discover free extra gigs on your hard drive!

[wquiles]

Even if not true, it was a fun read

 

[JigPu]

I would NOT try this on a drive that is new. Doing this will void your warranty, and could kill the drive. and YES maxtor/wd can see what you done, and im sure they wouldnt rma your drive if they knew.

If all you're doing is screwing up the partition table, how in the world would that void your warntee? My warntee isn't voided by partitioning weird portions of my drive, and this I'd say is a VERY weird portion (since it's the same portion ). The warntee is also not voided by screwing up the partition tables manually. However, neither are covered reasons for returning the drive if you can't fix it yourself

This is 100% software. It dosen't modify the firmware, it dosen't (..well, as far as we know) make the heads move any further, and does no physical damage to the drive. Everything you did could be wiped out by either erasing/rewriting the partition table, or simply zeroing the drive.

JigPu

 

[blackjackel]

Well, if you do screw your drive up and wanna RMA, just pass a really strong magnet over it and they'll never know what happned

 

[ThePerfectCore]

And the drives aren't permanently screwed up, btw. Just write zeros or do a block fill with WinHex (if you have the full version, that is).

 

[electromagnetic]

It's amazing what you can accomplish with a buggy build of Norton Ghost. This just proves that Partition Magic is better. Seriously, this thing makes me laugh and I seriously doubt this is the last time we'll hear it. Any bad piece of software could potentially report false drive geometry. And that's all this is really. And BTW, the hard drive manufacturer they got that statement from is talking about something else, a UNIX formatted partition that pc makers like Dell use to hide a partition containing an image of the initial build. They've been doing this for 10 years.

If you have a disc that has extra space on it, the way to go about retrieving that space would be to change the disc geometry in the BIOS, that's the ONLY way. And what manufacturer in their right mind is gonna ship a 20 GB drive that actually has 60 GB, come on! That would be fraud, because that would mean there is some physical PROBLEM with the extra space, why else would they hide it?

 

[I.M.O.G.]

There was mention of some disks that are shipped formatted without the full space partitioned... Something about recovery space left unallocated. That was where the alleged comment from "micro" came from I thought, and might still be true. The vast majority of drives however are shipped unformatted.

I didn't read that closely, so I might be off base on that, but that was my understanding.

 

[NoteUser]

I just realized that Partiton Magic 8 Pro isn't 100%

It tells me 228 but the C: properties says 223.

What gives Ohwell, still in the 90%

 

[ToiletDuck]

I got 155bg out of a Seagate 111.7 GB drive. And around 113GB out of 60GB. No time for test yet. I'm resetting up my system to try it out. I'll make a full review of the process I used to do this when I return.

Duck

 

[DaWiper]

I just realized that Partiton Magic 8 Pro isn't 100%

It tells me 228 but the C: properties says 223.

What gives Ohwell, still in the 90%

Example:
When installing a 128MB stick of ram. Your computer tells you that you have 131MB(right after post).

Same stuff goes for hd's too. It all depends on how you calculate it. In other words... 1 KB as 1000 Bytes or as 1024bytes.

If you multiply 223 with 1,024 you get 228...

(edit:The filesystem knows that 1KB is 1024 Bytes)

 

[electromagnetic]

I got 155bg out of a Seagate 111.7 GB drive. And around 113GB out of 60GB. No time for test yet. I'm resetting up my system to try it out. I'll make a full review of the process I used to do this when I return.

Duck

It's just too bad your drives aren't really that big, huh?

 

[ToiletDuck]

What do you mean that big? I have a 60Gb western digital and 3x120GB harddrives. There didn't seem to be any problem with them working. But then again I didn't go and fill them up all the way. I don't believe some of the letters where they say it is just opening up it's own image. First of all no image is created. Secondly cd disk do the same thing. You can dissable the protected space on a CD and put 900MB on it. It doesn't mean that the protected space it bad or corrupt so they limit it. It just means that the disk uses that are. Kinda like a swap drive. Knoppix can put 2gb of programs onto one disk. When you go to use them the programs have to be opened up. Think of that when you think of harddisk kinda. It could be possible for the disk to need that buffer area. I find it hard to believe that all the sudden every sector past a certain point is corrupt. And that every drive has it corrupt at that same exact point. I have 3x120's and they all show the same exact size. Are you telling me all 3 of them are corrupt past the 111.7GB area? I think it comes down to marketing a lot as well. I'm going to run some test on them later.

 

[Vio1]

how do you fit 900mb onto a cd?

 

[zachj]

I'm interested in fitting 900MB on a CD as well . . . gotta' back some stuff up . . .


On topic, I'd say that until somebody proves it DOES work, it's safe to assume it doesn't. It might well work a little bit, but people are still going to have to prove it. Do the mod, fill up the old partition, then start adding a few GB to the new one and make sure the old partition still works. If it actually works, then all you need to do is find the overlap, which hopefull happens toward the end of the new partition, not at the beginning, or it won't work no matter what.

Z

 

[electromagnetic]

Are you telling me all 3 of them are corrupt past the 111.7GB area?

No. I'm telling you that your drives are not bigger than 111.7GB. Your operating system is telling you that your drive is bigger than that because it's using a false partition table. You'll eventually overwrite data on your drive.

 

[the-one1]

The folks over at HardOcp found out that it doesnt work. . Would have been nice if it worked.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Exactly electromagnetic. That is what the people at storage review forums are saying, and they are pretty much the experts when it comes to storage stuff. You can see exactly how they explain it in my earlier link.

[offtopic]
Certain CD writers can burn 900MBs on a single CD, but I don't believe this is a capability of all writers and programs or discs.

I do not believe that this is because a portion of regular CD's is not used, I believe the actual method used to write the CD's is different or the media is special and hence what you end up with is a 900MB CD that can only be read in certain CD drives (like the one that made it).

Not so sure on that either but I think that is what I remember from looking into it in the past. NTM if you look on a disc after you finish burning 700 MB worth of data, you can see that the entire disc is physically burned... I believe that anything beyond that can only be done and read by certain burners through a special method.

Here is a link on overburning and reading with special media and a plextor drive:

http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/104/11
[/off topic]

 

[ToiletDuck]

True that not all CD burners and not all CD media can go that high. Bit Some can do it and they do it because there is a protected area on a disk. So when you scratch the disk or something like that it can still work. www.doom9.org has some articles on it.

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".

operating system is telling you that your drive is bigger than that because it's using a false partition table

What are you basing this on, other people's post or have you tried it? Is my operating system making up a random number for harddrive space? To double check I booted from CD as if I was going to install windows and it noticed the partition from blue screen. I'ev heard of others getting it to work. I've also heard rumors that random information is stored there and that is how FBI investigators find out what you have been doing even if you do erase your harddrive.

Why would my operating system see an extra 40GB on a 120gb drive and an extra 57GB on a 55gb drive? Seems a little randomized don't you think? I've been in fry's and seen a 540GB harddrive. It could have been a harddrive that we could buy except made with exceptional quality so they enabled that partition.

 

[electromagnetic]

I've also heard rumors that random information is stored there and that is how FBI investigators find out what you have been doing even if you do erase your harddrive.

Rumor is apparently what started this thing. The FBI would be able to get data off your drive even if you wrote all 0's to it several times over.

 

[electromagnetic]

I would like to buy a 540 GB hard drive, please send me a link. 2 drives glued together doesn't count.

 

[VaTechHokies]

I've also heard rumors that random information is stored there and that is how FBI investigators find out what you have been doing even if you do erase your harddrive.

I've taken a few forensics classes taught by people that do work for the FBI (I'm actually right across the street from the headquarters right now ) , and I hate to break it to you, but there is no magic involved when hard drives are seized for evidence. There are special programs that take images of the hard drive (kind of like Ghost or Drive Image) that allow the technician to look at every single bit on that hard drive. The reason that data can be read after you delete it is because you are actually only deleting the pointer to the memory location, not the actual data. With that being said, when a low level format is done, data can still be recovered up to a point by doing a more thorough examination. If enough low level formats are done (approximately 7) the data is essentially unrecoverable.

There is some additional space on hard drives that your OS will not see--but it is usually an insignificant amount (not multiple gigabytes).