Hidden Hard Drive Space?!
Posted:
Tue Mar 09, 2004 7:07 pmby Ian
I saw this over at The Inq.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14597
Anyone ever try this?
Posted:
Tue Mar 09, 2004 7:35 pmby gigabyte
whoa, 200 gigs to 510?! interesting...
Western Digital 200GB SATA
Yield after recovery: 510GB of space
IBM Deskstar 80GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 150GB of space
Maxtor 40GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 80GB
Seagate 20GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 30GB
Unknown laptop 80GB HDD
Yield: 120GB
Anyone know if these are the only drives that work? if anyone is brave enough to try this, post results please!
Posted:
Tue Mar 09, 2004 9:29 pmby BurninMan921
Wonder if it's just a corrupted partition table that's showing a false partition size? Wouldn't be too hard to use a sector editor to do so...
I don't have ghost, otherwise I would try this. I've got two unused 60GB hard drives sitting here...
Following the news link there:
"First, users are usually amused to learn that the capacity of modern hard drives is _unknown_, until it goes through the factory's qualification tests. The 120GB hard drive you purchased may have been physically identical to a 250GB hard drive, but simply it only passed qualification at 120GB"
Just like Intel & AMD do to CPU's...best guess even if it does work it'll be unreliable as hell.
And another (ie, the explantion of whats really going on here):
"What is happening is that Norton Ghost creates a virtual partition on the drive, and the data for that virtual partition resides on one of the existing partitions. So as more data is added on the virtual partition, a file on the normal drive partition expands as well.
It's kind of like a disk image which is being mounted to a drive letter. All the data for it is still on the primary partition.
Hopefully that's clear enough to explain what is happening here. The extra virtual partition basically is defined as the amount of freespace on the partition to which the that virtual partition file actually resides.
In short: No miracle space here, don't bother the hard drives manufactures. Just using a feature in ghost in a weird way, but with no real benifits other than being able to boot a disk image without reszing all the partitions on your drive. "
Posted:
Wed Mar 10, 2004 11:10 amby socheat
I've got a few 2 and 4GB hard drives lying around and a few old computers just sitting there... maybe I'll slap on Windows 2000 and give it a go this weekend. Should be much more interesting than studying for this boring Patent Law exam.
Posted:
Thu Mar 11, 2004 11:31 amby Bhairav