1TB HDD turns to 31MB

The other day I transferred a bunch of files using Mageia to a drive which I believe was partitioned and formatted in Windows 8.1. A few days later, I noticed that Windows was reporting the drive to be 31MB in size. After a bit of research, I learned that there are some hidden areas on drives named HPA and DCO.

Of course, linux provided some handy tools to solve this issue. Using

hdparm -N /dev/sdb

I noted that HPA was enabled and only a fraction of the available sectors were indicated as available in max sectors. So, I set the max sectors equal to the available sectors using

hdparm -N p78165360 /dev/sdx

Please note that the numbers and drive identifiers are samples only (my drive didn't contain 78165360 sectors and I'm not sure it was sdb).

Credit is due to this post.