How to screwup your HDD in three easy steps

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IBM Atlanta eh? GSSC? LOL!!! I am your BO in Raleigh!!!
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Im currently on a leave of absence, but i worked in the server dept for a year and CDT for 3 or 4. So ive been out of the loop for a year, but if thats right its really cool.
 
Yeah, I would try to completely fill up both partitions with data. I'm guessing that the two partition tables are overlapping one another and actually using the same space.

I propose someone who tries this to get a hex editor and look at the partition tables directly. I'm willing to bet that the beginning and ending ranges from the "Hidden Space" are already being used by the original partition.

I may be wrong though (and I hope I am).



As for the thought of having "disabled" space on a drive, I could see it. I mean why not? The manufacturer can make 4 or 5 "sizes" of drives and appeal to everyone with one model that has a maximum capacity, with the "usable" space being unavailable due to firmware on the lower capacity drives.

The hard drive manufacturer isn't going to design an new platter with less areal density just so it can market to a different segment. It's going to use the same platter between all the models. It's cheaper and much more efficient to make a single drive and market it differently.

Riley
 
Originally posted by laserdemon
What model server are you speaking of, i work for IBM i can look into that, sounds kinda cool.
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<hijack>
It's the "On-demand" stuff you keep hearing about. I worked on the bring up and integration of the RegattaH stuff (p670, p690, etc) for a little over a year, so I know just a bit about the hardware that's inside :) It's a very cool feature, and I don't believe IBM even charges extra for the "dead" procs unless you use them. They can be enabled for any amount of time, so you could basically purchase from IBM the ability to use extra procs for only one day a month, or even just a few hours a month.

I'm not sure what models support this feature, but I know all the newer H models do. I believe that some of the Mi and LE boxes can support this as well.

I'm in eServer Build right now, so I'm getting a little out of touch with what's currently available on the server market right now.
</hijack>
 
Well I have a 20gig and a 60gig that will get this treatment this weekend. Wife will be out of town so I get to play ;) I'm interested to see what I get
 
I did my Maxtor 80GB EIDE. It made it to a 150GB. I didn't follow the instructions exactly either. Instead of moving drives around, I just changed the hard drive boot order in the bios. It worked as far a making the extra space show up. I just finished formatting it, but haven't tried "using" the extra space yet.

I'm glad to see some people thinking what I was. That drive companies just turn out one drive, and then limit the size somehow, just like Intel limits the speed on processors.

The Inquirer article has been updated when some from Bell Micro saying they do this type of thing all the time for recovery purposes.
 
wow!!!
I'm speechless. Please try to write full capacity and see if it had an error.
 
Safe mode didnt work so what I did was put both my sata drives back in and had it boot from them. Now I am moving stuff to both the "old" and the "new" space on that drive.

It is not the boot disk anymore.
 
Yep. I support the "On Demand" Blade Centers with the xSeries Level 3 team. On Demand allow us to sell a Blade Center chasis fully populated with 14 blades at a cheaper price to the customer.

EX: Customer only needs 2 blade servers, well we sell them a fully populated blade chasis with 14 servers in it, however, only two are active. As their business grows, they can purchase the keys to unlock the other blades as needed.

This concept is the same with shareware. You download a full copy that is time limited. If you want it, then you just purchase a key to unlock it.

It is cheaper to make make one product and sell it differently than it is to make many products and still have to sell them differently.
 
I've got (2) WD 200GB SATA drives on the way - shre would be awesome if I could turn both of them into 510GB - easy terabyte.
 
Could it be that the new partition uses overlaps with the existing partition, but only places that do not contain files on the new partition? If ghost uses this, what is it used for? If its temporary, could it rely on the main partition's free space not being filled up?

I guess the way to prove this theory would be to completly fill the original partition and see how much free space you get off of this extra partition. I think that this is the most likely cause of this free space.

And by all means, somebody post their partition table!

Now to go check what build of ghost i have....
 
Still haven't tried writing data yet, BUT I thought maybe I'd try merging the partitions in Partition Magic 8.02. Well, it lists the drive, at the original size (80GB), and says the partition is 'BAD'.

I'll start copying data to it now, and see what happens.
 
Oh, to clarify...its not the extra partition thats showing BAD, its the whole drive.
 
This is just plain silly... and one has to wonder if it's some sort of very early April Fools joke by the guys at the inq.

Appearances can be decieving, and this is all basically just a case of two partitions being created with erroniously overlapping parameters. When you try to fill both partitions up BAD THINGS(tm) are going to happen. :(
 
Guess we'll find out...no point in taking anyone's word for it until I try.
 
Originally posted by finalgt
I can't make a definitive argument without a greater understanding of how hard drive technology is developed, but the following is based on the assumption that hard drive manufacturers need only develop one technology, which they can then apply to multiple drive models (different capacities).

A hard drive manufacturer doesn't necessarily have to design every drive model from the ground up just because it's a different capacity, does it? For example, once WD has the technology to create a 120GB 7200 RPM 8MB drive, then it follows that they'll easily be able to create a 40GB, 60GB, 80GB and 100GB variation of those drives without having to completely design the thing from the ground up, correct? If that's true, why would they manufacture 80GB drives, then "disable" 40 gigs and market it as a 40GB drive? Their profit margins would be far lower than if they just manufacturered a regular 40 gig drive.

Again, that's based on my limited comprehension of the hard drive manufacturing process. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
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Basically it's because they can sell more of the cheaper 40GB drives. Then they can charge a premium on the 80GB because they will sell fewer of them at the higher price. Yeah, it's not completely intuitive, but that's how they work.

I see this all the time since my business works closely with drive manufacturers. One drive vendor was unable to work out firmware bugs on a certain model of their drive in time to meet a certain OEM's required ship date. To get around this, the drive vendor took one of their larger capacity models and limited the capacity via firmware and sold that to the system OEM. That's just one example. Stuff like this happens all the time.
 
If you look at the numbers in the article, they could correspond to what the largest HD size was in the days when those capacities were made? Do 500GB hard disks exist yet? or perhaps we just haven't been told about them! Very anxiously refreshing this thread hoping for good news on this before i go home to try it. :)
 
I'm sure Intel also has faster processors already made, but why release them when they can sell the current ones just fine.
 
Due to price and demand and improvements in production technologies, Intel released remarked PII 450 (100FSB) as PII 300 (66FSB).

Just because they were producing higher quantities of 450s did not mean they should flood the market with 450s. Same principal applies here.

If the HD manufacturers are yielding platters than have more storage space, there is no need to flood the market, until a time when the market can handle the demand vs the supply.
 
Ok enough with this sillyness about HDs having disabled space on them. HD manufacturers get the varied sizes of HDs by varying the number of platters in the drive. They only make say ~20GB, ~40GB, and ~60GB platters then 80GB drives are 2x40GB, 120GB = 2x60GB (or 3x40GB in older models), 160GB=3x60GB and so on. There is no large amount of wasted space in any model. What's happening here is that you are creating an error in the partition table where the two partitions overlap on the disk (2nd part's begining block < 1st part's ending block).
 
Commenting on an article you posted today about hidden hard drive space. It was brought to my attention from a link to it from HardOCP.

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.

Peace

Matt
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This is the UPDATE posted on the inquirer:

** UPDATE II A representative for large hard drive distributor Bell Micro said: "This is NOT undocumented and we have done this in the past to load an image of the original installation of the software. When the client corrupted the o/s we had a boot floppy thatopened the unseen partition and copied it to the active or seen partition. It is a not a new feature or discovery. We use it ourselves without any qualms".

*** UPDATE III See the letters column today, here.

This is from a response article:

"I am the "Linux SATA guy".

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.

Intel does the same thing with processors. A 3.0Ghz processor may be sold as 2.4Ghz, simply because it didn't pass qualification at 3.0Ghz but did at a lower clock speed.

Second, in the ATA standard there is a feature known as the "host protected area". This area is accessible from any OS -- but it requires special ATA commands in order to make this area available to the OS.

Third, all hard drives reserve a certain amount of free space to use for reallocation of bad sectors. These "spare sectors" are free space on your drive... completely unused until your hard drive starts finding problems on the physical media.

So this is old news :) Although the host-protected area (HPA) can be used for insidious purposes such as DRM/CPRM that is completely hidden from the users, most of the "invisible free space" exists for a purpose -- either it's spare sectors for bad sector remapping, or its capacity that didn't pass factory qualification, that you don't want to use anyway."


The best test would be for anyone who does this, to fill the entire drive (both partitions), and see if the data gets corrupted.
 
But if a 200GB becomes 510GB...how is that possible based on what you guys are saying? I mean, it could be rubbish, but if that happens, you're explanation doesn't cover it. Overlapping partitions, and virtual partitions, can't be more than the drive is, can they?
 
Originally posted by GezusK
But if a 200GB becomes 510GB...how is that possible based on what you guys are saying? I mean, it could be rubbish, but if that happens, you're explanation doesn't cover it. Overlapping partitions, and virtual partitions, can't be more than the drive is, can they?
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Im not really sure. Valid questions... All I know is I smell something fishy... I really dont think this is the *hack* we all thought it was 3-4 hours ago....

Like the update said, most of the space is hidden for a reason. Wheather it be for developing bad sectors or because it failed during tests... I know I wouldnt be trusting any data on a hacked drive if it does in fact work like some say.
 
Originally posted by GezusK
But if a 200GB becomes 510GB...how is that possible based on what you guys are saying? I mean, it could be rubbish, but if that happens, you're explanation doesn't cover it. Overlapping partitions, and virtual partitions, can't be more than the drive is, can they?
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I read somewhere that most people believe that to be three partitions overlapping. I know that 200GB x 3 = 600GB not 510GB, but that is just what I have read.
 
This is a quote from another forum from a user who tried it:

"Pretty much as I figured and others have stated it appears to make a bogus partition. I applied the technique to an 80 gig drive and started to fill up the "new" partition with about 16 gigs worth of files from another physical drive. After completion of the copying process, explorer locked up tight with a memory error and even task manager crapped out (I tried to manually re-launch explorer). So I next rebooted the machine entirely, only to be presented with a file corruption error. It's pretty clear to me that writing to the "new" partiton is simply overwriting existing data on the original partition..."
 
Originally posted by SuperG
This is a quote from another forum from a user who tried it:

"Pretty much as I figured and others have stated it appears to make a bogus partition. I applied the technique to an 80 gig drive and started to fill up the "new" partition with about 16 gigs worth of files from another physical drive. After completion of the copying process, explorer locked up tight with a memory error and even task manager crapped out (I tried to manually re-launch explorer). So I next rebooted the machine entirely, only to be presented with a file corruption error. It's pretty clear to me that writing to the "new" partiton is simply overwriting existing data on the original partition..."
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and here we all thought we had $300 TB arrays.. :D
 
Originally posted by niall
Do 500GB hard disks exist yet?
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that is exactly where I have a problem with this
I can see a 10 20 30 40 all based off a 40


but doubling to 510? not right
there may even be a fairly large amount of slack for error remapping
but not half the drive
 
Assuming there are people who actually believe the whole "your drive is actually a bigger drive sold as a smaller drive because it didn't pass qualiification tests at the original size" theory, there are some pretty big conspiracy theorists around here. As far as I knew, the maximum any hard drive manufacturer has yet managed to fit on a platter is 100GB, making the largest drive the 300 gig Maxtor (100x3 platters). If all of the hard drive space on the WD 200GB that they tested is usable, that works out to about 170 gigs per platter, at 7200 rpm...not physically possible.

My vote goes towards the glitch theory, that most of that "new" space isn't actually usable.
 
Originally posted by finalgt
My vote goes towards the glitch theory, that most of that "new" space isn't actually usable.
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I agree,
however limiting does occur
like pointed out in UICompE02 last post (he works for LSI Logic)
but a portion of a single platter that a given drive is based off is the maximum it would possibly be limited,
they arent throwing "extra" nonaccessible platters in HDDs :p
 
Here's what I've got so far on my 80GB drive.

1 partition of 76.33GB (the original partition)
1 partition of 8MB (the one that holds Ghost's temp files)
1 partition of 66.71GB.

So far, I have copied 52.5GB to the 66.71GB partition. Tried playing an mp3 from it, and it worked.

Tried accessing the files on the orignal partition, and couldn't, BUT I am in the process of reformatting it. The instructions did say it may corrupt the original partition. If the partitions are overlapping, wouldn't formatting one of them corrupt the other? Guess I'll see in a few minutes.

If you use the theory that the drives really do have more space, but its bad because it didn't past tests...couldn't this be compared to processors. Where their speed isn't determined until testing. And as the process matures, yields get better, but if there isn't demand for those faster processors, they get marked as a lower speed...hence the reason we're able to overclock some so well? Couldn't something similar apply to those platters?
 
i believe that the manufactures do sell larger drives as locked out smaller drives, but itd be firmware locked and screwing with partitions wouldnt open it. ive seen it done before on OEM machines that were also physically sealed so you couldnt touch the jumpers and therefor reenable it.
 
Originally posted by GezusK
The instructions did say it may corrupt the original partition. If the partitions are overlapping, wouldn't formatting one of them corrupt the other?
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Actually the instructions say to use the "Quick Format" method. Which all the quick format does is whipe the FAT for the formatted partiion..
 
the thing is, if whats happening is that its creating a phantom partition that is purly writing over the other, wouldnt the increase in size (percentage wise) be indenticle no matter what drive was used.. for example: using a 200 gb or a 10 gb drive provide the same % increase in size??

that dont seem to be the case???
 
see there is where Im a little hazy
I know about older jumper limiting
Disk Size Reduction Jumpers

and the firmware makes since, unless there is some sort of Dynamic Drive Overlay scheme that is employed instead, in which case Ghost might be able to access it.

But Still, not half a large modern HDD worth
thats nutz

as pointed out earlier, if what is (at least partially) happening is that user access to Spare Sectors is occuring, that will eventually lead to issues
 
I think that the program is using a "dummy" partition to create a mimic of the drive. The program is mapping this partition (new) almost equal to either the used or the unused portion of the drive (old). So the question is...

in this example:

1 partition of 76.33GB (the original partition)
1 partition of 8MB (the one that holds Ghost's temp files)
1 partition of 66.71GB.

did the original partition (76.33GB) have 66.71GB free or 66.71GB free used.

Also if you were to write to the new partition you would corrupt the old partition and vice-versa... if you quick format a partition it wouldn't affect the other because you wouldn't be overwriting the data, just the copy of the fat table that that partition is using (as someone else has already meantioned).
 
new article update (links to the letters section)

I am the "Linux SATA guy".

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.

Intel does the same thing with processors. A 3.0Ghz processor may be sold as 2.4Ghz, simply because it didn't pass qualification at 3.0Ghz but did at a lower clock speed.

Second, in the ATA standard there is a feature known as the "host protected area". This area is accessible from any OS -- but it requires special ATA commands in order to make this area available to the OS.

Third, all hard drives reserve a certain amount of free space to use for reallocation of bad sectors. These "spare sectors" are free space on your drive... completely unused until your hard drive starts finding problems on the physical media.

So this is old news :) Although the host-protected area (HPA) can be used for insidious purposes such as DRM/CPRM that is completely hidden from the users, most of the "invisible free space" exists for a purpose -- either it's spare sectors for bad sector remapping, or its capacity that didn't pass factory qualification, that you don't want to use anyway.

Feel free to edit/reproduce/publish this email.

Jeff Garzik

Not speaking for my employer, speaking as an Open Source guy
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Hi Mike,

About the "recover unused space on your drive" article:

Working for a data-recovery company I know a thing or two about harddisks....

One is that if the vendors would be able to double the capacity for just about nothing, they would.

All this probably does is to create an invailid partition table which ends up having:

|...new partition.............................
|old partition.................................|

overlapping partitions. So writing either partition will corrupt the other. It probably so happens that whatever situation people tried it, it just so happened that the (quick) format of the "new" partition didn't corrupt the other partition to make it unbootable.

And the 200G -> 510Gb "upgrade" probably has ended up with three overlapping partitions....

Roger
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Commenting on an article you posted today about hidden hard drive space. It was brought to my attention from a link to it from HardOCP.

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.

Peace

Matt
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Hello.

Here's my take on this phenomenon as an IT professional. I have HAD THIS HAPPEN BEFORE, with Microsoft FDisk. Microsoft tends to recycle [crappy] code, and it would appear that the tools called by the Disk Management MMC snapin are no exception. I didn't immediately realize what had happened some years ago (I think about 4 years ago now), but FDisk's faulty start/end sector calculation code ended up causing the program to create a ~3GB partition after an existing ~10.8GB partition on a ~11GB drive, after I had used it to delete a ~200MB Linux partition. This resulted in ~5GB of corrupted data on the primary partition due to the fact that I was probably half asleep at the time and wrote things to the other partition. I was not impressed. Regardless, this is almost certainly what's going on. I'd suggest to anyone trying this to fill the first partition with one HUGE file, take an MD5 checksum, write something to the second one, repeat MD5sum, and compare.

Just my three cents...

Paul Nienaber
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well that covers most of our collective guesses :p
 
OK, enough with the off topic stuff.

Where do you stand on this?

does it actualy just corrupt data on the drive? I don't want a yes based on the info from the inq site, I want some kind of proof from the people in these forums
 
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