Recovering Secret HD Space 849
An anonymous reader writes "Just browsing hardocp.com and noticed a link to this article.
'The Inquirer has posted a method of getting massive amounts of hard drive space from your current drive. Supposedly by following the steps outlined, they have gotten 150GB from an 80GB EIDE drive, 510GB from a 200GB SATA drive and so on.' Could this be true? I'm not about to try with my hard drive." Needless to say, this might be a time to avoid the bleeding edge. (See Jeff Garzik's warning in the letters page linked from the Register article.)
How? Reliability? (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, I have one of these and this looks more than interesting. But those step-by-step instructions with some specific Norton Ghost sound pretty unreliable. Anyone have any idea what really happens in the procedure and where does that almost 50% increase come from?
Main question: Will the extra storage/the disk as a whole be as reliable in normal use as it was before this procedure?
Floppy / Drill fun (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Floppy / Drill fun (Score:5, Interesting)
That worked because RLL encoded the data using a different method than MFM.
This, though, is smoke and mirrors.
You can increase some HDD sizes (Score:2, Interesting)
In those instances however, it often involves firmware upgrades, to remove the "crippled" firmware and replace it with the original intended firmware for the model it really was.
But the method explained sounds like a great way to generate more work for PC techs when clueless users try it... Just like using a frozen Mars Bar to let you overclock processors...
Andre Hedrick (Score:5, Interesting)
This was on the linux-kernel list a while back, too lazy too find it. (And it's possible I misunderstood -- Hedrick is a crackpot who is barely able to articulate what he is thinking.)
the latest "Chang Modification" (Score:2, Interesting)
It might SHOW that it's more (Score:4, Interesting)
witnesses reported UFO sightings (Score:3, Interesting)
So you're saying that, much like the UFOs, this really is true but it's being covered up?
Re:Uh, no (Score:5, Interesting)
There are lots of internal sectors that are reserved for errors. There are builtin algorithms on the disk to diagnose and correct physical errors. You just don't notice them because the disk remaps those sectors transparently.
Hooray! I learned something in class for once!
It works, but be careful (Score:4, Interesting)
On a side note a freand of mine tried this with his 20GB drive at around the same time, cranked it up to 32GB... Funny thing is it still fully works. Amazing isn't. Just don't try it at home
Re:Lovely (Score:3, Interesting)
This is really a nonsensical idea. Who wants to gamble with there data when hard drives are cheap and plentiful?
You learn how valuable your data is the first time you lose it.
This is just the kind of article... (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean tricking an OS into seeing the partition table twice hardly counts for doubling the actual drive capacity. Geeez.
Mmmm.. already dreaming of (Score: +4, top news) and (Score: -1, dupe)
Re:How? Reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Partition a from 0 to 200 GB
Partition b from 1 to 200 GB etc.
You could probably get it to say almost any amount, but it wouldn't be usable space.
Some drives may have a little extra space but not 70 GB on a 80GB drive. No sane company is going to sell a 150 GB drive as an 80 GB because they pay as much to manufacture platters and heads no matter how they're used. The cost of the unused parts would come right out of their profits. Also, sometimes there is "unused space" used for the hard drive's bios, or for relocating data from bad sectors.
Re:Modder (Score:5, Interesting)
CPU overclocker - okay
Grapic card overclocker - okay
HD modder - ???
Actually there are guys that mod their harddrives [bp6.com].
Notice the less than clean working area with metal particles from the dremeling everywhere. This is less than wise, as the probability that foreign material will get in the drive and act like sandpaper is high. I certainly wouldn't put a modded drive like this in a production machine.
I think modding is great, but this is where I draw the line.
Re:Simple corruption (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone wanting to try such amazing technology today can use a Catweasel [jschoenfeld.de], although I'm not sure if it supports anything more exotic than standard Mac/Amiga floppies.
Anyone remember NaBob? (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the days of the "archive format wars" somebody made a program called NaBob that was pretty funny. It made archives that were so perfectly compressed that they approached singularity. That is, every archive turned out to be one byte long.
The various compression methods, it was said, were named after different types of quarks. So, as the files were compressed, it would report, "upping," "downing", "charming," "stranging," etc.
The file extension was
When you ran the uncompress process, all your files would be mysteriously "extracted" from the archive again. Amazing! It really stored all that data in a single byte!
Of course, all it was really doing was setting the hidden file bit on all your files and creating a one-byte file with the
That program always cracked me up, so I just thought I'd share.
Long ago and Far away..... (Score:1, Interesting)
Probably true (Score:3, Interesting)
I did this with my IBM DeathStar to My WD Caviar. cfdisk then thought I had a 20gb drive
Re:Simple corruption (Score:2, Interesting)
Like, Shock?
*nix only and Mac guys maybe not knowing it, Ghost is one of rare good codes coming out of Symantec and the primary purpose of it is DATA SAFETY lol... So, its like a huge joke.
There was even worse stuff.... (Score:5, Interesting)
the faq of comp.compression has a lot of really wired stuff...
Re:I call (Score:2, Interesting)
anyway, i'm a bit techie and for calming down the people, there is no 50% extraspace in any hdd, really
just some wierd hoax brought up by people to make them ruin their hdd-s and buy some new ones
[considering the work/software/configuration loss you will have whily trying this, it's cheaper to buy a new hdd]
Stay Anonymous (Score:3, Interesting)
Whoever submitted this should remain anonymous. But, unless they were just seeing if they could slide one past the editors, we educated at least one person today.
Debunking bogus articles every once in awhile isn't a bad thing. Chances are, quite a few people, although they would never try it, probably thought it was a valid concept.
Ben
Aha! (Score:1, Interesting)
Look how obscure this command is, compared to the easy Windows equivalent. CQD.
On a serious note, Windows fdisk is really different, because it does not work! I once had to lend a TOMSRTBT floppy to fellow Windows users, because fdisk refused to clean their HDs...
Re:Uh, no (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Floppys used to be better.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, it doesn't help that now it's not just the computer geeks using these things and a bunch of stupid college kids are storing all of their term papers on these crappy things. Then they run around with them jammed in their back pocket or backpack until crushed, bent, or otherwise destroyed.
My job involves me helping people use the computer, but I'm about to put a sign up that help with college work will cost extra.
Re:Just to be a bastard (Score:0, Interesting)
Is it a bug in MacOSX that it doesn't work if you delete the Applications folder while running a program from it?
Re:Uh, no (Score:3, Interesting)
Getting 5% more disk space (Score:4, Interesting)
When I created my Linux filesystems with mke2fs, I didn't know there was an -m option. This option specifies how many percent of your disk Linux will "steal" so that root can use it to fix your system when the disk is full. This defaults to 5%, which for a disk used to store files is obviously 5% too many. So for all your non-system disks at least, simply correct the file system with tune2fs:
tune2fs -m 0
Et voila. The disk is 5% bigger as if by magic. For a 120GB drive this gives you an extra 6GB. Hey, you never know when you might need it. Also, if you do this on your system disk, don't say I didn't warn ya.
Re:Uh, no (Score:5, Interesting)
That's probably because the Amiga floppy controller wrote track-at-once, rather than secton-at-once but without either the controller or the trackdisk.device verifying that the entire track had been written correctly. Hence, if you updated a single sector on a track, the entire track would be re-written, and the "unmodified" tracks may get corrupted in the process.
There was a nice hack called TrackSalve [funet.fi] which hacked the trackdisk.device so that it performed an automatic verify of tracks after writing. ISTR equivalent functionality may have been incorporated into trackdisk.device in 2.04/3.0+ Kickstarts, but before I started using TrackSalve, I used to frequently end up with corrupted diskette bitmaps (probably the most-rewritten track on an Amiga floppy).
Another, probably less significant factor is that the Amiga disk hardware wrote tracks with no gaps between sectors in order to get that extra 160KBytes. If a PC disk controller encountered an error in the inter-sector gaps, I doubt it would cause it many problems, but for Amigas, it increases the probability that an error will occur in an occupied cell of the disk.
--
Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again (Score:3, Interesting)
A few months back (in Sydney at least), if you purchased particular uni-processor Dell rackmount gear (1650's from memory?), dell would send you dual-processors and charge you for the uni.
I guess they might loose more money throwing a spanner into "their high speed money making machine". Perhaps just selling the next closest thing up is more cost effective for them.
I saw this confirmed for other continents I beleive in the OpenBSD mailing lists, so it wasn't just a stuff up with our 3 orders.
Re:Simple corruption (Score:4, Interesting)
"to some magic 1.22 meg format that mysteriously made my floppies faster"
No magic at all. I used the shit out of that program. It was called fdformat [simtel.net] and even came with Pascal source code! scheweet There were two little parameters called Xnnn and Ynnn that did sector sliding.
From the fdformat docs... These options can be used to enhance the performance of your disk up to 100%. This is a bit difficult to explain. Imagine a standard 360 kB disk. It has 9 sectors on each track numbered 1 to 9. Normally the sectors on all tracks ordered "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9". With sector sliding of 1 you order "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9" on track 0, "9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8" on track 1, "8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7" of track 2 and so on. You can easily imagine, that it takes a little time, when your diskette drive head steps from one track to another. But your diskette continues rotating. Without sector sliding your diskette is positioned to sector 2 or 3 on the next track, when the stepping is done. It needs nearly a full revolution until sector 1 of the next track can be read. With sector sliding of 1 or 2 your diskette is positioned exactly on sector 1, when it starts reading again.
This little bit of magic was somewhat drive-specific, since some drives were faster than others, you needed to use different sliding numbers, but all in all, it's a very cool hack.
Back in the Old Days (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How smart u are.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Uh, no (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. I call it corrupting your partition table. ; )
Years ago, when an 800MB drive was "big", a friend of mine tried to convince myself and a group of IT staff friends, that he could get around BIOS limits of a particular DEC workstation, through some tricky settings of the geometry in the BIOS. LBA was not big in those days and MS OS were still using the BIOS for disk access beyond the boot process.
Anyway, my friend managed to "trick" the BIOS into seeing 800MB (previously 504MB).
So, in an attempt to prove him wrong, I then proceeded to format the drive. MS-DOS format claimed it was formatting the drive as 800MB, but this did not deter me. I knew that MS-DOS was simply fooled into thinking that 800MB was actually addressable on that particular (504MB through BIOS limited) machine.
The format completed fine! But I was still not detered. I said, "ok, now we start to fill this drive up...".
I started copying a large directory over and over to fill the drive. When we approached about 500MB... "Seek error: sector not found.". The drive no longer booted either.
What had happened, was that we managed to force the BIOS to accept geometry values which it could not fully address. Most Significant Bits which MS-DOS would send, would never get seen by the drive, since the BIOS could not go beyond a certain address width. So while formatting, MS-DOS would be sending write commands which would be honored by the drive, but the BIOS would be passively stripping some of the highest MSB's out of shere lack of support of them.
The end effect, was that at the 504MB point, the drive head would be about 504MB's in to the 800MB, then at 505MB, the address would go back to zero and the head would come back to the start! That first sector would be formatted again, the drive would report success, and MS-DOS format would think nothing of it. When it got to "800MB", it would have all appeared to format ok to MS-DOS.
The end result was an 800MB drive, with a partition table which that BIOS was never going to be able to fully service, even though MS-DOS format "saw the proof" that all was fine. ; ) When someone tried to copy data to the next "safe" sector beyond what the BIOS could address, what they were actually doing was writing back over the beginning of the disk! Corrupting the partition table.
; )
I was delighted, because everyone else was on my friends side, even though one of my buddies also had a background in electronics and should have known what I was talking about. Anyway, modern drives DO have secret areas set aside for remapping of bad sectors (to give you the consumer the perception of zero bad sectors and all the space you legally purchased), but this space is way smaller than what these jokers are claiming and it is normally not user accessible.
So, save yourself the hassle of wondering in a few months time, why your drive has "crashed". You might not remember the "magic" that you did to your drive.
To the Ghost Developer (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a Serial ATA 150 drive, 80 gigs with WinXP loaded on it (sans 700mb hidden partition). I've used ghost to create an image. Here's the question:
Taking the second 80gig sata and creating a 700MB partition (hidden, primary.. end of disk), is there a way I can keep this **.gho file in the partition, give that hidden partition it's own boot instructions (ie. off the ghost 2004 cd) and setting up the first partitions boot loader (whatever works) with a password protected "reimage drive" option that I can use to reimage my first partition of the same hard drive?
Or am I not able to take the xx.gho file from the same physical disk and image the first partition meaning I have to load the image file from a foriegn disk?
Let me know, google hasn't been much help and my ghost 2004 documentation is limited i.e. I can't find it
Re:How smart u are.. (Score:3, Interesting)
The arbitrage, and reason for such excitement in overclocking, is that most of the time Intel's manufacturing is too good. It makes too many uniform pieces that qualify for 3 GHz. The company likes to sell a few processors at high prices at the cutting edge, most processors at a sweet spot (~$200), and the remander as budget processors. To meet the economic demand, they take over qualified processors and mark them (most of them are multiplier locked as well) at for lower speeds. Over clockers take the chance that they bought a "relabed" processor not a "binned" processor. The success of a large group of overclockers is an indication of how well the manufacturing process is at delivering things at good tolerances. If you recall the Barton launch over clocking was a much dicier prospect, or further back an old Cyrix chip, because the processors were more likely to not qualify at higher speeds.
Almost all manufactured goods are built to tolerances rather than exact specs. Go grab a precision instrument and check some. The tolerances allow for much lower cost, and are usually developed as a balance between cost reduction and usefulness. There is a whole branch of manufacturing statistics that has developed tools for deciding when a process is out of tolerance. (The stats aren't too tough the tools make it easy to check on the fly even if you have little or no stat's training).
Sometimes they do... (Score:5, Interesting)
The best example of this is the Celeron 300A debacle for Intel. Switch back to those days of yore for a moment...
Intel introduced the Celeron line to help blunt AMD's advance into the low end post-Pentium I market. One problem: The Celeron 233 and 266 with NO L2 cache suck so much ass nobody wanted them, but they couldn't just change over the production line to a new Celeron design at the drop of a hat. What to do, Andy? Easy. That production line in Malaysia that's pumping out the Deschutes 450 PIIs to the rescue! So Intel took a whack of those chips, gave them a lower L2 cache, dropped their "rated" bus speed to 66MHz and branded them Celeron 300As. Which is why pretty much every Malaysian Celeron 300A runs just fine at 450 MHz with the stock Intel cooler, no adjustment required.
Intel actually lost money doing it, but they didn't lose the low end market. But the damage the current batch of crap they call a Celeron is doing to their reputation down there seems to indicate they will lose it soon...
Re:Uh, no (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How smart u are.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Avoiding Recovery CD's (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sometimes they do (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again (Score:3, Interesting)
This partition's presence in the partition table would not harm the TiVo's function as it would have no need to access the extra partition in its daily operations, so it would not be mounted.
Lightning Strike! (Score:2, Interesting)
Lo, and behold, when I re-formatted the drive it worked fine. Better than that, a 250M drive was now a 330M drive.
This drive never ever failed after that, and is still operational inside one of my dinosaur computers.
From personal experience I can verify that some drive do have more Megabytes than the manufacturers allow consumers to use.
TTFN!
Re:Uh, no (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Uh, no (Score:1, Interesting)
OK, 99 tracks is too much, but Rob did manage to fit 1028K on a 720K for one game's release - only part of the first track was "normal" enough for it to pick up the bootsector, at which point it was doing some freaky things with custom skews, interleaves, small "subcodes" of data stored between the tracks at the syncs (which probably only worked because of the changing interleave)... all highly timing-dependent too, but it was using nop loops to pull a similar sort of trick to the one that the Mac "spiral" format was doing at the time.
It was hell to copy. I don't think anyone managed it directly (rather the cracker used Vexmon 1 (based on Mon 3.10), single-stepping and safe-nopping protection code as they went, managed to breakpoint the exotic loading routine, dumped every sector it read to his fancy, massive 100MB SCSI hard disk, linkfiled it, and used the groups' own, more efficient compression routines to get it into an 820K 10-sector slightly-extended format).
There were these little problems with the original.. the discs weren't rated for that, so they failed quite soon... the drives weren't designed for it, so about one of every three times, the game refused to boot... oh, and it didn't run on the STe when it came out... of course only the cracked version survives now... it always did work better and he ended up megatraining it too
Trying essentially that sort of ninja trick on *all* my precious data does not strike confidence into my heart.
Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again (Score:2, Interesting)
I've had something similar a couple times. I bought a barebones kit that was supposed to include a 440LX board with a 333 PII. I discovered later that the machine shipped with a different board than the one I ordered, but it was better (a BX 100mhz bus jumpered down).
I went online again to the place that sold me the kit, and they no longer had the LX kit, but were selling the BX kits for less than I paid for the older board. I assume this meant that they no longer stocked the older boards, but had a glut of the new ones.
I later got hold of a P2/450 and jumpered the board to 100mhz fsb and all worked.
Windows NT limitation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Platter size....just a clarification (Score:3, Interesting)
Tm