HDD Capacity Restore

As its name implies, HDD Capacity Restore provides you with a comprehensive application designed to help you recover the hard drive space that Windows is no longer detecting, thus restoring the full factory capacity of the HDD.

The computer hard drive might lose some megabytes for various reasons, such as usage of software that interferes with the device configuration overlay (DCO), disables the LBA48 addressing mode, or creates host protected areas (HPA). If you notice that the hard drive reports less capacity to the operating system than it should, HDD Capacity Restore can help you recover its factory settings.

While the usage is pretty straightforward, the application alters the HDD firmware, thus it is not recommended to beginners. The connected drives are automatically detected, together with their size, serial number and security state. Once the desired drive is selected, HDD Capacity Restore removes it from device manager for security reasons and proceeds to determining its factory capacity.

The main window of the application is intuitive, displaying the HDD model, serial number and information regarding the reported and the factory capacity. The difference between the two values is automatically calculated, enabling you to view the amount of 'lost' disk space.

There is not much you have to do, but press the 'Restore Capacity' button in order to start the recovery process. The application analyzes the HDD, extracts the factory capacity and tries to restore the original LBA48, HPA and DCO configurations.

Once the process is finished, you are notified about the success of the operation and prompted to re-power the computer for the changes to take effect. Please note that re-booting the system might not be enough for the application to work, so you must shut-down your PC and wait for about 20 seconds before turning it back on.

HDD Capacity Restore comes in handy for retrieving the original HPA, LBA48 and DCO settings. Although it might not always succeed in restoring the full HDD capacity (for instance, when the motherboard is blocking HPA and DCO commands), it is definitely worth trying.