Hard Disk Capacity Limits to 32 GB: Solution
Written by Pavan Kumar on April 29, 2009
I have come across people sometimes say that their 160GB hard drive gets limited to 32 GB and to get rid of that, they have even formatted the drives, reinstalled the OS and tried a lot of things but with no solution. After reading this article you will come to know how silly mistakes can eat up your brain in solving computer problems. It occurs with ATA hard drives and it has no relation with 0x8004240f partition error.
This problem may be because of two reasons.
1. Motherboard Limitations
Old motherboards will not support high capacity hard drives like 80GB, 120, 160, 250 GB or higher capacity hard disks. In such boards, even if you install very high capacity hard drives, the limit will be the same maximum capacity which can be addressed by mother board.
2. Jumper Setting limiting Hard Drive Space
A minimal mistake of inserting the jumper into hard disk jumper block will result in limiting the hard disk capacity to 32GB if HDD is of higher capacity or 2.1GB otherwise. The first and last jumper block confusion will lead to such problem. The first placement will be for Master, and last for limiting, users confuse it and find their hard drives limited to 32 GB. Refer to this diagram which illustrates the jumper usage in hard drives.
You can refer to more details about jumper settings on Seagate webpage.
Image Credits: Seagate.
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My hard disk’s capacity has been limited to 32 Gb’s due to shifting of jumper as you have indicated.How can i restore my disk capacity without any data lose.Please mail me regarding the solution.
Thanking you
Prateek