Samsung EVO 840 Resized by Seagate DOS Tools

Earwax

Senior member
Oct 2, 2001
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www.mrwig.com
So I accidentally re-sized my Samsung EVO 840 500GB drive to 32GB when trying to run Seagate's Seatools for DOS. Now windows sees the drive as having a capacity of 32GB. Samsung Magician reads the same, and I can't find a way for me to resize the drive to the proper size from within windows.

I tried booting back into Seatools in DOS, but now it doesn't even see my Samsung drive when I run it, so I can't even use it to restore the drive to the proper size.

Anyone have any suggestions?
 

zir_blazer

Golden Member
Jun 6, 2013
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As far that I know, it is rather possible to use a tool that limits the size than the HD Firmware reports, and you just did that. Some people claims that there is a bug somewhere that on very rare circunstances magically toggles it, since if you google around, that a HD gets limited to 32 GB size occurs ocassionally.
What I don't really know is how to restore it, since I was just looking for this very thing as I meet a guy with a 2 TB Toshiba HD which somehow got detected as 1 TB after moving it to another computer, and I was looking for Firmware restore tools for him.
 

Earwax

Senior member
Oct 2, 2001
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www.mrwig.com
Yes, I've been looking into trying to do some sort of factory reset on the drive. It's been a real pain because Magician is telling me the drive is in a frozen state, and I have an nvidia card that does not work correctly with their DOS secure erase program.

I've followed some workarounds posted here and on other forums, but nothing I've done has gotten the drive to show up as anything larger than 32GB.

I went through Computer Management initially and it's the same problem there--the device properties in windows report that the volume has a capacity of 32126MB. Windows (and as far as I can tell DOS as well) thinks the hardware itself is only 32GB, so there is no way to extend it.
 

Earwax

Senior member
Oct 2, 2001
222
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www.mrwig.com
I was able to fix the problem by moving the SSD from SATA port to port until Seatools could see it. I was then able to use Seatools to resize the drive to the native default.

What a headache.
 

Coup27

Platinum Member
Jul 17, 2010
2,140
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If you use the Samsung secure erase DOS utility on a Nvidia card you do get a corrupted display but program can still be used if you know what to press. Alternatively you can switch to the iGPU temporarily and use that whilst using the application and the display will be fine.

The frozen state thing is perfectly normal. This happens every time I secure erase an SSD whether it be with a Samsung drive using Magician or an Intel drive using the SSD Toolbox. All you have to do is unplug the power connector and reconnect it again during the procedure and then the secure erase can complete.
 
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