade the size of the HDD on my daughter's Dell XPS M-1210 laptop. I installed a solid state drive in my XPS M-1210 and installed the Hitachi Travelstar 200 Gb drive in an external enclosure, then cloned the 60 Gb drive in her laptop over to the 200 Gb Hitachi. Upon completion of the cloning, I discovered that the new drive capacity was reading only as 60 Gb, not the full 200 Gb available on the drive. Note that the 200 Gb drive was wiped and reformatted to a single NTFS partition prior to the cloning. Windows Xp service pack 3 and the programs originally installed work fine booting from the "new" drive. Herein lay the problem; all attempts to restore the original drive capacity of 200 Gb have failed. I have tried using several programs including HDAT2 and Hitachi Feature Tools. I have been able to temporarily restore the drive capacity, but upon rebooting, the BIOS only recognizes a 60 Gb capacity. Here's what I believe is happening.
The XPS M-1210 came with Dell Media Direct, which was placed in an HPA (Host Protected Area) and was designed to allow the PC to boot slightly differently when pressing the Media Direct button, rather than the Power button. Media Direct loaded the drivers and programs required to play Audio or Video CDs and DVDs and thus, allowed quick access to these features over a normal power-on boot sequence. Cloning a hard disk drive with this partition including the HPA copies the HPA over to the new drive, and if the capacity of the new drive is larger than the original drive, the HPA will be expanded to include the remainder of the entire drive (over that used as the primary partition). The HPA is viewed by Windows as "unallocated space", so in this case, 140 Gb on the 200 Gb drive is inaccessible. Dan Goodells addresses this issue in an article he has posted ("Inside the Dell PC Restore Partition") which also goes on to address the HPA and Dell Media Direct. Now, while the HPA itself cannot be copied, the MBR (Master Boot Record) is copied during cloning. The first track of the HDD includes the LBA-0 sector (where the MBR resides) and LBA-3 sector (where the HPA boot code resides). It is the LBA-3 sector which must be overwritten (cleared of the HPA boot code) to allow the full capacity of the HDD to be utilized. This can be accomplished two ways.
The first way is to overwrite the LBA-3 sector on the original drive with zeros using a program like Roadkil's Sector Editor. Then restore the capacity of the destination HDD with a program like Hitachi Feature Tools, Seagate's Sea Tools, Magic Boot Disk (MHDD), or HDAT2. Once the original drive has had the LBA-3 sector overwritten, one may again clone the drive, this time without fear the HPA will be established on the destination drive.
The other way is to first, back up any files from the original drive to which you desire access on the new drive and note which programs are installed on the original drive. Remove it and install the new, formatted, HDD into the laptop. Restore the capacity of the drive if necessary using one of the aforementioned tools. A new drive may also be installed and the formatting can be done with the operating system installation disks. A new installation of Windows using the installation disks will not re-install Media Direct and create an HPA. Once the OS is installed, install the desired programs and then copy your saved files over to the new HDD.
Either of these processes should allow one to recover the full capacity of a new HDD.