hdd capacity restore with hdparm

by Gabriel Ramuglia (changed)
For those who cannot run hdd capacity restore tool because they are running 64 bit windows,
a copy of GNU/Linux (even a live cd like knoppix should work) is enough.
hdparm version 8.0 or higher will work for this.
Download the hdparm tar.gz file from sourceforge to your linux machine.
    tar –ungzip -xf hdparm(version).tar.gz
    cd hdparm(version)
    make
If receive errors, you may need to
#yum install gcc gcc-c++
to get a compiler needed. If you still have errors, your linux kernel may be out of date for the program
Now, from the same directory:
# ./hdparm -N /dev/sdX
(X as the hard drive device)
This will show you if you’ve got that damn HPA going on. it will also show you the true maximum number of sectors. then you can run:
    ./hdparm -Np### /dev/sdX
Where X is the related hard drive device and ### is the maximum number of sectors as we found out previously. This will set your drive back to normal size.
 (hard drive device) may be sda, sdb, sdc, hda, hdb, hdc, etc, depending whether the drive is sata or ide, and depending which disk it is on the system.