[PhilGURU]

Article at theinquirer.net
I would have guessed in some varience in manufacturing but this much?

"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"

[casa]

That means the manufacturers (WD) deliberately
sells a 500GiBY HDD as a 200GiBy ; )

Sounds too good to be true...

/casa

[rfarris]

Hmpf. Is it April already?

-- Rick

[Laglorden2]

Sounds like they manage to get the computer to think it has two partitions the same size as the whole drive. Maybe it will work... for a while until you actually try use it...

[jeremymacmull]

have u got this if yes can u actually store 30 gb on the 20 gb hdd etc (as in actually 30 GB of files not what windows tells u )

and when u copy them off that recovered hdd do they still work

JEREMY

[rfarris]

jeremymacmull, on Mar 9 2004, 12:43 PM, said:

have u got this if yes can u actually store 30 gb on the 20 gb hdd etc (as in actually 30 GB of files not what windows tells u )

and when u copy them off that recovered hdd do they still work

JEREMY

You go try it and report back!

-- Rick

[PhilGURU]

I will try and track down Ghost 2003 Build 2003.775 (if it exists) and give it a try. I know my laptop drive has all recovery software on a hidden partition but 2X increase is well, I think, optimistic.


"* UPDATE Does this work? We're not going to try it on our own machine thank you very much. Instead, we're waiting for a call from a hard drive company so we can get its take on these claims."




-Philip

[rfarris]

Think about it. Did areal density double last night? Are they really putting 200GB on a platter today? No. Physical impossibility.

So either the whole thing is a hoax, or, more likely, the OS is looking at a damaged drive (damaged partition table, at least) and seeing the same partition in multiple ways. Try to write on that shiny new partition and you'll be overwriting data on the old one. Guaranteed.

-- Rick

[FaaR]

I can't possibly see how this would work. They're reporting a (more than?) 2x size increase on the largest harddrive they alledgedly did this trick on.

If it works at all, all it really accomplishes is trick windows into thinking the partition really is bigger than it is. There's NO WAY it could get any bigger in reality, since drive capacity is based on the number of sectors the drive reports to the computer, and that is a fixed, hard-coded number that can't be changed by Norton Ghost or any other utility. If you try to address sector maxcapacity+1, you'll just get an error message back from the drive, it won't actually do anything.

This is just a case of someone making sh** up in order to appear on the front page of hardware websites... A bit like participating in a 'reality show' on TV.

[zetto]

Well, it's not gonna hurt to try it, won't it? I mean everyone has some old throw-away HDs that you can experiment with.