Large hard drives not recognizing full capacity in old enclosures -- fix

MacFixIt reader Sherman Heinig recently identified an issue where using an old enclosure for a large hard drive can result in some of the drive's capacity not been seen.

Sherman writes:

"I had a Maxtor FireWire enclosure laying around from which I had pulled the 120Gb in order to put it into a Internal-Power-Supply enclosure.

"Purchased a Hitachi 250Gb IDE Drive to use in the old Maxtor enclosure. Connected to G5, it recognized only 128 Gb Changed enclosure without initializing it = same result. Put it on a PC = same result."

"Finally, on speaking with Hitachi, they told me that the drive somehow became limited to 128Gb.

"I downloaded their (PC-DOS) software: FeatureTool With that you can set the Drive back to its real capacity. Conclusion: The Maxtor enclosure writes information onto the Drive that, upon connecting, limits it to the size the enclosure was made for."

If you have encountered a similar issue, or know of a Mac OS X tool for resetting ATA capacity, please let us know.

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