{"id":409,"date":"2009-06-20T05:24:57","date_gmt":"2009-06-19T20:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/20\/i-hate-fujitsu-aka-upgrading-the-hard-drive-on-an-artificially-limited-fujitsu-machine\/"},"modified":"2009-06-20T05:24:57","modified_gmt":"2009-06-19T20:24:57","slug":"i-hate-fujitsu-aka-upgrading-the-hard-drive-on-an-artificially-limited-fujitsu-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/20\/i-hate-fujitsu-aka-upgrading-the-hard-drive-on-an-artificially-limited-fujitsu-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"I hate Fujitsu (AKA upgrading the hard drive on an artificially limited Fujitsu Machine)"},"content":{"rendered":"

My mother-in-law’s laptop is “broken”.
\nThe laptop is a Fujitsu FMV-Biblo MG50S<\/a>, if you check the page there
\nyou will see there are a few others with similar specs.
\nI took a look at it last week. A quick check of the hard drive (first
\non list of things to check because “I can’t put any more pictures on
\nit”) and that is the problem: 30GB on a 30GB drive. Nice. <\/p>\n

\nSummary: I hate you Fujitsu. Marketing droids added a hidden
\nsomething somewhere (looks like it was hiding on the MBR) that made
\nWindows see only 30GB of an 80GB drive, and when I did a clone to a
\nnew hard drive (160GB) it showed up as 30GB. So to be clear: when
\ncloning a drive using CloneZilla, PNG, or Acronis True Image and the
\nlike, if you copied the hidden MBR your new 160GB drive would show up
\nin Windows as only 30GB, even though the Disk Utilities management
\nprogram would show the full disk size.\n<\/p>\n

\nAbsolutely crazy. Click the “Read More” link to read more about this
\ninsanity. For the impatient: do not copy the hidden MBR and you will
\nbe fine. Also, I now prefer Clonezilla to PNG. And the GParted boot
\nCD rocks. Also, I hate Fujitsu. If you need to buy a new laptop you
\nreally should only consider Apple<\/a> (coupled with a TimeCapsule<\/a>) or
\nThinkPads<\/a>. For netbooks, do whatever you want but back them up
\nsomehow.\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nSo I ordered a new hard drive. The laptop is about 2 years old, so
\nneeds an IDE drive. I was able to find a 160GB 2.5″ drive for about
\n$80, which sounds reasonable to me.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo I went over there this afternoon to do a simple copy and hard drive
\nswap. I had some extra memory also that I thought I would throw in
\nthere and bring it up to the max 2GB that it can handle.
\nI’ve used PING (Ping is Not Ghost)<\/a> in the past to image drives and
\nrestore them. I thought I would give it a go for this job also.
\nUnfortunately, it looks like in order to do that I need to back the
\nimages to another disk. Hm. So I made a partition on the big drive,
\nthen backed up the 30GB drive onto it (three partitions.)\n<\/p>\n

\nAnd wait, what’s this? When looking at the partition table, there is
\nactually a total of 80GBs on the drive. They threw an 80GB drive in
\nthere, and then for marketing reasons, only shipped it with 30GB!
\nThose sneaky marketing guys!\n<\/p>\n

\nWell, after the backup completed (about an hour) I tried to copy the
\nimages onto the extra free space on the big drive. But wait! By
\ndefault PING restores back onto the disk that it imaged from. Shoot.
\nSince the restore started there wasn’t much I could do but wait things
\nout: about an hour and 50 minutes. Longer than the first backup.
\nMust be because we’re writing back to the smaller drive, which is
\nprobably slower. (Off to do some shopping, back in a bit…)\n<\/p>\n

\nI think I can edit some files by hand to make them restore someone
\nelse. But instead, I thought it would be interesting to try to grow
\nthe 30GB NTFS partition on the small drive to the full 80GB size.\n<\/p>\n

\nThat sounds like a job for GParted<\/a>. Or the live CD version of GParted
\nanyway. So, booted into that, then expanded the partition. Oh wait,
\nthere are some errors on the drive. Perhaps from the backup \/ restore
\ncycle. So back into windows, schedule two chkdsk \/f runs. Those
\nfinished. Back to GParted. Expansion completed. Now we should have
\n70GB to play with instead of 30GB. That will work for a short-term
\nsolution.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo, back into Windows. The Device Manager reports that there is about
\n74GB or so. Great! But strangely, Windows itself only sees 30GB.
\nThat is crazy!\n<\/p>\n

\nJust before that, I used Clonezilla<\/a> to do a direct drive-to-drive copy
\nfrom the small drive to the big drive. That was my first time using
\nClonezilla, and it seemed a bit simpler than PING. I’m going to
\nrecommend that for copying and backing up from now. I’ll have to try
\na few backup and restore cycles with it first, but it is looking
\nreally good to me.\n<\/p>\n

\nBack in Windows. Even crazier: the large 160GB disk (currently
\nhanging off of a USB IDE converter) is 160GB in the Device Manager,
\nbut it also<\/b> only shows up at 30GB. So somewhere in the process of
\ncopying all the partitions from the original drive to the new one it
\npicked up a setting that says “please ignore the physical size of the
\ndrive, and show us only a certain amount.” Annoying. After poking
\naround a bit, it sounds like this is due to
\nDCO and HPA<\/a>, some sorts of methods that can be used to limit hard
\ndrive sizes. Crazy. It looks like you can play with them in linux
\nusing hdparm<\/a>, but unfortunately that does not work with USB drives.
\nShoot. So that is where I am at now. I think I can use hdparm with
\nthe drive in the machine, so I will try that next.\n<\/p>\n

\nhdparm did not seem to report the correct thing on the drive:\n<\/p>\n

\n$ hdparm -N \/dev\/sda
\n\/dev\/sda’
\nmax sectors = 156301488\/5306544, HPA setting seems invalid\n<\/p>\n

\nThat doesn’t sound right.
\nHere is another page that lists HPA issues for Dell machines<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\nSeatools for Windows<\/a>\uff0eThat didn’t work well. It was able to show some
\ninformation about the drive, but in the end I didn’t see a way to make
\nit show any kind of limiting information. The drive in there now is a
\nFujitsu drive though, so that could be why.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo, let’s try the hitachi tool<\/a>. That didn’t seem to work. It
\nreported the drive as 80GB. Windows does see the 80GB drive, but when
\nI extend the partition to 80GB, it doesn’t see that. So there might
\nbe something else going on.\n<\/p>\n

\nThis is really starting to get on my nerves. I am going to do a
\nrecovery install from my Windows XP disk. So I deleted the initial
\ntwo strange partitions that I don’t know about – because they bother
\nme – and then did a re-install of Windows over the existing
\ninstallation.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo even after all of that – which also reverts the windows install to
\nEnglish since that is the only install disk that I have around – the
\ndrive is still 30GB. During the install process it sees a 80GB
\npartition. But when you boot into windows after the 1.5 hour process,
\nit shows up at 30GB. The Disk Management tools also see an 80GB
\npartition, but confusingly report it as 30GB when you check the
\nproperties pane.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo this time I am going to wipe the partition entirely and re-install
\nWindows fresh from my English XP install disk. If that doesn’t work
\nthen I will try to screw around with a few more HDA options on the
\nhard drive, even though hdparm reported those as non-sensical and
\nprobably not working. This is insane.\n<\/p>\n

\nTurns out that a wipe and install makes the hard drive show up at
\n80GB. That means that Fujitsu is doing something crazy in Windows to
\nmake the hard drive show up as 30GB. This is very bad news because it
\nmeans I would have to find out what they are using to make the hard
\ndrive show up as only 30GB. That sounds really hard to me. Just
\nextending the partition did not make it work, so maybe there is some
\nregistry setting or something strange like that. Since the setting
\nwas preserved on a hard drive clone, I can’t easily copy the contents
\nof the old hard drive to a new hard drive (unless the setting is
\nsomewhere in the bootloader or hidden partitions.)\n<\/p>\n

\nThis is extremely frustrating.\n<\/p>\n

\nA breakthrough! Using Clonezilla to restore the internal hard drive,
\nwhen doing the restore I told it to skip the “hidden MBR” stuff. I
\ndidn’t expect that to actually work – all I wanted to do was to
\nrestore the internal drive to the limited 30GB state and then do an
\nimage, and try wiping the drive and recopying only the partition from
\nthe image with the data. But when I rebooted, the small 30GB disk
\nmagically showed up at 80GB (or close enough to count.) Wow.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo now I am re-imaging the internal disk onto the external (160GB
\ndisk), will then use GParted to resize the 80GB main partition to as
\nlarge as it will go, and then see if I can boot from it while it stays
\nexternal. If that works, I’ll crack open the laptop, swap the hard
\ndrives, and add a gig or two of RAM (since I have extra RAM sitting
\naround.)\n<\/p>\n

\nLooks like I can’t boot from an external USB drive. Boo. So I will
\nhave to just try to swap things out and hope that it all works.\n<\/p>\n

\nFirst up: is it easy to swap out hard drives on this thing?\n<\/p>\n

\nI was not able to find any manuals on this thing. I love ThinkPads:
\nthey have great manuals available that show how to change out every
\npart. Just amazing. Not so for this laptop. I started unscrewing
\nthing, and playing around. Eventually I got the hard drive bay
\nexposed. Turns out you only need to remove 5 screws (two on the
\nmemory cover, three on the plastic bit that covers the hard drive and
\nCPU assembly. I unscrewed about 14 screws and pried a few things
\nopen, made a few bad plastic cracky noises… Probably not good.)\n<\/p>\n

\nAfter swapping out the HD and putting two 1x1GB sticks that I had
\nleftover from upgrading my Mac (or the ThinkPad T60p or the ThinkPad
\nX60, none of which are my own computers – they are all from my
\nprevious job…) and a reboot, the thing actually booted up. It said
\nthat it had 2GB of memory, up from 512MB, and an 80GB drive, up from
\n30 (but really 80…)\n<\/p>\n

\nI rebooted in the GParted CD, expanded the main partition to the full
\n160GB, and rebooted. Things looked good. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My mother-in-law’s laptop is “broken”. The laptop is a Fujitsu FMV-Biblo MG50S, if you check the page there you will see there are a few others with similar specs. I took a look at it last week. A quick check of the hard drive (first on list of things to check because “I can’t put […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}