Get more from your hard disk!

From /.

'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.'

Full article on The Inquirer here

No concrete proof here of said recovered space (and I don't own enough hdds that I can risk getting screwed) so if someone if brave enough to try it, post some results!

[Admins - if this would be better in hardware & oc, please move it ]

 

Sounds like a neat party trick! Like to see more proof, although I don't think i'll be rushing, reliability is more of a concern than space for me personally, but for the so-dense-crew who are aiming for the golden Tibbibyte it sounds great.

 

I read the updated on the article, apparently the "trick" is simply writing currupt partition tables, and there is no actual physical spot for your data to sit (Or the paritions are writting to the same spot on the disk)

I would be interested though in a program that can do a low-level format of a harddrive and re-claim some of the extra chunks on the disk.

 

Dang man... I might give this a shot sometime with some spares I have at work.

 

It looks like its more or less a mirror-image of your current partition. When you write data to one of the partitions, you're also writing it to the other one, because it IS the other partition, just the drives been tricked in thinking its a whole new area of space, which simply destroys itself more and more as you put stuff on it.

Or so thats how I understand it.

 

Worth screwing up a 200gb drive though?

 

Will try it on smaller drives 1st

 

Looks like people are trying it out and finding out it's not what it's made out to be: link

Apparently he said that people on some of the forums around are finding the same things. I have no doubt there is extra space on hard drives...and even that manufacturers may lower rated capacities based on quality testing. But I don't believe that trick actually works.

 

Manufacturers probably change the rated sizes to be smaller through quality checks because it won't be any good: it probably ends up being destroyed every 5 weeks or something, so they declare it unusable and change the firmware to ensure no-one uses it and moans about data security.

 

actually I think this has possibilities if you think of profit margins and what not

but I DO have some spare 200gig drives sitting around after I get done with research I am going to be testing this tonight and see what results are and how reliable it can be....


/me has never been this motivated in a long time hehehehe

 

sweet doubled the amount of the 200 gig now time for the fun testing part

lets take bets who thinks it will work or not

 

Ive read the article but was just wondering if there was any danger of the drive breaking (hardware) rather than data loss?

 

I have done a lot of research and so far the only borked hardware was the already unstable HDD's that couldn't do jack already

but dang its going to take a bit to fill both 186GB on this drive I think I will finish it after I get some sleep

 

ok I did a small test of a few file upon each drive and here are my results......


the same set of file cept one had a bunch of mp3's on it I proceded to restart and see if chkdisk pops up with any errors upon boots

needless to say it did it found orphan files and proceded to delete them but then it also recovered other orphan files I know that it recoved parts from both drives cause as I logged back in Windows saw both partitions.

I proceded to test out a few for the files and found that some progs didn't work might be due to the copying process but other files upon both partitions worked.

now I am tempted to say that it might have over-written parts on the first partition when I was copying from the seperet HDD but I will test out a full fill of the drive after I sleep a good 12 hours.

Otherwise it is looking a bit grim that we can increase the size without messing around with the firmware (which is already to hard to get at).

.me crosses fingures and hopes for the best

EDIT:
if some one else can host this for the time being go ahead, just hope you can get it when it is not over the limit

http://us.share.geocities.com/Smog6984/untitled.bmp

 

This writes a false partition table. You're not getting "hidden" space, you're tricking your operating system into thinking theres more space. When writing to one partition, it will overwrite data in another partition. Do not do this.

There is a small amount of space on an HDD thats reserved, but no where near the sizes this article speaks of. You can get this space back, although I wouldn't suggest it as it's used for repairs and the like.

If you decide to do this to your drive you better know how to fix your partition table or be prepared to take the loss.

 

Was getting excited by this, but now looks like a failure I may try on a couple of old drives to c how it goes ne way

 

okay, I can see this wont work as the original article suggests, but I assume it is possible to access a few mB of 'hidden' space then? It appears (correct me if im wrong) that this is what Ghost does. Does anyone know how much space this actually is, and how one would go about accessing it reliably?
I'm thinking something along the lines of making a bootdisc which would make this small (say 20mB) hidden partition appear and disappear as required - could be v. useful for security etc.

 

well interesting thing poped up the second partition lost its NTFS file system when I just checked it and then I tried to do windows disk defrag and the second "Hidden" partuion scaned just fine but the original partition could not be scanned.

Although I think I know why this "hidden" space is coming up. When you run ghost what it is doing as it reads every bit of data it copies and deletes the old data but it gets put on the hidden partition which then at the end will be relabeled as the original. So in essense this has no way of staying a stable drive if you preform this procdure.

so it's debunked period

now since I like "Mythbusters" I feel the need to blow this drive up in fire and smoke.....

 

send the 200gig drive to me thx, i need an upgrade from my 30gig hehe

 

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?p=562013#post562013