Gigabyte Xpress Recovery and the Host Protected Area

Nix McRetro // 31st December 2019 // IBM PC

Some Gigabyte boards using Xpress Recovery were reported to create a Host Protected Area (HPA) at the end of the boot drive for recovery data, and affected BIOS implementations could leave a drive reporting the wrong capacity. The following explanation comes from Franc Zabkar’s HDD Capacity FAQ.

“When the drive is first in the boot order, Gigabyte’s BIOS will write a backup copy of itself to a small Host Protected Area (HPA) at the end of the user area. It then hides this image by reducing the capacity of the drive by a corresponding amount. Unfortunately a bug in the BIOS incorrectly adjusts the drive’s capacity after creating the HPA. 1TB drives are reduced to 31/32/33MB, 1.5TB become 500GB, 2TB become 1TB, and 3TB become 2TB (not 2TiB).”

So this is about affected Gigabyte/Xpress Recovery implementations, not every motherboard carrying Gigabyte’s DualBIOS branding. HDAT2 can inspect and modify HPA settings, but changing HPA or drive-capacity settings without understanding the existing disk layout is not something to do casually.

Sources

AI-assisted revision: This post was reviewed and edited with OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol on 1 October 2026 for fact-checking, sourcing, and editorial cleanup. Final editorial responsibility remains with the author.