A Miracle Or A Hoax??

OfflerCrocGod

Read this Article here on the Inquirer first, once you have read it can someone verify this?, it looks too good to be true 200GB -> 510GB:eek:. Surely its just a trick that Ghost plays why would HDD drive makers pack drives with that much space and NOT use it all??. Why a specific Ghost version only?, has anyone actually tried/heard of this before I could change my drive from a 120GB drive to 160/170GB:eek:. This whole thing stinks to me it just cant be for real - if anyone knows what is going on here please post - my theory is that Ghost is just making a false partition which doesn't actually have any real physical space and these guys just believe that this virtual partition is real.

Mutant_Fruit

Argh, you beat me to it. I was just going to post that here.

Even if it is true, there has to be a reason for having this unused disc area. i thought that most drives contained a spare platter (or just extra "unused" space) that was used to seemlessly replace bad sectors in the "working" platters. Could that be this mysterious "wasted" space?

Someone try this on an old drive. Let us know if it works.

OfflerCrocGod

OK there have been quite a few replies to that article on the Inquirer.net the one that really struck me as being the possible answer is this one:

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

The other replies are here and one person said what I said but everyone seems to agree that its not an actual way of getting something for nothing:(, oh well I'll just grab a 300GB HDD from komplett then .

Mutant_Fruit

yeah, i was definately thinking that you couldn;t get something for nothing. and it looks like i was right in my thinking.

Now, to pass this along to ppl i know....

unkel

This dude's post is probably the nearest to the truth:

Hi,

I'm writing regarding the "unused space on hard drives recovered?" article at http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14597. As a frequent user of Ghost, both for work and personal machines, it is quite obvious all this method is doing is corrupting the discs' partition tables.

I'd be curious to know if the person who sent you this ever tried to FILL all partitions of the disc and then verify the data is usable. Basically, you're corrupting the hard drive's information that says its size and telling the computer it's larger-- it will definitely APPEAR that you mysteriously have tons of new space, but it WILL cause corruption and data loss.

I think at the very least you should put even more caveats on that story, before some punter comes by and wipes out all his important data by copying it to his new super-huge-hard drive.

There IS "lost space" on modern hard drives-- they do major amounts of error correction, data redundancies, etc. However, you're not talking anywhere near 50% of space lost. And even if you were-- is losing all error control worth a bit of extra space when you can pick up another 120GB drive for under $80US??

Justin Scott