Recovering Secret HD Space

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.)

Uh, no

Sorry, but this is complete bullshit.
Did aureal density technology increase to 200GB/platter overnight? No.

Please refer to this thread [storagereview.net] on StorageReview.com for more information.

Re:Uh, no

No you fool, don't tell them yet! This is all part of my incredibly ingenious plan to get all the script kiddies and spammers in the world to follow these instructions to "enlarge" their three inch hard disks and corrupt all of their data in the process. Nobody remotely knowledgeable about computers would ever believe this, and nobody who knows nothing about computers would possibly attempt to do this. Who does this leave? Yes, the script kiddies and spammers. Now it's back to Plan B, sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.

Re:Uh, no

I initially misread your post as "enlarge their three inch hard dicks". From the crap that my mail server blocks, the spammers have been trying to enlarge their three inch hard dicks for a long time...

Re:How smart u are..

Er. Except that's not how it works.

Intel tests a sample from each batch of processors to determine which "bin" it goes into. That sample tested reliably at 2.4GHz? Okay, into the 2.4GHz pile. That sample tested at 2.8? Okay, into the 2.8 pile. The trick about processors running faster than labeled isn't because they're mislabeling processors, it's that they only test one processor out of the entire batch. Many processors within either batch could be capable of 3GHz, simply due to vagaries of production - you can give it a shot and find out, but don't be surprised when it develops unacceptable amounts of heat like the processor they tested.

HD manufacturers are quite different. When they release a new line of HDs, they are all based off common technologies, but over a wide range of hard drive sizes - because the NUMBER OF PLATTERS inside each model are different. Got a platter that can hold 100GB? Stick 1 inside, you've got a 100GB drive. 2 inside, 200GB. 3 inside, 300GB. There's three models (though drives typically contain substantially more platters). Now you stick 2 in heads for each platter (unless it's one of those old wacky Barracuda drives, which had 4 heads per platter), and firmware that is designed to control the hardware inside the sealed case - but usually even the controller is identical within a line.

One other important thing to remember is that they test the platters BEFORE the HD is fully assembled. This is very different from a processor, where you can't exact test individual components until the entire thing is built. That said, they certainly design in a certain amount of fudge room certainly, so they can remap bad sectors into the fudge room. No platter is perfect, so they need additional space to remap bad sectors. I would be very, very surprised if there's more than 10GB of available space on a 250GB drive...

Re:How smart u are..

I would carry your analysis a step further and note that chip and drive manufacturers don't make money by downgrading their product.
I daresay they've a statistical model that has them doing enough sampling to maximize profit, and the means minimizing the amount of irritated customers calling in about problems.
This is not like highway engineering, where they have to figure in weather, vehicles, and Aunt Tillie before posting a speed sign for a curve, so they lowball it heavily.

Sometimes they do...

Not always is their goal to make a profit, but rather market share...

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:Sometimes they do...

Sorry, I gotta start a flame :)

Maybe I should have been a bit clearer by stating
"Not always is their goal to make a profit *THIS MINUTE*, but rather longer term make more by locking up market share and inflating prices once you've got the market share"

The world is full of examples of companies eschewing short-term profits in favor of long-view profits from market share:

- Gilette made it famous "Give away the razor, make it up on the blades"

- Microsoft and a ton of other companies sell their "academic" versions of software to college kids for pennies on the dollar compared to the stuff in the computer shop down the road. If they didn't the little bastards would probably use something like that pinko OpenOffice and Linux. ;). Instead they "hook" them using the stuff now so it's harder to change later.

-Let people pirate your graphics software easily so they get used to screwing around with it *Cough*Photoshop*Cough*. When it comes time to get a job doing graphics, and the company asks what software to buy you for your workstation, well, it's a one-horse race, isn't it?

-Microsoft execs including Steve Ballmer himself, have said repeatedly that if people in asia were to pirate software, Microsoft would prefer that it was their software that was being pirated.

Short term loss, long term gain because of.. market share.

Sometimes they do

ATI is a perfect example I think. Ya'll remember the various mods to convert their otherwise identical top-of-the-line video card into their top-of-the-line 3D rendering graphics pro card? Sometimes the designs are basically identical for good reason. Cost savings comes to mind. They simply use software and/or a few well-placed jumpers to differentiate between the two.

Re:How smart u are..

I once toured a wafer plant and this is how it was done there. When a die mask is made, there may be small imperfections in it. Say the mask contains a 10x10 grid of supposedly identical circuits, but there were a couple of flaws when the mask was made that messed up the copies at grid locations A1 and A2. Every wafer that gets made with that mask will automatically have the A1 and A2 circuits marked for rejection before testing because they are "known defects".

After a wafer is made a robotic tester probes each circuit before the wafer is cut up. If a circuit fails the basic tests, the probe squirts a little dot of red paint on that circuit. The "known defects" get a red dot without even being tested. After this initial probe test, the circuits are cut apart, the ones with red dots are discarded and the rest are mounted on carriers.

It is possible that a slight mask defect or wafer imperfection might cause a performance problem rather than a total functional failure. This could also be caused by a slightly out-of-spec doping or wafer heating. These are sorted out by further testing as mentioned by other posters.

If all of the circuits on a wafer get the same doping and same heating, then you can sample one or two and assume that the rest of the circuits from that wafer will have similar performance. If you have a mask problem that causes degraded performance, you can automatically flag that die location as a "known slow" or a "known bad" depending on your criteria.

Re:How smart u are..

I happen to work in the processor inducstry, and your statement is untrue. Every processor gets tested. The 'bins' are chosen due to 2 factors:
1) The processor passes testing under extreme conditions at this speed. This gaurantees that the part has a high probability of never being returned as a defect (as silicon is used it ages due to electron-igration, which effectively makes it work slower/stop working eventually). The testing gaurantees that the user won't ever see this impact. In this case, a 2.4GHz binned part may work fine for you at 2.8GHz, but perhaps it will die in 3 years. Or perhaps a single instruction in SSE will return the wrong value 1 time in 100,000. Who knows.

2) Parts are binned to meet supply. The company says it will supply 10,000 2.8GHz parts, and 100,000 2.4GHz parts. However of the 110,000 parts, 40,000 ran at 2.8GHz, and the rest at 2.4GHz. To keep the price scale (and meet the contract) 30,000 oparts which are perfectly good at 2.8GHz will get sold as 2.4

The downside: There is no way to tell (1) from (2) as a consumer, so overclocking is all a game of craps.

Also remember that the tests are done under 'extreme' conditions, which means that all parts will likely work slightly faster than the bin they were assigned to.

Caveat: When a new frequency/design is released, it may be very difficult to get to the desired frequency, and the testing is relaxed somewhat to meet the quota (in which case very few parts will be overclockable)

Lastly, no testing is done above the top bin, so if 3.2 GHz is the current fastest sold, some percentage of those may run at 3.4 or 3.6, and they won't have been tested that far.

Re:How smart u are..

The parent post is incorrect in regards to chip testing.

Manufacturers test every single chip pretty much identically. Different companies differ in how they determine speed of parts (run some patterns at full speed, measure the delay of some known circuits, etc.) but each part is tested. There is too much variation across the wafer to do much else.

It's always possible to run a chip faster than a manufacturer's testing especially if it is kept cooler than the max spec, voltage is within tighter tolerance than spec, or if the user doesn't care about correct answers. I find the last point is what usually allows the greatest overclocking.

Also, some large manufacturers (Intel, AMD) have marketing needs to sell certain speed grades. So if all parts run at 3.0GHz, but users are demanding the cheaper 2.8GHz parts, then they'll sell some faster parts marked at 2.8GHz. In general, this is a temporary situation since re-pricing to reflect the increased yield will probably move the 3.0GHz price down shortly to increase pressure on the competition.

This does not make sense

Testing only one processor for a whole batch won't make sense and be dangerous. What would be if you happen to test the one processor of a dozen which can run with 3.0 GHz, while the others only can do 2.4 GHz? You would sell a bunch of overrated processors. Therefore EACH processor is tested.

Re:How smart u are..

though drives typically contain substantially more platters

Maybe in the old full-height drives, but most consumer 3.5" drives nowdays only have 1-3 platters (as have most drives I have disassembled....my platter collection is at about 50), 4 in the ultra-top-of-the-line high-capacity drives. Each platter is about 1mm thick, but has space between the rest of the chassi and other platters for the head assymblies (which is 2 assymblies between platters, one for each). These take up more room, as the arm's design itself is usually thicker than the platter, and it has to be rasied off the platter so that it will not damage it as it swings back and forth rapidly. You also have to add in the case itself and the motor used to spin the platters. Theres not much room to cram in too many platters inside the case. Remeber the dimensions of a half-height 3.5" drive gives only about 1.6" of vertical space total.

You are correct though, in that lower capacity drives just remove platters and head assymblies from a higher capacity model. Specifically, I took apart two older Seagate drives, one had 1 platter, the other had 2 and was rated at almost double capacity, but where otherwise identical. In place of the platters, they just put in spacers on the drive axel.

Tm

ps: on a side note its interesting to see how the design of drives have changed over the years, from heads actuated by stepping motors to voice-coil actuators, and from the full-height monsters with 7 platters to single platter drives with 10x capacity, yet the platters have stayed the exact same radial size on every 3.5" drive I have taken apart. The only notable physical differnece other than color is the thickness. Newer platters are lighter in color and are ALOT thinner.

I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

You see I have encountered numerous Dells wich has only a portion of their HD partioned. Not hidden or recovery partitions. Just 6gb of a 8gb disk used. Maybe the machine was sold as 6 but 8 was cheaper or they ran out of part but it still mean't an easy upgrade. (was the time of napster so everyone needed more HD space)

But yeah more then doubling the HD capacity sounds fishy and there are plenty of letters to the inquirer article explaining how and why it ain't true.

Re:Uh, no

nobody who knows nothing about computers would possibly attempt to do this.

You wish. Floppy format programs that could magically get 1 meg from a 720k floppy were all the rage for the Atari ST. You could explain to people that there weren't really 99 tracks on the drive, that the displayed space remaining was bogus, that it just didn't work and might damage the drive by banging the head into the end stop for tracks 83 onwards. It never worked. They would swear that it worked, and swear at you for telling them it didn't. Even asking them to do a test of putting 1 meg on the floppy and checking if it was all really there didn't work.

Re:Uh, no

The Mac did this by varying the number of sectors per track (more on outer tracks, fewer on inner tracks), or, to put it another way, varied the speed of the drive depending on how far the head was from the center while writing at the same speed. I recall Chuck Peddle's Sirius computers did a similar thing with their 5.25" drives. The approach basically makes the official rating of the drive/disk irrelevent because it's not storing data that way.

The Amiga had a trick which was closer to the idea of trying to squeeze a meg out of a one meg floppy. It wrote each track as, for all intents and purposes, one sector (though, to make things manageable for the OS, it divided those "sectors" into 512 byte sectors from a software point of view. The point though is that it wrote the entire track without any substantive gaps between each sector.

There were two ramifications of this approach. First, without any additional special tricks, you could squeeze 880k out of a floppy; Second, early on Amiga floppies had a reputation for being somewhat less reliable than their PC and Atari brethren, though personally, by 1991 when I got a 500+, I didn't see any real difference.

As you say, you can also use various tricks to squeeze more space on a real floppy in Linux, and Linux even has a bunch of devices you can use in place of /dev/fd0. Those work though by making use of the fact that most disks are not exactly 80 tracks in size, they have additional ones because, well, who'd manufacture disks that accurately?

Re:Uh, no

Second, early on Amiga floppies had a reputation for being somewhat less reliable than their PC and Atari brethren, though personally, by 1991 when I got a 500+, I didn't see any real difference.

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:Uh, no

Microsoft developed tools to get 1.6 and 1.8MB out of a 1.44MB floppy.

DMF. [winimage.com]

Re:FDformat did this

I used to use the program the parent speaks of, and it really did work. The format tool let you adjust the number of tracks and sectors on a floppy, with the 1.72 Meg combination working well but anything beyond that not working right. The space gains were quite real, back when my hard drive was a mere 40 megs I used this to offload things and make room. It used a small TSR program (i.e., a memory-resident driver) which had to be loaded, or you would get errors trying to read the disks.

Re:Uh, no

Couldn't tell you what "aureal density" means.
That's probably because I can't type. You may want to read this reference for " areal [storagereview.com]" density, though.

Re:Uh, no

fdisk (on a Windows machine - I dunno the Linux equivalent).

er, fdisk

Re:Uh, no

Couldn't tell you what "aureal density" means.

"Aureal density" is a misspelling of "areal density". Areal means relating to area. In other words, the bits per square inch of the hard drive platters.

Re:Uh, no

Could also be a misspelling of "Aural density". The measure of the amount of bullshit in any given sentence.

Re:Uh, no

You forgot areole density. That's two per person, unless the carnival is in town.

(Aw crud, maybe four per person. Dictionary.com wants to call part of the Iris an areole...)

Re:Uh, no

It's a mis-spelling of oreo-density; how many portions of breakfast cereal you can get in a single serving.

Re:Uh, no

Aureal density explained.

a high aureal density is those dark nipples and
a low aureal density is those bright pink nipples.

Right?

Re:Uh, no

If this is real which is doubtfull it is probably a marketing trick. The drive manufactures proably make one drive and sell it as 3 different drives in different capacities.

Actually, this is exactly what they do. The difference, however, is that the lower-end (smaller) drives are identical except that they come with fewer platters. For example, a 160GB hard drive today likely has two 80GB platters, whereas an 80GB drive probably has one (though different combinations of different sizes are of course used, depending on when the hard drive was manufactured and other factors)

In some cases, a hard drive will be sold with a greater potential capacity than its available capacity. For example, a drive with two 60GB platters may be sold as a 100GB drive, the platters having been "short stroked". This has nothing to do with the absurd technique described in the Inquirer article, and I doubt that it is possible to recover the lost space.
Hard drives are the highest precision mechanical devices that most people have in their home--moreso than processors, high-end printer heads, or toasters. They are not something that you want to physically modify.

See the following highly informative and interesting (if you are a geek) posts by a Maxtor engineer:
Here [storagereview.net]
here [storagereview.net]
and here [storagereview.net]

Re:Uh, no

For example, a drive with two 60GB platters may be sold as a 100GB drive, the platters having been "short stroked". This has nothing to do with the absurd technique described in the Inquirer article, and I doubt that it is possible to recover the lost space.

It used to work on the old seagate drives, you just set the bios to the parameters of the 100GB drive of letting the bios autodetect the 60GB drive and you had an 100GB drive

Re:Uh, no

Working for a data-recovery company I've opened up quite a bunch of drives. So I know what's going on inside.

Depending on the form factor and the manufacturer, they can stuff 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or even 15 platters in an enclosure.(That last is for a full height 5.25" drive. 6 only fit into the 1.7" heigh drives).

Suppose Quantum can fit 10Gb on one side of a platter. They will then make a family of drives: 10G (one platter, one head), 20Gb (one platter, two heads), 30Gb (two platters, three heads), 40Gb (two platters, 4 heads), and 60Gb. (Quantum only fits three platters in a 1" high 3.25" drive). This sequence holds for the quantum Fireball AS series by the way.

As you can see, there is half a platter (one side) unused in the 10 and 30Gb models. Quantum usually leaves that nice and shiny. IBM usually takes a sharp object and makes a big scratch on the surface....

In either case, it's quite possible that QA on that part of the disk failed, and that it would be unwise to use that part of the disk. Even if you managed to get a head able to read/write it....

Re:Uh, no

Do they actually phisically install a head on the side of the platter that is not being used for drives such as your 10GB and 30GB examples? It wouldn't seem completely unreasonable to build them all the same and just disable the extra head in the firmware.

Re:Uh, no

No, the head would be missing.

Re:Uh, no

Well thats what they advertise...

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!

Re:Uh, no

This is true, but there certainly aren't several GB of sectors reserved for errors. :)

Re:Uh, no

CDROMs use constant data rate by varying the RPM of the drive depending on where you're located

I can vouch for the fact that the RPM is greater in the heady latitudes of the UK. People living nearer to the equator will experience slightly longer seek times, and I wonder if those in places like Barrow AK & North Norway actually appreciate the extra performance.

Maybe someone from New Zealand or nearby could chime in and verify that there data is read from the drive in the opposite direction.

Re:Uh, no

Being from Australia, yes, we do read the information backwards. And it is stored in memory backwards. For example, lets say I have the number 0x2244 it is written on the disk as 0x4422. And, even more amazing is if we look at the number 0xffff, it can sometimes be read backwards, forwards, or randomly, giving the values:
0xffff, 0xffff, and 0xffff. But, we get no errors.

(Hear are some replys for you consideration:
- Isn't Australia part of New Zealand?
- Isn't New Zealand part of Australia?
- That is the lamest piece of shit I have ever
read.

Re:Uh, no

Ahem.

-- I thought hard drives in Australia had to be installed upside down.

-- I read your post backwards, you insensitive clod.

-- You must be new around here, in Australia your hard drive reads you.

-- Imagine a beaowulf cluster of Australia bits!

Re:Uh, you're wrong sorta

CLV is constant linear velocity and is what the first generation CD players used. That meant the data passed under the head at a constant speed, 150kbytes/second. The further out on the disc the slower the disc turned as each turn had more data than close-in.

Once the speeds went up the manufacturers moved to CAV or constant angular velocity where the disc spins at a predetermined speed and the data comes in at different rates depending on the head position over the disc. What really happens is there's a table of different CAVs stored in the drive's firmware depending on the absolute position on the disc. Close into the hub the disc spins faster, further out it spins slower. If there are a lot of errors it will slow down to try and read the data better. On a 48x drive there might be as many as 12 different CAV speeds available to the firmware.

Re:Uh, no

Yeah, it works.. I just tried it and it seems to b##0"#,##0;\-""#,##0 ""#,##0.00;\-""#,##0.00# ,##0.00;]\-""#,##0.005 * ,##0.00;]\-""#,##0.005 * ,##0.00;]\-""#,##0.005 *

Virus ?

Is this the first tech info virus ? Follow instructions to destroy your own HD. Seems like just putting a hammer through it would be easier, but it would probably work with the clueless. Hmmm, yeah not a bad idea I guess in a very twisted way.

Re:Virus ?

Wait, can you give me more information on this so called "hammer" approach? How much more storage would I get?

Re:Uh, no

A standard "make one partition full sized" uses only the parts of the drive that aren't reserverd. If there was a way to use the disk size including the bits reserverd to fixup bad sectors, then you could get more space.
Now if your 1st partition is a full disk - reserved and your second partition is full sized including reserved and the reserved aren't all at the end of the disk, your going to end up with partitions of the ratios they talk about.

However what happens you start putting windows on this thing? Well block sizes of big drives aren't your friend and most small files will end up in reserve clustors. Since directories are small files too and if they don't conflict, you should be able to load up a few gig of data on one of these disks before you start to find out that its overwriting other bits of the other partiion. I expect one of these 180 gig drives could be loaded up with at least 90gig of data before the directorys started acting funny. One cool bit about this is block related files (like mp3) will show up on the dir just fine but when you play it, it might switch songs in the middle. I don't think the RIAA could ask for a better gift.

Re:Uh, no

Firstly, this is just resectoring, and is HIGHLY dangerous as all it is doing is making some sectors appear twice. Physically its just one sector.

Secondly, ALL IDE type drives (and some SCSI) have soem reserved space (possibly 5%) which is intelligently remapped whenever a bad sector is found. (rememeber you are NOT supposed to Low Level format an IDE drrive). During manufacturing, it is inevitable that bad sectors WILL be found, but these are remapped to the hidden reserved section, whcih is why most Hard disks you buy now do not APPEAR to have bad sectors. The reason is they are already mapped into the reserved area. So the rule is, when you DO start seeing bad sectors on your IDE drive, you can be sure that the reserved space is now full and its time to start looking for a new Hard Drive.

"Recovering" the space allocated to the reserved section is NOT good at all, since you then bypass the IDE bad sector mapping mechanism, and if the drive is not suitably surfaced checked, you can bet yoru bottom dollar that you will see some bad sectors.

Beware.

Re:Uh, no

Sorry, but this is complete bullshit.

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.

Re:How? Reliability?

It seems to work by deliberately corrupting your partition tabes by overlapping your patitions:
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:How? Reliability?

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.

You'd be correct if there was just one HDD maker in the marketplace, but that isn't so.

First off, let me say that I think this whole isue is bunk. But let's pretend for a moment.

Company A and Company B are both in the business of making and selling HDDs. Company A makes only 200 GB HDDs which cost them about $100 each to manufacture and they then sell them for $200. Company B makes a 200GB HDD which costs them $100 to make and they then sell it for $200. Company B also does this, they modify the firmware of the drive to that only 150 GB are usable. They sell these "150 GB" HDDs for $150.

Company A gets the business of people who are willing to shell out $200 for a 200 GB HDD. Company A does not get the business who have a budget of less than $200 for their HDD purchase.

Company B get the business of people who are willing to shell out $200 for 200 GB HDD and the business of people who have a smaller budget.

By crippling the drive they protect the value of their "high end" product while at the same time making some money on the "mid range" as well

Company A's profits can be calculated like this profit = (X1xP1) whereas X=The number of units sold and P=The profit margin on the unit. #=The model of the HDD

Company B's profits can be calculated like this profit = (X1xP1)+(X2xP2).

This same business principle is a part of the reason why some 2.4 Ghz processors will run at 3 Ghz when overclocked.

I have no doubt that there could be a fair bit of space on a drive that is unavailable to the user, but double or triple capacity? Of course not!

LK

Re:How? Reliability?

Company A gets the business of people who are willing to shell out $200 for a 200 GB HDD. Company A does not get the business who have a budget of less than $200 for their HDD purchase.

Company B get the business of people who are willing to shell out $200 for 200 GB HDD and the business of people who have a smaller budget.

Company A buys company B. The new Company AB sells both 150GB and 200GB drives, so they get money from everybody.

Except, of course, that Company AB is in competition with Company C, which makes a real 150GB drive which costs less to produce than company AB's "150GB" drive because it's not really a 200GB drive with modified firmware. Company C sells their 150GB drive for less, and starts driving company AB's margins down; Company C can keep doing this because their costs are lower.

I call

Shenanigans.

No way in heck can you increase the amount of storage a HDD has so drastically. I mean, the physical disks can only hold so much, and no matter what you do, they arent going to magically double or triple.

These are physical disks, they have a set number of sectors. One size and one size only.

Unless you get into the whole mega vs. mibi byte but thats a whole nother can of worms!

Re:I call

No way in heck can you increase the amount of storage a HDD has so drastically. I mean, the physical disks can only hold so much, and no matter what you do, they arent going to magically double or triple.

unless the disks were secretly, specifically designed this way.

for example, for the benefit of spooks who want the device to maintain a rolling log of disk data for some period of time after the unsuspecting user thinks it's been deleted/reformatted/security-wiped.

Re:I call

I've been getting faster rotational speeds since I opened up my HD and removed the "dummy" platters.

Simple corruption

I'm a Ghost developer.

This is just a method of corrupting your partition table so the same disk sectors appear more than once. If you try this, don't ask Symantec for help afterwards.

Damn.

Not only do US programmer have to compete against programmers in other countries, but now we have to compete againts the Undead?

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!

Re:Damn.

Compete? Dude, if you don't think you're undead, you've been getting way too much sleep.

Re:Simple corruption

Oh come *on* people.

Almost every slashdotter wants to find new and interesting ways to hose their data.

Its only natural.

Re:Simple corruption

Or perhaps one of the few times a comment deserves +5?

Re:Simple corruption

I once made a floppy that reported its size as 4 gigs, back when hard drives couldnt even reach 1.
It's pretty easy to set your hard drive to whatever "size" you want it to be... just dont expect it to work properly :P
Having said that, there were a few proggies floating around back then that could make your floppies slightly larger by formatting them with a weird, non-standard configuration.
You could do wonderful things with them, from 1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable, to some magic 1.22 meg format that mysteriously made my floppies faster.
Ahh, those were the days ;)
I have very *ahem* fond memories of spending the whole day formatting and copying Civ2 to 96 floppies... ouch!

Re:Simple corruption

Heh, I remember how Amigas used to have a more powerful FDD controller than PC's, meaning they could squeeze more on a disk; the space-optimized filesystems there let you squeeze almost 1MB onto a single DD floppy vs the already impressive default of 880k; and yup, you got nearly 2M from a HD floppy! ;)

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.

Re:Simple corruption

1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable,

You made floppies even slower and less reliable I wouldn't have thought that was even possible. Obviously some kind of WORN file system (Write Once Read Never!)

Re:Simple corruption

"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.

Re:Simple corruption

One flaw I found in the article is that they say you need two drives, both containing an OS. Later they ask you to swap out one of them for another drive with an OS. That whole section sounds like smoke and mirrors.
If this extra space really exists, why do you have to "trick" the OS into believing it is there? I was expecting some mention of a low level format at least, but there's no way this will work. I'll bet the didn't do any data integrity tests which would no doubt show right away the flaw in their system. Oh well, who needs proof if you're just storing appz and mp3s.

Just to be a bastard

Just to be a bastard, I gotta point out that this could probably be considered a Ghost bug. While there might not be anything Symantec could *do* to help someone that's mucked up their drive, I could reasonably see them complaining to Symantec about it.

ATTEMPT TO CLEAR UP MISCONCEPTIONS RE ATAPI/PARTG.

(Most) ATAPI-4 and later hard drives have a way dividing up drive space in user-addressable space and host protected space (Host Protected Area). The "user" in this context is the bios of your computer or your operating system of course.

The Host Protected Area is space on your hard drive that your bios, your operating system or even your applications can be set aside for certain management information. I take it that some backup programs (ab)use it to "hide" compressed boot images on hard drives. I wouldn't be very surprised if companies like Dell or IBM stole some of your hard disk so you can restore a windows installation.The "Host Protected Area" has nothing at all to do with the drive-internal handling of bad sectors or other drive-interal.Drive-internal information as well as sectors used for replacing sectors gone bad are not accessible through the ATAPI commandset for accessing the HPA.

The ANSI T13 Standard Document for ATAPI-6 (current) are overprized at $18.00 but you can download a draft of upcoming ATAPI-7 from the T13 working group's site at http://www.t13.org. There you will find in Section 4.9 of the document: "A reserved area for data storage outside the normal operating system file system is required for several specialized applications". Systems may wish to store configuration data or save memory to the device in a location that the operating system cannot change. The optional Host Protected Area feature set allows a portion of the device to be reserved for such an area when the device is initially configured. A device that implements the Host Protected Area feature set shall implement the following minimum set of commands:"

READ NATIVE MAX ADDRESS

SET MAX ADDRESS ... ... I take it that READ NATIVE MAX ADDRESS tells you how many sectors of user addressable space have been configured on the drive and SET MAX ADDRESS lets you adjust that.

The way I see it there may be a lot of preinstalled hard drives out there with a compressed windows installation images on them "hidden" in the HPA. Maybe a new version of hdparm will allow linux users to reclaim that dead space.

Floppy / Drill fun

This does sound suspect, but it reminds me of the trick you used to be able to do with 720 floppy disks - you could drill a hole where the hole on a 1.4MB disk would be and use it as a 1.4MB disk. Trouble was, it wouldn't retain data for very long, but it usually lasted for a day at least before the data degraded.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

Then what kind of disks did you use? I did that to literally hundreds of disks more than 10 years ago, and they still work perfectly today; I've used some in the past week.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

THIS method is obviously BS (to put it mildly) but back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth we could double the size (or was that 1.5x, I can't remember) of a MFM hard drive by hooking it up an RLL controller. I remember putting a full-height IBM 10mb hard drive into my 386 and making it into either a 15mb or 20mb hard drive. I used that hard drive to store and rotate Fidonet echomail for several years, as I recall.

That worked because RLL encoded the data using a different method than MFM.

This, though, is smoke and mirrors.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

RLE is a kind of compression. RLL hard drive controllers didn't do any kind of hardware compression. RLL is just a more efficient and more complex way of turning bits into flux reversals on the hard drive platters. See here [storagereview.com] for a good description.

Back in the day of MFM and RLL controllers, the hard drive controller did much of what the drive electronics and firmware do in modern hard drives, that's why you could have MFM or RLL controllers. Hard drives still use RLL encoding today.

Anyone remember NaBob?

(I post this here because maybe you've been around long enough to remember when ARC vs. ZIP vs. LZH vs. some others was a big deal.)

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 .BOB.

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 .BOB extension, but hey, as they say, there's one born every minute.

That program always cracked me up, so I just thought I'd share.

There was even worse stuff....

There were also programs that just "deleted" the file and strored the cluster numbers in the "compressed" file. Too bad if you happen to defrag or something else in the meantime.
the faq of comp.compression has a lot of really wired stuff...

Re:Anyone remember NaBob?

Hmm can't remember that one, but these days you can always download the actively developed LZip [sourceforge.net] - a lossy compression program!

It has a non-GPL compliant license [sourceforge.net] though. Pity.

Floppys used to be better..

In 1994 I bought a box of 720K single-density floppies by TDK. After discovering that making this extra hole could double the disk capacity, I crudely bashed the holes in them with the end of scissors.

These floppies were used almost daily for 3 years. (no hard disks available at that time). They were reformatted countless times.

Not single one of them ever failed. About a year ago, when failed to reformat and make a boot disk from several fresh-brought floppies I digged up one of them, reformatted again and succeeded in making a reliable boot disk.

Quality of todays media just makes me cry.

Re:Floppys used to be better..

I'll second that. Wish I had a mod point for you. I don't trust 3.5s any more at all. USB flash drives for quick mobile storage, CD-Rs for anything bigger or more long term. Even the CD-Rs don't last well anymore. Now all those 3.5s come with those stupid little plastic sliders instead of the sturdy old metal ones. Constantly I find those things coming off and getting jammed in the drives at work. And the plastic is so cheap and flimsy they are almost a real "floppy" disk again.
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.

that looks like a *bad* thing

I have to agree with all of the naysayers on this. As much as I'd love to double my hard disk space for free, there's no such thing as a free lunch. This looks like a really terrific way to hose all of the data on your hard drive. You're really better off just shopping around for a reasonably priced 100gb hard drive or something instead.

yeah right.

So either the whole thing is a hoax, or, more likely, the OS is looking at a damaged drive (damaged partition table, at least) and seeing the same partition in multiple ways. Try to write on that shiny new partition and you'll be overwriting data on the old one. Guaranteed.

Some drives are known to short stroke their platters. This raises the more serious problem of this idiocy... The problem is modern drives store important information on those hidden inner areas of their platters (firmware, disk information, reallocated bad sectors), who knows what you could be overwriting whenever you use that space. Put something down in the wrong place and the drive will never start again or corrupt data at certain sectors. It's a lottery ticket everytime you write data in that partition. That's not what I call useable capacity.

Don't believe me? Go ahead and try it. You'll lose all those Buffy episodes you've downloaded on KaZaA, and instead you'll have to spank it to the Portman pictures your mom doesn't know you have stashed under your bed.

Re:yeah right.

Some drives are known to short stroke their platters.

Is that what kids are calling it nowadays?

Re:yeah right.

I've discovered a method to turn a single processor computer into a dual processor machine! First go into the BIOS and turn Hyper-Threading on. Finish booting the system. Now get a hacksaw. Hit reboot and quickly saw the processor in half. Before the system restarts, kill the power. Take the left half of the CPU and put it in the second processor slot. Start the system again and everything should be working wonderfully!

What *idiot* dared to post this on /.?

In other news, witnesses reported UFO sightings all over the country...

I HAVE seen UFOs

And not even I believe this one.

LK

Disk is cheap.

My data is way more important than squeezing a bit extra out of an 80 dollar drive. Interesting idea and all that, but this isn't like in the old days of the "punch a new hole to make your 5-1/4 inch floppy double sided", where if you screw up, you lose only a disk worth of data - with this, if you screw up, you lose a _disk worth_ of data.

If I need more space, I'll buy a bigger drive, they keep getting cheaper and faster and bigger all the time anyway.

Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

Reminds me of the old trick in which you could turn a single-sided diskette into a double-sided one by punching a hole through one corner.

Slight problem: the diskette usually failed a few weeks later.

The trick with this hard disk "expansion" is to reclaim space that has been reserved for error correction, or which failed quality control.

It's a lot like over-clocking a CPU, with a big difference: when it fails, you can't just reboot, you lose all your data. Personally, with HD prices so cheap, it hardly seems worthwhile.

Manufacturer's view..

'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' Which, having worked for a PC sales company, I can confirm is true. And certainly, while earlier models had partitions you could wipe with partition software, later PC builds had this hidden space. But the space was 1GB at most - there's no way there was the kind of 40GB plus hidden space the article claims.

Enlarge your HardDrive

Gain upto 300-600 more gigs. Your lover will be happy. Risk fre.....wait....lol.

Sorry.

Summary...

I think posting in the "letters" linked article sums it up pretty well:

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

Re:Summary...

Yes, that post sums it up pretty much, other than that 'probably' should be replaced with 'absolutely'.

Basically this idiot has found an incredibly cumbersome way to screw up his partition table. (see below for more details)

Then of course this gets posted and linked to all over the planet for everyone to try for themselves. Who are these fucking idiots that post this kinda stuff? They should get 'gullible' tatood on their forehead.

Hint: nowhere in the article is it said that they actually tried to use all the space and verify all data remained intact. Wouldn't that be the first thing you'd do before posting something like this online?

Anyways, I've written several IDE drivers (and worked on the IDE core for BIOSs) and I can tell you that there is NO way you can increase the size of a 200GB drive to 510GB, especially not with the tools that are described (Ghost).

Look at the 80GB example: they got 150GB? That's interesting, because that would mean that the drive all of a sudden became a 48-bit LBA drive. Older drives are limited to 137.4GB in size and to get 150GB capacity you need 48-bit LBA. I don't think Ghost is going to reflash the firmware of the drive to add support for that (yes, that's meant to sound sarcastic).

Ghost works at the partition level. A drive reports it's size in sectors. This is basically a lower (or closer to the hardware) level.

All they do is move partitions around. But the drive will keep reporting the same number of sectors. Where do the extra sectors come from?

Why don't these people run an IDE identify program on those harddrives. They'll see that the drive still reports the original number of sectors. Exactly the same amount of sectors you can get to through /dev/hda.

It's true that some OSs don't create the most ideal partitions so you lose _some_ sectors but nothing in the order of magnitude described though.

Initially I thought maybe they where using the extra error-detection/recovery bytes that each sector has (which would be a very stupid idea), but that would never give you that much increase.

Or that they were removing some factory/OEM predefined partition, which is basically the only relatively safe thing you can do to reclaim some disk space. Again, not the same order of magnitude, plus you'd never go over the size that the disk is sold as.

inq

I might note that it is the inquirer, not the register. Some editors might take offense ;)

Andre Hedrick

The old Linux IDE guy spoke of something like this a while back. Apparently the drive vendors got sick of stocking every drive model for warranty replacement, and implemented a scheme where they could "flash" a generic drive with a specific model number and capacity. Therefore it's possible that your "120GB" drive is really qualified for 160GB but was set that way for inventory reasons.

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.)

Everybody that tries this

Be sure to use similarly advanced techniques to "defraggle [datadocktorn.nu]" your hard drive.

I thought this was going to be helpfull

I saw the article title and I was very excited. I've bought many hard drives, and just recently I bought a 160 gig drive (was like $80 too after a mail in rebate, Fry's I love you...) and was about to buy a 250 ($110 after rebate, Fry's, still love you.) But then I figured, well if I do buy the 250, it's going to be able to hold around 200 gigs, and for some reason 50 gigs will be gone without a trace. I think there's 30 gigs missing on my 160 too, I've noticed this on a lot of drives (as drive sizes go up, so does the missing space.)

I thought this would actually let you use up that lost space somehow, you did buy the drive, it should contain the space, but it doesn't. RAM is just the opposite, you buy 512, it has 560 or so, well any ram I bought did. Anyway, is their a way to recover this lost space? Is their something I'm doing wrong? It seems to be worse in linux (but I heard that's cause it reserves space for root to access.)

damn i hope you are kidding

but in case you are not:

HD are sold in GB with GB "defined" as 1,000,000,000 bytes, which is ~7.4% less than a real GB (2^30 bytes). After formatting, (depending on your FS) a extra few percent goes away for your file table, sector marker, directory structure, etc. so in real GB (in units of 2^30 bytes), it'll be a lot less than 160, or whatever your "bought" size.

Don't expect to recover those.

RAM is sold with truthful advertising. 128MB = 128*2^20 bytes, which is like 134,217,728 bytes - despite the 134, it's still 128MB.

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

Really?

Personally I thought that the people who sugessted "Mebi" were taken out back and given a good kicking, and the rest of us sane people who understood the word context continued using mega knowing that we meant 1024 when refering to computers.

We also realised that the hard disk manufacturers would continue to use out of context numbers but feel that they may one day have to change due to the ever inceasing discrepency making them look stupid.

But maybe that's just me?

It might SHOW that it's more

But really, has anyone ran over the data with a bunch of unique files to see if it's not just sharing tables and writing over itself on the respected sides?

I'm suprised

I'm suprised with all the comments from people who DON'T want to try it out. This is SLASHDOT! Come on don't we all have dozens of 512MB hard drives? Or even some old 10 gig drive that you found in some computer while you were dumpster diving?

OK, I think I figured it out!!!

The guy who wrote this article is definately the same guy who is sending the "add 3 inches to your hard disk" SPAM.

Gigabytes Song

(A.K.A The Song of Failing Disks)

Ten little gigabytes, waiting on line
one caught a virus, then there were nine.

Nine little gigabytes, holding just the date,
someone jammed a write protect, then there were eight.

Eight little gigabytes, should have been eleven,
then they cut the budget, now there are seven.

Seven little gigabytes, involved in mathematics
stored an even larger prime, now there are six.

Six little gigabytes, working like a hive,
one died of overwork, now there are five.

Five little gigabytes, trying to add more
plugged in the wrong lead, now there are four.

Four little gigabytes, failing frequently,
one used for spare parts, now there are three.

Three little gigabytes, have too much to do
service man on holiday, now there are two.

Two little gigabytes, badly overrun,
took the work elsewhere, now just need one.

One little gigabyte, systems far too small
shut the whole thing down, now there's none at all.

It works!!!!

I j5st tried thiJ out wi_* my MAXTOR 80YB 7&00 RPM hard dFDve. It's ju7t amazifg; it says that I have over 200 GB unfoFGatted, with almosF 190 GB for3atted. I'm sure that the risks are all overstated. Who needs Gga3 for error correcGion and bad blocks, or whatever. It's just paranoia. If you want mor6 stFrage space, go try this out right sgrGREG][2fFS3g4

Don't believe them

I'm here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.

Re:Modder

Case modder - okay
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.

It works, but be careful

I've done something similer in the past with a 40GB drive. I managed to get 67GB out of it. Worked fine and all the space was usable. The only problem was bad sectors, after only 2 weeks I had 15% of the dirve unusable, and after a month I couldn't even accsess it. So while it dose work it will quickly devistate the life expectince of the drive.

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 :)

This is just the kind of article...

... that makes me want an article moderation capabilities to slashdot. I mean, how great would've it been to avoid seeing this at all because it had gotten (Score: -1, bullshit).

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)

Great.....

Great......now I can expect spam that reads:

Increase your harddrive size by 150mb! Women don't like men with small harddrives. Trustmeeee and click this blind link and giveme your CCnfo and I promise thisvkpj&$(*)#Hf89h0eq2987y

article summary

Ok.. so what you do is you heat up your soldering iron and you burn a small hole in the corner of the disk. This will cause the bios to detect massive amounts of free disk space. and best of all... it is completely reliable storage!

How to do this in Linux

mkfs.ext2 /dev/hdb1
mkdir /mnt1
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt1
mkdir /mnt2
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt2

Tada! now when you `df` you'll have twice as much total space!