• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

double ur hardrive space for free!(honestly, not spam)

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.
It's been posted before, but I cannot find it. What happens is your data gets corrupted when you write data to both partitions.
 
this doesn't really work.. what ends up happening is you overwrite your old data eventually. Its completely bogus, and should not be done unless you want data loss.
 
That looked a little complicated, but if I followed it word for word then i could probably get it. I am going to try it later.
 
Previous findings on the subject

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=278490


Looks to good to be true

bchur83 wrote
Well with some more investigation, my original partition is completely corrupted, and I now cant access it. The second partition is still good, but only because the data going to it was overwriting the first partition. Like those letters said, there is some space that is just sitting there unused, but not enough to almost double your space.
 
Last edited:
nicknomo said:
this doesn't really work.. what ends up happening is you overwrite your old data eventually. Its completely bogus, and should not be done unless you want data loss.
Beat me to it :p People have tried and it doesnt work
 
hmmm, worst come to worst I'd just hafta format it all, right? I mean from the explanation you guys post all that happens is ghost creates a illusion of a drive, 'n thats where we get this "doubling" of space, but if so I'd expect the exact same space to show up
 
Listen, lets put an end to this thread please, before someone toasts their data.

There isn't really much "free space" not allocated on the drives.

THERE IS A PHYSICAL DIFFERENCE between a 120GB hard drive and a 250GB hard drive.. namely the number of platters. Platters are big round discs (which look like the inside of a floppy disk... only much much harder). Now unless you find a way to make the platters perform mitosis, you are stuck with your given amount of storage space.

All this little trick does is make two logical drives that overlap the same space. It looks like there are two drives, but there is not a single byte of extra space gained.

DO NOT implement this, or you will be stuck reformatting and losing all of your data..
 
I'm ordering a spare 250 SATA drive, I'm gunna do the trick and load it with data to test it out. following the above posters advice, I'd wait for my results before you make any decisions
 
your not the first to try it its a bogus thing and all it does is lie to you. if you want to go ahead and deal with all that hassle if it dont work right u go right ahead
 
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


So its like the dead cache on cpu's that might be re-enabled..you dont want to enable it cause it will kill your cpu.
 
Yeah, I've screwed around a lot with partition tables in the past and ended up with overlapping partitions.

I swear we used to have a sticky about firmware flashing HDDs though to get 40G from 30, 20 from 15, 80 from 60, where the "odd" sized drives that didn't fit with known platter sizes had some capacity disabled. It was mostly only a quarter extra though, nothing like double.

Also I have encountered drives that appear to have part of thier firmware in the protected areas of the disk. I had a "REAL" low level formatter once, and I managed to format a 110Mb IDE drive to 160Mb, however I knew the extra space was likely to be dodgy, and I kept all my important stuff below 110Mb and had a 50Mb partition in the extra area, that had a lot of bad sectors, about 10%. I don't think it hit the bad sector remapping area, it was just faulty area of the disk. If I scanned it twice a week it was semi-reliable and wasn't overwriting any of the other partitions. I think the areas reserved for bad sector remapping are less than 5% of total capacity or so.

As far as OEMs using reserved partitions goes. I've seen very well hidden partitions, that MS FDisk didn't pick up, but hiding stuff from MS Fdisk is only about as hard as hiding a penny from a retarded midget. Linux Fdisk can see them of course, and they come out of the rated capacity of the drive. However, OEMs might sell you a PC with "30G HDD" and have a "real" 40G in it, so you don't get ****y about not having the drive space you paid for.

I was messing with a compaq that belonged to a buddy once over, it had some severe issues, and I decided to zero fill (fake LLF) the drive, and as soon as we did, ooops, 10Mb more capacity and we can't get into setup. I had only had the dos Fdisk to play with at that point or I might have had the sense to check for hidden partitions.

Anyhoo, nothing new under the sun with messed up partition tables and OEM hidden partitions, but it would be nice to see some reliable info on firmware hacking on odd capacity sizes.

Road Warrior
 
Back