#208611 - 09/03/2004 17:17
expanding hard drives with ghost?
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new poster
Registered: 04/01/2004
Posts: 14
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interesting article here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14597
they are uncovering hidden partions and increasing available space on a drive 50-100%. This has huge implications for the empeg! I dont know if it would work with ext2 partitions, or only windows partitions.
thoughts?
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#208612 - 09/03/2004 17:39
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: jerryfreak2]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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Interesting results to date:
Western Digital 200GB SATA
Yield after recovery: 510GB of space
IBM Deskstar 80GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 150GB of space
Maxtor 40GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 80GB
Seagate 20GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 30GB
Unknown laptop 80GB HDD
Yield: 120GB
Complete bollocks, clearly. I can just about conceive a drive manufacter shipping a 30GG drive, fixed to look like a 20GB drive (afterall that is how processor speeds work), but a SATA 510GB disk from 200GB ?
Edited by andy (09/03/2004 17:49)
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#208613 - 09/03/2004 18:01
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: andy]
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enthusiast
Registered: 09/06/2003
Posts: 297
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200GB->510GB of space?
Ain't no such drive (yet).
-brendan
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#208614 - 09/03/2004 18:24
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: jerryfreak2]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31600
Loc: Seattle, WA
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/me checks Calendar...
Nope, still a few weeks until April.
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#208615 - 09/03/2004 19:12
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: tfabris]
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enthusiast
Registered: 18/01/2002
Posts: 234
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What this does is creates a phantom partition. So it LOOKS like you do have that much space. However, both partitions are common so as you fill one up, it overwrites the other.
I cant believe people actually thought this was true..
/me shakes head
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#208616 - 10/03/2004 11:39
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: jerryfreak2]
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addict
Registered: 11/01/2001
Posts: 579
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While is it true there are a few extra cylinders/sectors on a drive to account for bad ones and a LOW LEVEL format with the right tools could allow you to access them the most you could gain is 2% to 5%, I used to do this with SCSI drives back in the day but this report is nothing by MULE FRITTERS, you want more space buy a bigger drive.. don't believe everything you read, if that was true I would be a 6'11 220 pound blonde hair blue eyed Man with a body like a greek god and Money like bill gates.
Edited by belezeebub (10/03/2004 11:40)
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#208617 - 10/03/2004 16:17
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: belezeebub]
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addict
Registered: 11/01/2001
Posts: 579
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Okay I am scared someone please hold me 
I just caught a hallway meeting between my boss and one of the lead engineers, it seems this article is getting around and a few people in the lab want to try this.
First off some back ground I report to a Supposed Sr. Network Administrator at this little mom and pop chip fab maybe you have heard of it, its called Intel Corporation
To have people on the floor in CV (Customer validation Lab) actually believe this make me very frightened.
Hope they don’t expect me to recover their data after the drive Exploded and sends shards of 1’s and 0’s all over the lab.
Heck maybe I should write an inter office memo and suggest we upgrade all of our systems to use 2’s instead of 1’s and 0’s cause 2’s are bigger and can hold more data.
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Do not meddle in the affairs of Network
Administrators, for they are subtle and quick to
anger.
______________________________________
Worlds Lamest Wb Site (mine)
http://home.comcast.net/~jlipchitz/
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#208618 - 10/03/2004 16:29
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: belezeebub]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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Okay I am scared someone please hold me Scary stuff indeed, but I suggest sitting well back, as such idiocy brings its own reward in the shape of the severe cluebatting their systems will undergo if they try running with overlapping partitions. Boot knoppix, take two "fdisk -l /dev/hda", and come back next week if you aren't dead.
Peter
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#208619 - 10/03/2004 16:35
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: peter]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Every one of the computers I administer has overlapping partitions. But that's just because Solaris likes to have slice 2 be the entire disk for management purposes. I suppose since Solaris can have up to eight slices, I could have eight times the disk capacity.
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#208620 - 11/03/2004 08:41
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: belezeebub]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 25/08/2000
Posts: 2413
Loc: NH USA
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A few nights ago I read a great follow up article at The Inquirer explaining & debunking this. It was written by the "Linux SATA guy" (whom I'm guessing Mr. Lord may know). The article is here. Scroll down about halfway to see the article.
-Zeke
Article Text (reprinted with permission):
Unused space on hard drives recovered
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.
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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#208621 - 11/03/2004 11:12
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: Ezekiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31600
Loc: Seattle, WA
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The 120GB hard drive you purchased may have been physically identical to a 250GB hard drive, but simply it only passed qualification at 120GB. I call bullsh it on this one. He's trying to cash in on the same mentality that allows us to overclock CPUs. But hard disks are not CPUs.
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#208622 - 11/03/2004 11:57
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: tfabris]
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Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 08/02/2002
Posts: 3411
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Tony, I'm not sure that you understood that comment. He's saying that it would be a _bad_ idea to try and utilise that space, not that we should 'cash in' on it.
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#208623 - 11/03/2004 12:16
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: genixia]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31600
Loc: Seattle, WA
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I don't care whether he's saying it's positive or negative. I say it's bullshit, period, his basic premise is wrong. You don't rate hard drive capacity the way you rate CPU speed. He's trying to draw an inference that hard disk manufacturing is like CPU manufacturing, and it isn't.
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#208624 - 11/03/2004 12:27
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: tfabris]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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All modern hard drives definitely have sectors marked as bad. I wouldn't guess that it'd be so many as that, but I don't suppose it's impossible. Certainly the bad sector map is dynamically defined at manufacturing time, and I suppose that a drive could conceivably have more sectors bad than it it could havein order to have the remaining space be as big as the drive spec. I would think they would just trash it in that instance, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that they would just call it one size smaller.
I don't think that what he's saying is likely, but it's hardly utter bullshit.
Also, a hard drive sector marked bad is bad, period. A CPU that's not stable at a certain speed can often be made stable at that speed through significant effort put into cooling. There's no amount of effort that's going to make an unusable sector reliable.
But binsorting hard drives seems like a reasonable manufacturing method. After all, all the drives of one model come out with the exact same specs. You know that each of those drives didn't have the exact same number of bad sectors.
Edited by wfaulk (11/03/2004 12:35)
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#208625 - 11/03/2004 12:41
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: tfabris]
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enthusiast
Registered: 09/06/2003
Posts: 297
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> I don't care whether he's saying it's positive or negative.
> I say it's bullshit, period, his basic premise is wrong.
I agree with Tony here: did this Linux SATA guy not notice they made a 510GB drive out of a 200GB one using this procedure? Clearly the procedure being used in this article needs to be debunked BIG TIME. They've f**ked with the partition map plain and simple, and created and invalid map of the drive. If he's so clever, how can he miss commenting on that?
-brendan
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#208626 - 11/03/2004 13:53
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31600
Loc: Seattle, WA
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All modern hard drives definitely have sectors marked as bad. That part of what he's saying is true. I don't dispute that.
I don't think that what he's saying is likely, but it's hardly utter bullshit. What I'm calling BS on is not the fact that bad-sector testing is done. It's his statement that a 120gb drive is the same thing as a 250gb drive that was just rated lower in testing.
Yes, they test the drives for bad sectors and mark them off, but the bad sectors are a miniscule sliver of a fraction of the drive's total capacity. Not 50 percent of the capacity as he implies.
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#208627 - 11/03/2004 14:10
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: tfabris]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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What I'm calling BS on is not the fact that bad-sector testing is done. It's his statement that a 120gb drive is the same thing as a 250gb drive that was just rated lower in testing. For 120Gb vs 250Gb, then yes I'd agree, because in today's technology that's a whole other platter. But it wouldn't surprise me if today's 60Gb drives were 120Gb drives with one of the two heads disabled in firmware. It wouldn't even surprise me if today's 40Gb drives were 120Gb drives with one head disabled and the other short-stroked.
Edit: Mind you, it would surprise me if such measures could be reversed merely by corrupting one's partition table with a bug in Ghost.
Peter
Edited by peter (11/03/2004 14:12)
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#208628 - 11/03/2004 17:20
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: peter]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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I know this has little connection to today's situation, but IBM have in the past had disks that could be doubled in size by a "firmware" upgrade.
My dad has worked on computers since the late 1950s and he remembers the IBM technician turning up to upgrade a "disk pack". Apparently he opened the disk pack, took some wire cutters from his toolkit and snipped a single wire. Instant 100% upgrade in disk space...
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#208629 - 11/03/2004 19:39
Re: expanding hard drives with ghost?
[Re: andy]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 19/09/2002
Posts: 2494
Loc: East Coast, USA
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<kidding around> Instant 100% upgrade in disk space? Maybe if the disk in question was a 720k floppy disk which the technician punched out the upper left hand corner square. ::snap:: Instant 100% upgrade to 1.44 meg!!!
No really, I can kind of agree with peter on grounds of: Maybe it's significantly cheaper to manufacturer a single physical drive and just limit them different ways to create your product line up. When they want to antiquate the 40gig, they could just stop limiting their, lets say 160 gig, to 40. And when they want to make a 180 gig, they could just research and develop a 320 gig and limit that.
<speculation, don't flame too hard> By only manufacturing these two physical drives, the company could: save on production cost, reduce support and RMA complexity, spend more money on R&D to create their NEXT big-step-up drive, still offer a wide selection of capacities, maybe even get a performance gain from short-stroke heads, AND still sell enough to make this all profitable. ::goes off to start a hard drive fabrication plant::
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