[casa]

Good suggestion, zetto...

Tell us how it went later ; )

/casa

[PhilGURU]

feature of ghost

This seems to be a "feature" of that version of ghost to corrupt disk size info.

[mrybczyn]

who needs ghost? I hear that by using the "Format" or "mkfs" command, one can get up to 300GB of free space on one's disk!

[Gilbo]

mrybczyn,

Quote

I hear that by using the "Format" or "mkfs" command, one can get up to 300GB of free space on one's disk!

You're joking right?

On the subject of the Inquirer article.

The 200JB, or BB or whatever is clearly impossible. There is no hidden space on them to recover at all, let alone 310GB! I can't imagine what kind of idiocy provoked someone to believe that was even possible. Western Digital doesn't make drives with more than 3 platters! The 200GB Western Digitals are only available with 80GB/platters. They only have 5 heads. It's therfore impossible to recover any capacity from them at all (5*40GB=200GB).

Some of the other drives are known to short stroke their platters. This raises the more serious problem of this idiocy... The problem is modern drives store important information on those hidden inner areas of their platters (firmware, disk information, reallocated bad sectors), who knows what you could be overwriting whenever you use that space. Put something down in the wrong place and the drive will never start again or corrupt data at certain sectors. It's a lottery ticket everytime you write data in that partition. That's not what I call useable capacity.

Do well.
Jonathan Guilbault.

[Gilbo]

Also, if this was working properly, the 80GB deskstar would yield:

either 90GB (+10GB) if it was a 180GXP (three heads on 60GB platters)
or 80GB (+0GB) if it was a 7K250 (2 heads on 80GB platters)

Anyone with most basic knowledge of hard drives should know that most of the numbers up there are simply impossible, not to mention simply ridiculous.

It's not that there aren't hard drives which are short stroked and sold at a capacity below that available for access in theory, but that something is clearly wrong with this method in that it is simply inventing space that physically can't be there. Perhaps hard drive manufacturers are shortstroking disks to the point that they are formatted with the capacity of drives with fewer platters or heads, but this could never justify the failure of this method on the 200GB Western Digital drive. This drive is a known quantity. No matter what, even if they got a disk that was a shortstroked 6 head drive (which would make no sense), the maximum capacity is 250GB, not 510GB. You would need 7 platters to get that capacity with todays technology!

Do well.
Jonathan Guilbault.

[PhilGURU]

From site "** UPDATE II 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"."

Ok there is an extra 10GB max maybe.

[blakerwry]

yes, but there is a major difference between that statement and what the authors of the article are claiming.


many OEMs put recovery partitions on HDDs.. these partitions are plainly visible from fdisk or disk management.


what the article is claiming is that the HDDS come with some sort of partition on them... FALSE. New hdds are usually unpartitioned in my experience.

It is also claiming that not only is the drive partitioned, but there are hidden partitions on the drive that can only be unlocked with a specific version of ghost. AGAIN FALSE. see reasons above


Another important factor is that they claim the ability to double your disk size... FALSE. Their claims go beyond what is possible. You can't fit 1 gallon of watter in a 1 quart container.

[ericg]

I think I know what's happening. You can take a 3GB disk, and create the following parts with a disk editor:

• 3GB starting at 0GB
  
• 2GB starting at 1GB
  
• 1GB starting at 2GB

You will appear to have 6GB total. You can format these, and put up to 1GB files on each without data running into the next partition. After that, you trash the next part.

[shoemakc]

Yep, you can basicly make partition tables say anything you want. Partitioning utilites check the numbers during partitioning to make sure they are in fact same. I've seen some wacky partition tables on corrupted disks, and I imagine if you had the guts to muck about with the partition table yourself you could create even crazier ones.

On a semi-related note, I also remember back in the Stacker days you could set a "estimated compression ratio" for a compressed volume. If you set it to something crazy and completely unrealisic, you could get it to report that your 100MB drive was in fact 2.1GB :-) Of course, as items were added and the disk filled, it would ajust the estimated remaining disk space accordingly until by the time was full you'd be getting something around 1.7:1.

-Chris

[Mercutio]

I don't normally post on SR, but I tried it and it appears to work.

Read more here.

I haven't found a way to verify anything yet.