Hello everyone.

I bought a Samsung HD103UJ (1TB) a couple of days ago; but I'm unable to get it to work properly. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4. I can only get the drive to appear as a 32MB drive. Once or twice I have had to unplug the sata cable while the bios screens showed, as it would pause on drive detection when it reached the socket the 1TB drive was connected to; however the drive would work if I plugged it in after windows started -- still appearing as a 32MB drive. I'm not sure what there is that I can try to resolve this problem... Could it just be a defective drive?

Thanks for reading ^_^

What version of Windows you using? Have your formatted the drive yet?

In windows disk manager, and in the windows vista installation, the drive appears as a 32MB drive... And (in case you were wondering), I can create a working partition in this tiny space.

It sounds like you need to update the BIOS on your Gigabyte MB.

That's a logical conclusion, however i'm unsure as to how to update the bios. I'll see if I can find a guide. If it works out, i'll post again.

Hang on a sec. That's not his only drive obviously! What size are your other drive/drives?
Surely they are not showing 32MB. Does this drive have a 32MB buffer?
Have you made the drive active in disk manager? Because you won't be able to format it until it is.
And most likely it's a SATAII drive. Does your MoBo support SATAII (SATA300) drives? If not there should be a jumper on the back of the drive do run SATAI (SATA150).
Hope this helps.

if it didnt support SATAII, it simply would not show up. That is not his problem. Update your BIOS, then format it with the tools that came with the disk.

Try running Samsung's drive diagnostic/configuration utility, I have heard of larger (Samsung) drives incorrectly reporting capacity due to the internal configuration data being screwed-up.

Try running this:
http://www.samsung.com/global/busi [...] _Tool.html

As always, disconnect any other drives before running (etc. etc...)

Did you format the drive?

OK, this mobo has full support for SATA II, and ALL such boards have BIOS support for 48-bit LBA, so a BIOS update is not the issue. But the 32 MB size limit can arise another way. When you partitioned and formatted the drive in Disk Management, what File System did you use? Some of Microsoft's OS's (I'm not sure about Vista) allow you to make a FAT-32 Partition but will NOT make one larger than 32 MB. You should be partitioning it with an NTFS File System; that will let you make any partition size up to one full-capacity volume.

EDIT: This morning I realized (as SomeJoe7777 did below) that I focussed on the 32, and missed the M vs. G thing. The FAT32 limit is 32 GB. So I figured unless OP made a mistake, the FAT32 limit is NOT involved here at all.

Windows XP will format a FAT32 partition up to 32GB, not 32MB. If his drive is actually showing as 32MB, the file system is not the problem.

MrLinux's link to ES tool turned out to solve my problem... although it was a little bit strange. I restored the native size, but it seemed to revert when i turned the computer off. Later on I booted the floppy disk again and ran ES tool again, and restored the native size, but I also formatted the MFT which may or may not have fixed it. At any rate it seems fine now. Thanks for everyone's help!

Glad it's sorted.
This is now the third time I have heard of a 1TB Sammy reporting the wrong drive size, I'm beggining to think they may have a firmware issue...

I just purchased this drive and I have the same problem. First I connected it to my current windows installation, it worked fine, 1TB and I could create partitions. Then I wanted to install Windows XP sp2 on it but it reported 33MB. I used some tool to restore it to full capacity and tried again. Each time I try to install Windows, it switches to 33MB capacity. Once that happens it reports it in bios and widnows and I have to restore it again. I have pretty modern mobo P35-DQ6, something is not right with this drive.

I got around this problem by switching my controller to AHCI mode. I could install any system on it as long as SATA driver were loaded.