Unused space on hard drives recovered?

[TechZ]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14597

[confus-ed]

Regarding article "Unused space on hard drives recovered?" at this URL.

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.

They use the same platters but 'bigger models' have better head control, so you 'might' using this method get some extra space, but how reliable ? you could test it I guess but by the time you've decided for sure, you might as well have paid the $20 extra (or whatever) for the next size up !

So its true even though its on the Inquirer !

[Archer]

i suppose its a bit like upgrading your Liteon CD/DVD writer firmware to the next model it might work but then again...........

[imagoon]

This was proven to be a farse. Ghost was just makeing a virtual partition in the empty space of another partition, causing excess data to over write the valid data on the first partition.

~Chris

[confus-ed]

This was proven to be a farse. Ghost was just makeing a virtual partition in the empty space of another partition, causing excess data to over write the valid data on the first partition.

~Chris

Go on then, lets be having a link - I know for a fact that they use exactly the same platters in different model drives & the 'difference' is head control (no links on that, but personal experience!)- so even if ghost does what you say ... then the original idea about getting at 'spare' capacity still holds water - like I said how accurately you can write & retrieve that data is another matter, a platter with 'whatever' capacity is only as 'readable' as the heads let it be

[imagoon]

Go on then, lets be having a link - I know for a fact that they use exactly the same platters in different model drives & the 'difference' is head control (no links on that, but personal experience!)- so even if ghost does what you say ... then the original idea about getting at 'spare' capacity still holds water - like I said how accurately you can write & retrieve that data is another matter, a platter with 'whatever' capacity is only as 'readable' as the heads let it be

Poof!!

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?threadid=739701

The problems are listed near the middle to the end. As the fake (new) partition was created it would eventually crash windows and corrupt the main partition because the files in the second one would be written right over the first. Now the real question is.... does anyone see the potential for a very damaging virus here......

~Chris

[confus-ed]

Poof!!

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?threadid=739701

Man there's eight pages ! I shall just believe you they seemed real undecided with some folks reporting it worked others not (in the brief skim I did)... I dunno whether the ghost method does or doesn't 'work' - I can say if you dreamt up a way to specify the usable disk space 'different' from the standard geometry fixed in the drives firmware, then since certain model disks all use exactly the same size platters then you might get some 'extra' if you can get the heads to locate accurate enough ..