Recovering Secret HD Space

An anonymous reader writes "Just browsing hardocp.com and noticed a link to this article. '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.' Could this be true? I'm not about to try with my hard drive." Needless to say, this might be a time to avoid the bleeding edge. (See Jeff Garzik's warning in the letters page linked from the Register article.)

Comments

Uh, no

[Sivar]

Sorry, but this is complete bullshit.
Did aureal density technology increase to 200GB/platter overnight? No.

Please refer to this thread on StorageReview.com for more information.

Re:Uh, no

[Froggert]

No you fool, don't tell them yet! This is all part of my incredibly ingenious plan to get all the script kiddies and spammers in the world to follow these instructions to "enlarge" their three inch hard disks and corrupt all of their data in the process. Nobody remotely knowledgeable about computers would ever believe this, and nobody who knows nothing about computers would possibly attempt to do this. Who does this leave? Yes, the script kiddies and spammers. Now it's back to Plan B, sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.

Re:Uh, no

[Chalybeous]

I'm not techical. Not even remotely knowledgeable about HD sizes and technology. Couldn't tell you what "aureal density" means.
But that article seems pretty suspect to me. I know some OEM PCs have HDs with hidden partitions, but I doubt they'd be half the HD size. Plus unless there's a way to mask partitions from DOS, you could see what was on the HD using, say, fdisk (on a Windows machine - I dunno the Linux equivalent).
I, for one, will not be trying it. I agree with parent in detecting a whiff of bullshit.

Disclaimer: I am not a techie. Please do feel free to correct me on any of the above.

Re:Uh, no

[IamLarryboy]

If this is real which is doubtfull it is probably a marketing trick. The drive manufactures proably make one drive and sell it as 3 different drives in different capacities.

Re:Uh, no

[Sivar]

Couldn't tell you what "aureal density" means.
That's probably because I can't type. You may want to read this reference for " areal " density, though.

Re:Uh, no

[No One's Zero]

I was really hoping for a cool firmware/bios hack to turn on unused platters or something cool... this is utterly dissapointing.

What is truly amazing is that some fool "discovered" this and actually believed he got ghost to double his HD size.

This does not in any way increase the physical disk size... this either overlaps partitions (bad thing) or creates a virtual partition inside the main one (stupid thing).

DONT DO THIS!!!!! (emphatic, not yelling)

Re:Uh, no

[borgasm]

Well thats what they advertise...

There are lots of internal sectors that are reserved for errors. There are builtin algorithms on the disk to diagnose and correct physical errors. You just don't notice them because the disk remaps those sectors transparently.

Hooray! I learned something in class for once!

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

"You get what you pay for"
I doubt that. I think it's more like you get what you believe you will get. If you believe you should pay more, then you will. If you don't, you don't.
You may doubt this, but it is related to one's ability to judge what defines self-fullfillment. Some people know how to fullfill their needs without spending money, others need to spend money to feel fullfillment because they lack an understanding of their goals.
I haven't paid for hardware in a long time because people are so quick to give me their supposedly outdated hardware that I can use in ways they can't even use their brand new overpriced, overheating, electricity guzzling toys.
I seriously doubt that you get what you pay for in computer hardware.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

aureal density? rofl

aureal means golden.

try areal.

Re:Uh, no

[Sivar]

If this is real which is doubtfull it is probably a marketing trick. The drive manufactures proably make one drive and sell it as 3 different drives in different capacities.

Actually, this is exactly what they do. The difference, however, is that the lower-end (smaller) drives are identical except that they come with fewer platters. For example, a 160GB hard drive today likely has two 80GB platters, whereas an 80GB drive probably has one (though different combinations of different sizes are of course used, depending on when the hard drive was manufactured and other factors)

In some cases, a hard drive will be sold with a greater potential capacity than its available capacity. For example, a drive with two 60GB platters may be sold as a 100GB drive, the platters having been "short stroked". This has nothing to do with the absurd technique described in the Inquirer article, and I doubt that it is possible to recover the lost space.
Hard drives are the highest precision mechanical devices that most people have in their home--moreso than processors, high-end printer heads, or toasters. They are not something that you want to physically modify.

See the following highly informative and interesting (if you are a geek) posts by a Maxtor engineer:
Here
here
and here

Re:Uh, no

[DrSkwid]

fdisk (on a Windows machine - I dunno the Linux equivalent).

er, fdisk

Re:Uh, no

[Luguber123]

I suppose it's possible to pack more information into the outer cylinders of a harddrive, since the data density of the outer cylinder is much lower.
The outer cylinder is a much longer 'track' than the inner cylinder but still a conventional harddrive stores the same amount of data in all cylinders.
If you calculate how much more data that is teoretically possible to pack into the increasingly longer tracks, then I suppose you will end up with numbers like the ones suggested in the article.

Re:Uh, no

[Sivar]

This is true, but there certainly aren't several GB of sectors reserved for errors. :)

Re:Uh, no

[tap]

Couldn't tell you what "aureal density" means.

"Aureal density" is a misspelling of "areal density". Areal means relating to area. In other words, the bits per square inch of the hard drive platters.

Re:Uh, no

[antic]

I initially misread your post as "enlarge their three inch hard dicks". From the crap that my mail server blocks, the spammers have been trying to enlarge their three inch hard dicks for a long time...

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it works.. I just tried it and it seems to b##0"#,##0;\-""#,##0 ""#,##0.00;\-""#,##0.00# ,##0.00;]\-""#,##0.005 * ,##0.00;]\-""#,##0.005 * ,##0.00;]\-""#,##0.005 *

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, and I thought it was rather significant that the parent (or grandparent? if forger) made this comment. This is a rather idiotic thing to try. I would admonish further usage of this article unless they change the article to expressly state that this is in fact utter B.S.

BUSH 04!

Re:Uh, no

[Chalybeous]

See, if I was a techie, I'd've picked that up (the gaffe, I mean - "areal", I could've figured out). Instead, I didn't know it til two people put it down correctly.
I was pretty off-base anyway, guessing that "aureal" was to do with magnetic fields, kinda like the "aurora borealis". Which was probably pretty close to wrong. (Latin was never my strong suit, and I don't know many Greek derivations either)

Re:Uh, no

[edmudama]

that is incorrect

CDROMs use constant data rate by varying the RPM of the drive depending on where you're located

hard drives have lower data rates at the inner diameter since they're spinning the same RPM all the time, so you simply get less linear distance to store data during the revolution

all of the sizes shipped to customers already account for this.

it would be possible to put more bits on the media by changing the speed that the disk rotates, but those loosened mechanical tolerances would give you a 4.7GB drive instead of a 300GB drive.

Re:Uh, no

[thogard]

A standard "make one partition full sized" uses only the parts of the drive that aren't reserverd. If there was a way to use the disk size including the bits reserverd to fixup bad sectors, then you could get more space.
Now if your 1st partition is a full disk - reserved and your second partition is full sized including reserved and the reserved aren't all at the end of the disk, your going to end up with partitions of the ratios they talk about.

However what happens you start putting windows on this thing? Well block sizes of big drives aren't your friend and most small files will end up in reserve clustors. Since directories are small files too and if they don't conflict, you should be able to load up a few gig of data on one of these disks before you start to find out that its overwriting other bits of the other partiion. I expect one of these 180 gig drives could be loaded up with at least 90gig of data before the directorys started acting funny. One cool bit about this is block related files (like mp3) will show up on the dir just fine but when you play it, it might switch songs in the middle. I don't think the RIAA could ask for a better gift.

Re:Uh, no

[paganizer]

Somehow, I have ended up being the answer guy for a small army of wandering wanna-be computer geeks who eke out a living doing basic shit for stoopid people in the backwoods of kentucky and tennessee. it just sort of happened.
the only thing I can do now is wait for the phone calls. Because customers kids will have this AIM'd or IRC'd to them, they will do it to their parents computers, and a few of my wanna-be geeks will decide it's a great way to give a highly profitable "upgrade".
hmm.
Vacation time.

Re:Uh, no

[marcovje]

All HDs have spare sectors to use when during life sectors die. (though I didn't know it were that much, I'd guess 5-10%). I assume they managed to format them.

Note that all drives have become about 1 1/2 the size, except the ultrasuperduper new one.

That is apparntly a current topmodel, and those expensive models with borderline technology are apparantly more likely to loose sectors (either technology, or the higher density itself is fragile)

Re:Uh, no

[SenseiLeNoir]

Firstly, this is just resectoring, and is HIGHLY dangerous as all it is doing is making some sectors appear twice. Physically its just one sector.

Secondly, ALL IDE type drives (and some SCSI) have soem reserved space (possibly 5%) which is intelligently remapped whenever a bad sector is found. (rememeber you are NOT supposed to Low Level format an IDE drrive). During manufacturing, it is inevitable that bad sectors WILL be found, but these are remapped to the hidden reserved section, whcih is why most Hard disks you buy now do not APPEAR to have bad sectors. The reason is they are already mapped into the reserved area. So the rule is, when you DO start seeing bad sectors on your IDE drive, you can be sure that the reserved space is now full and its time to start looking for a new Hard Drive.

"Recovering" the space allocated to the reserved section is NOT good at all, since you then bypass the IDE bad sector mapping mechanism, and if the drive is not suitably surfaced checked, you can bet yoru bottom dollar that you will see some bad sectors.

Beware.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know Bill Gates (or Darl, or...) post here as Froggert.

Re:Uh, no

[WorkEmail]

You know what they say, if it sounds to good to be true it most often is. :)

Re:Uh, no

[kuiken]

For example, a drive with two 60GB platters may be sold as a 100GB drive, the platters having been "short stroked". This has nothing to do with the absurd technique described in the Inquirer article, and I doubt that it is possible to recover the lost space.

It used to work on the old seagate drives, you just set the bios to the parameters of the 100GB drive of letting the bios autodetect the 60GB drive and you had an 100GB drive

Re:Uh, no

[hayden]

Could also be a misspelling of "Aural density". The measure of the amount of bullshit in any given sentence.

Re:Uh, no

[andy landy]

And here was me thinging it had something to do with improving my Aureal Vortex soundcard as well as my hard disk. :)

Re:Uh, no

[offpath3]

A- means not, as in amorphous. Thus "areal" must mean not real. =)

Re:Uh, no

[rew]

Working for a data-recovery company I've opened up quite a bunch of drives. So I know what's going on inside.

Depending on the form factor and the manufacturer, they can stuff 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or even 15 platters in an enclosure.(That last is for a full height 5.25" drive. 6 only fit into the 1.7" heigh drives).

Suppose Quantum can fit 10Gb on one side of a platter. They will then make a family of drives: 10G (one platter, one head), 20Gb (one platter, two heads), 30Gb (two platters, three heads), 40Gb (two platters, 4 heads), and 60Gb. (Quantum only fits three platters in a 1" high 3.25" drive). This sequence holds for the quantum Fireball AS series by the way.

As you can see, there is half a platter (one side) unused in the 10 and 30Gb models. Quantum usually leaves that nice and shiny. IBM usually takes a sharp object and makes a big scratch on the surface....

In either case, it's quite possible that QA on that part of the disk failed, and that it would be unwise to use that part of the disk. Even if you managed to get a head able to read/write it....

Re:Uh, no

[neiljt]

CDROMs use constant data rate by varying the RPM of the drive depending on where you're located

I can vouch for the fact that the RPM is greater in the heady latitudes of the UK. People living nearer to the equator will experience slightly longer seek times, and I wonder if those in places like Barrow AK & North Norway actually appreciate the extra performance.

Maybe someone from New Zealand or nearby could chime in and verify that there data is read from the drive in the opposite direction.

Re:Uh, no

[JohnFluxx]

as far as I can remember - the RPM was only variable on 1x cdroms. In fact a 2x cdrom was when they just switched to constant RPM. It's been constant ever since.

Re:Uh, no

[jcr]

Hard drives are the highest precision mechanical devices that most people have in their home

I remember when the most precisely-machined parts in my home were the head gaps of my VCR...

-jcr

Re:Uh, no

[tap]

Seems these misspelling are not that uncommon. Google hits: aureal density 688 aural density 16,300 areal density 70,700 The first hit for areal density is about hard drives, for aural the fist hit is about music, but the second is about hard drives, and for aureal the first is about hard drives and the second is about Aureal's soundcards.

Re:Uh, no

[Kaenneth]

The hard drives in many 60 hour ReplayTV's are actually 80 gigabytes (approx 1gig/hr), and can be reformatted as such. The formatting was reduced for marketing reasons.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

anal density
235,000

Re:Uh, no

[MonkeyBoy]

You forgot areole density. That's two per person, unless the carnival is in town.

(Aw crud, maybe four per person. Dictionary.com wants to call part of the Iris an areole...)

Re:Uh, no

[SmackCrackandPot]

It's a mis-spelling of oreo-density; how many portions of breakfast cereal you can get in a single serving.

Re:Uh, no

[Luigi30]

Aureal Density is how bad your speakers sound.

Re:Uh, no

[fireman sam]

Being from Australia, yes, we do read the information backwards. And it is stored in memory backwards. For example, lets say I have the number 0x2244 it is written on the disk as 0x4422. And, even more amazing is if we look at the number 0xffff, it can sometimes be read backwards, forwards, or randomly, giving the values:
0xffff, 0xffff, and 0xffff. But, we get no errors.

(Hear are some replys for you consideration:
- Isn't Australia part of New Zealand?
- Isn't New Zealand part of Australia?
- That is the lamest piece of shit I have ever
read.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright smarty pants
what's the equivalent on NETBSD?

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Could be a misspelling of "aureole density," which pretty much describes my data.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

disklabel

Yeah, there is no fdisk on NetBSD/alpha, much to my chagrin.

Re:Uh, no

[gilesjuk]

Well it might be they sell a 120GB drive that has failed quality checks as an 80GB drive, the area which is damaged is "masked off".

Re:Uh, no

[AndroidCat]

nobody who knows nothing about computers would possibly attempt to do this.

You wish. Floppy format programs that could magically get 1 meg from a 720k floppy were all the rage for the Atari ST. You could explain to people that there weren't really 99 tracks on the drive, that the displayed space remaining was bogus, that it just didn't work and might damage the drive by banging the head into the end stop for tracks 83 onwards. It never worked. They would swear that it worked, and swear at you for telling them it didn't. Even asking them to do a test of putting 1 meg on the floppy and checking if it was all really there didn't work.

Re:Uh, no

[wisdom_brewing]

hmm... maybe "a real density"? 2,090,000

Re:Uh, no

[Luguber123]

So for performance you would put data on the outer cylinders?
Doesn't each sector in any cylinder have the same data capacity?

Re:Uh, no

[bhtooefr]

However, there ARE tools to get 400K out of a 360K 3.5" floppy (and 800 out of a 720K) - the Mac OS uses them by default. Also, Microsoft developed tools to get 1.6 and 1.8MB out of a 1.44MB floppy. AFAIK, the technology is used by Linux, but Windows has a crap fit if it catches you writing to a 1.6/1.8MB floppy.

Re:Uh, no

[AndroidCat]

Ah yes... Anyone else remember the "drive doubler" programs for MSDOS? They would hook into the INT 9 call and just double whatever number the BIOS returned as the drive size. I think the first one was a joke, but later ones (naturally) contained malware.

Re:Uh, no

[DMadCat]

Could also be a misspelling of "Aural density". The measure of the amount of bullshit in any given sentence.

No, that's "Anal Density".

Re:Uh, no

[FireFury03]

CD players and older, slow CDROM drives use constant linear velocity - i.e. the disk spins slower when reading the outside tracks so you get the same data rate.

For fast CDROM drives, doing CLV impacts on seek times because at high speeds you have to change the speed of the disk more between the inside and outside tracks - accellerating the disk as you seek from the outside to the inside just takes too long. So faster CDROM drives either do CAV (Constant angular velocity - i.e. spinning the disk at the same speed nomatter what track you're reading), or do CAV for the inside part of the disk but CLV for the outside (e.g. the disk speed would remain constant up to a certain distance from the inside and then fall off towards the edge of the disk). Doing CAV obviously results in higher data rates on the outside tracks.

As for hard drives, I'm fairly certain that the number of sectors per cylinder is actually greater on the outside tracks so you get a (more) constant data density. Probably around 10 or so years ago I can remember advice being banded around that you should try to make sure your swap space is on the outside cylinders of the disk because you could get a higher data rate and more data per cylinder (so you wouldn't have to seek as much).

Re:Uh, no

[AndroidCat]

Yes, and those tools made it harder to explain why 1 meg was physically impossible. (By the 99 track method, at least.)

Re:Uh, no

[blackbear]

It could also be "areole density." Which has a rather titillating definition.

Re:Uh, no

[Ba3r]

Thats very interesting, reminds me of what the chip companies do regarding stable clock vs max clock rate.

Re:Uh, no

[nomadic]

I remember when the most precisely-machined parts in my home were the head gaps of my VCR...

I remember when the most precisely-machined parts in my home were in my steam-powered difference engine.

Re:Uh, no

[Mr Guy]

Ahem.

-- I thought hard drives in Australia had to be installed upside down.

-- I read your post backwards, you insensitive clod.

-- You must be new around here, in Australia your hard drive reads you.

-- Imagine a beaowulf cluster of Australia bits!

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

switch to OpenBSD, it has got both =)

Re:Uh, no

[squiggleslash]

The Mac did this by varying the number of sectors per track (more on outer tracks, fewer on inner tracks), or, to put it another way, varied the speed of the drive depending on how far the head was from the center while writing at the same speed. I recall Chuck Peddle's Sirius computers did a similar thing with their 5.25" drives. The approach basically makes the official rating of the drive/disk irrelevent because it's not storing data that way.

The Amiga had a trick which was closer to the idea of trying to squeeze a meg out of a one meg floppy. It wrote each track as, for all intents and purposes, one sector (though, to make things manageable for the OS, it divided those "sectors" into 512 byte sectors from a software point of view. The point though is that it wrote the entire track without any substantive gaps between each sector.

There were two ramifications of this approach. First, without any additional special tricks, you could squeeze 880k out of a floppy; Second, early on Amiga floppies had a reputation for being somewhat less reliable than their PC and Atari brethren, though personally, by 1991 when I got a 500+, I didn't see any real difference.

As you say, you can also use various tricks to squeeze more space on a real floppy in Linux, and Linux even has a bunch of devices you can use in place of /dev/fd0. Those work though by making use of the fact that most disks are not exactly 80 tracks in size, they have additional ones because, well, who'd manufacture disks that accurately?

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

See now, if your parents hadn't been so cheap and had bought you an Amiga like you wanted (Oh come on, admit it!) you really could have gotten 960k onto those "880k" floppies without any "tricks" or danger of damage to your hardware. The Amiga had a super-wicked-cool floppy controller, after all.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

That's Taural density

Re:Uh, no

[cowbutt]

Second, early on Amiga floppies had a reputation for being somewhat less reliable than their PC and Atari brethren, though personally, by 1991 when I got a 500+, I didn't see any real difference.

That's probably because the Amiga floppy controller wrote track-at-once, rather than secton-at-once but without either the controller or the trackdisk.device verifying that the entire track had been written correctly. Hence, if you updated a single sector on a track, the entire track would be re-written, and the "unmodified" tracks may get corrupted in the process.

There was a nice hack called TrackSalve which hacked the trackdisk.device so that it performed an automatic verify of tracks after writing. ISTR equivalent functionality may have been incorporated into trackdisk.device in 2.04/3.0+ Kickstarts, but before I started using TrackSalve, I used to frequently end up with corrupted diskette bitmaps (probably the most-rewritten track on an Amiga floppy).

Another, probably less significant factor is that the Amiga disk hardware wrote tracks with no gaps between sectors in order to get that extra 160KBytes. If a PC disk controller encountered an error in the inter-sector gaps, I doubt it would cause it many problems, but for Amigas, it increases the probability that an error will occur in an occupied cell of the disk.

--

Re:Uh, no

[padishah_emperor]

Oh God thats funny, I choked on my Cornflakes and ended up splattering my keyboard and monitor.

Re:Uh, no

[pair-a-noyd]

Aureal density explained.

a high aureal density is those dark nipples and
a low aureal density is those bright pink nipples.

Right?

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

A short-stroked 30 GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 actually has a single platter of 80 GB (2 surfaces of 40 GB each, of which only one is used).

This is an extreme case, and of course there is no way to get 80 GB out of it without reflashing the firmware and perhaps lot more engineering, but my point is that greater than 100% unused space is certainly possible.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Short-stroked single-platter drives with only one active surface exist. Examples include the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8. The unused space on this drive exceeds 100% of its official capacity.

Re:Uh, no

[bodgit]

Some ports (namely i386) ISTR have both disklabel and fdisk, your disklabel goes into one of the fdisk'd partitions set to the correct BSD partition ID. Whereas sparc, alpha, etc. just write their disklabels directly.

port-cobalt also has both under NetBSD.

Re:Uh, no

[noselasd]

I have no doubt you can screw up partiton tables so partitions *LOOK* bigger. It will be interresting when someone fills that drive

Re:Uh, no

[Shanep]

Microsoft developed tools to get 1.6 and 1.8MB out of a 1.44MB floppy.

DMF.

Re:Uh, no

[debrain]

This is true, but there certainly aren't several GB of sectors reserved for errors. :)

If I recall my engineering class correctly, it was 40% of the hard drive reserved for errors. That was back in the 240MB HD days, though I'm not sure that the probability of bad sectors would be higher now. If the ratio stays even remotely the same, it could mean 40GB for a 100GB of storage sold as a 60GB drive.

I am actually quite certain that there would be gigabytes allocated to bad sector remapping on modern disks. Whether it is accessible or not is another question - I always assumed it to be transparent and taken care of by the modern hard disk controllers. Mind, bad sectors were once taken care of by BIOS so it is possible that you can circumvent the transparency and access the extra space.

Re:Uh, no

[Shanep]

Yes, and those tools made it harder to explain why 1 meg was physically impossible.

Careful with the word impossible! Years ago, when I was learning electronics, the widely accepted maximum PSTN MODEM download speed was 9,600bps at 2,400 baud.

56k MODEM's still operate at 2,400 baud to this day, yet achieve so many times more than 9,600bps through tricky new techniques and removal of old hurdles.

I know what you mean though. Just pushing a head further than it is supposed to go is not always going to work. On something like an Atari, which has pretty consistent hardware, it might never work.

(By the 99 track method, at least.)

And there is your disclaimer! ; )

BTW, I beleive I have seen a Panasonic floppy drive advertised which claims to get 32MB from standard 1.44MB floppy disks using an encoding technology different from that typically used with floppies.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

So you Aussies are all little endian, eh? Figures.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

on linux, you can format floppies to get 1.92mb out of them. i used to use such disks for data transfers before i had networking between my computers (way back when).

Re:Uh, no

[nfsilkey]

cfdisk might be easier for a Windows-oriented userbase. :)

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

cfdisk might be easier for a Windows-oriented userbase. :)

Yes, it feels like home. It has a partition-browser integrated you can't unbundle.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Lest ye forget the trick that allowed anyone
to format a low density 3.5 inch floppy as
a High Density 3.5 inch floppy. It would actually
give you 1.44 meg of storage space on the disk,
but since the medium couldn't handle it, the
data would corrupt within a few days.

Still.. It IS possible to format a low density
3.5 inch floopy into a high density one for a few
days... if you had a low density floppy.

Re:Uh, no

[jwhyche]

I would have to agree, this is utter horse shit. No drive manufacture would release a 500 GB drive as a 250. Hell, if they had the process to make 500 GB harddrives they would be flying this fucker from they highest flag pole to see who saluted.

Re:Uh, no

[Shanep]

Sorry, but this is complete bullshit.

Yes. I call it corrupting your partition table. ; )

Years ago, when an 800MB drive was "big", a friend of mine tried to convince myself and a group of IT staff friends, that he could get around BIOS limits of a particular DEC workstation, through some tricky settings of the geometry in the BIOS. LBA was not big in those days and MS OS were still using the BIOS for disk access beyond the boot process.

Anyway, my friend managed to "trick" the BIOS into seeing 800MB (previously 504MB).

So, in an attempt to prove him wrong, I then proceeded to format the drive. MS-DOS format claimed it was formatting the drive as 800MB, but this did not deter me. I knew that MS-DOS was simply fooled into thinking that 800MB was actually addressable on that particular (504MB through BIOS limited) machine.

The format completed fine! But I was still not detered. I said, "ok, now we start to fill this drive up...".

I started copying a large directory over and over to fill the drive. When we approached about 500MB... "Seek error: sector not found.". The drive no longer booted either.

What had happened, was that we managed to force the BIOS to accept geometry values which it could not fully address. Most Significant Bits which MS-DOS would send, would never get seen by the drive, since the BIOS could not go beyond a certain address width. So while formatting, MS-DOS would be sending write commands which would be honored by the drive, but the BIOS would be passively stripping some of the highest MSB's out of shere lack of support of them.

The end effect, was that at the 504MB point, the drive head would be about 504MB's in to the 800MB, then at 505MB, the address would go back to zero and the head would come back to the start! That first sector would be formatted again, the drive would report success, and MS-DOS format would think nothing of it. When it got to "800MB", it would have all appeared to format ok to MS-DOS.

The end result was an 800MB drive, with a partition table which that BIOS was never going to be able to fully service, even though MS-DOS format "saw the proof" that all was fine. ; ) When someone tried to copy data to the next "safe" sector beyond what the BIOS could address, what they were actually doing was writing back over the beginning of the disk! Corrupting the partition table.

; )

I was delighted, because everyone else was on my friends side, even though one of my buddies also had a background in electronics and should have known what I was talking about. Anyway, modern drives DO have secret areas set aside for remapping of bad sectors (to give you the consumer the perception of zero bad sectors and all the space you legally purchased), but this space is way smaller than what these jokers are claiming and it is normally not user accessible.

So, save yourself the hassle of wondering in a few months time, why your drive has "crashed". You might not remember the "magic" that you did to your drive.

Re:Uh, no

[Atilla]

There used to be a DOS utility called 800.com (circa early 90's) that allowed you to format 360k 5' 1/4" floppies at 720k, and the 720k 3' 1/5" ones to 800k (hence the name). It actually worked, and was VERY popular in Russia (and maybe elsewhere). I think it actually made the floppy drive head steps smaller, or hell, who knows. All I know that you could use every bit of the newly found capacity. The only downside is that you _had_ to have that little utility to read what you wrote.

Re:Uh, no

[AndroidCat]

The Atari ST came out in 1985. Which "way back when" were you talking about? :^P

Re:Uh, no

[squaretorus]

Ah those were the days! - getting an extra few kay out of your disk seemed like an endeavour worth pursuing for its own sake.

'Look Ma - I just wrote 780 Kay to a NORMAL floppy and read it back - how cool is that'

Other than bits of random code, shit self written games, and animated rip offs of the MTV logos of the day I can't remember a damned thing I stored on the things.

Oh thats right - lecture notes!

Re:Uh, no

[Inuchance]

I once had a Linux livefloppy distro that fit onto a 1.6MB floppy. It gave you tools to format to 1.6 and everything, and it worked fine on all the computers I tried it on. Of course, this was a bit before CD burners became widespread.

Re:Uh, no

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

There are a few misconceptions about floppy disks, it seems. Let me try to clear some of them up:

• 3.5" DD - 1 MB unformatted
• 3.5" HD - 2 MB unformatted
• 3.5" ED - 4 MB unformatted

Now, the effective capacity depends on the fomatting method. For standard PC formatting, you get 720 KB and 1.44 MB, respectively. However, some altertative formats offer more efficient formatting options. For example, my Commodore can get 800 KB and 1.6 MB from the same disks.

Re:Uh, no

[MasTRE]

some more that you forgot:
Oriole density (fans/game)
Oreo density (fat bastard units)

Re:Uh, no

[pruss]

Though I regularly formatted 360K floppies to 420K for my 8086 unit. They worked fine, except there were compatibility problems with other PCs and a driver needed to be loaded.

Re:Uh, no

[Alien54]

Here is the letter you obviously did not read:

• 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

  Not speaking for my employer, speaking as an Open Source guy

which answers the question nicely. You can see the original letter here [scroll down a bit]

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear hear, and when you move the disk over the equator, it starts spinning the other way and all the memory flips over. And New Zealand is a pimple on Australias butt.

Re:Uh, no

[74nova]

60GB is old? im feeling old now and im still a senior in cs...

i remember the day when my dads 386 with a 40MB seemed huge. wait... i didnt even know what a MB was at the time. nevermind.

Re:Uh, no

[teeker]

I remember some years ago getting a MASSIVE 20MB 5-1/4" full height MFM hard disk...you had to use DOS's DEBUG program to jump to a memory location in ROM on the Western Digital controller card to low-level format the drive. While you were in there, you had to hand-type the "bad sector map" into the program, off of a dot-matrix-printed sticker on the drive! As I recall there were only a dozen or so....

Of course, I've no doubt things are much different today...the tighter tolerances probably require much more room for error, but I thought it was funny when it came up :)

Re:Uh, no

[lvdrproject]

No offence, but i'd expect someone as knowledgeable as you seem to be to know the difference between a gigabit and a gigabyte. :(

Re:Uh, no

[rew]

Correct. I know the difference. I also know that some people insist on writing GB for gigabyte, while I write Gb for gigabyte. Now, what is your point again?

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah? I once had explorer telling me that I had got 526Mb out of a regular 1.44 floppy! Beat that! Shame the data was corrupt, though; never figured that one out.

Re:Uh, no

[nmos]

Do they actually phisically install a head on the side of the platter that is not being used for drives such as your 10GB and 30GB examples? It wouldn't seem completely unreasonable to build them all the same and just disable the extra head in the firmware.

Re:Uh, no

[t0ny]

Dont buy into that thinking! They have *really* had 200 GB platters for decades. There is evidenct of fragmented hard drives at the Roswell crash site. The truth is out there!!!

Re:Uh, no

[the melon]

You can get more than 6 in a 1.7" high drive. I have some IBM's that have 8 and I have seen some Seagates that have shoehorned 11 into that form factor.

Re:Uh, no

[squiggleslash]

ISTR equivalent functionality may have been incorporated into trackdisk.device in 2.04/3.0+ Kickstarts,

That may well have been the case. I started with 2.04 and I'm sure I got a "write error" occasionally, and certainly it would explain why I didn't get many disk failures (enough to be annoyed but not enough to cause major hassles) - 99% of the time, the bitmap being corrupt was a function of the computer crashing with files open, not a corrupt sector.

I usually formatted my disks too with FFS... none of OFS's redundancy so living life on the edge ;)

Re:Uh, no

[cooley]

Old, Bah! My first machine had no hard drive, just DD floppies!

Of course, of course, I'm sure that I'm gonna get lambasted by a punch card user for saying this. I'm such an insensitive clod.

Re:Uh, no

[betelgeuse-4]

What happens on the equator? Does the drive not spin at all? In what order is data read from memory, is it just read in one big chunk? These are questions that need answering!

Re:Uh, no

[Nf1nk]

Being from Australia,

Wow you seem to speak american really good. how are the alps this time of year?

Re:Uh, no

[rew]

No, the head would be missing.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I thought New Zealand was part of Rohan.

And isn't Australia part of Mordor?

Re:Uh, no

[cybin]

i think you mean the amount of bullshit in a sentence divided by the volume of the entire sentence would be the Olfactory Density. Cos you can smell the shiate.

Re:Uh, no

[gid]

I always loved how my Amiga got 880k out of a 3.5" dd floppy by default. It was a damn nice machine, it was a sad day to retire it for a PC. I never did fill up my massive 80mb hard drive. :) Over a 2400 baud modem? riiiight.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

- Isn't Australia part of New Zealand?

Technically the continent that the country Australia and country New Zealand sit on it called Australia as well. (It is also known as oceania).

So yes New Zealand is part of Australia, but they generally don't have as bad an accent, (especially compared to sydney) ;)

Re:Uh, no

[lostboy2]

There was also the old flippy trick (turning a single-sided 5.25" floppy disk into a double-sided one by cutting an extra notch into the floppy disk cover and inserting it into the drive upside-down). That actually did work, though.

Re:Uh, no

[Tore S B]

That's just a big chunk of "wrong".

"get 400K out of a 360K 3.5" floppy (and 800 out of a 720K) - the Mac OS uses them by default."
You have got to be kidding me. The Mac and the PC use completely different recording techniques, and they are not "tools", they are just a matter of floppy disk controller drivers. The Mac started using these floppies in 1984, way before they became availible for the PC. Therefore, the drives were still basically newborn, and densities still couldn't be securely raised above 500K. The Mac SE and further up, (the one with the SuperDrive, ring any bells? Their CDRW/DVD-drive was also named SuperDrive) could read both formats. The OS on those computers included a utility to read and write to the inferior FAT filesystem.

You can format a disk way above its capacity, but it's not completely secure. For example, the floppy disk is only "certified" up to 1.44MB. This due to grain size of the magnetic material. The controller and drive may have bugs in them, resulting in the head banging against corners (which could seriously f* up the old Commodore 1541 drives).

My old HP 150, which was the first commercial machine to use 3.22" drives commercially, had 270K and 380K drives, with manual latches for the protective metal! You'd latch the metal before inserting it into the drive, and then press a release which would slide it back on.

Microsoft did not develop those technologies, they just formatted the floppies differently. The technology is not "used by Linux", but, Linux natively supports formatting drives all the way up to 3MB if your FD controller/drive/disk all support it. But, you can easily do this in Windows too, with nonstandard programs (afaik, anyway)

-tsb

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris has 'format', which is not the same as the Windows namesake.

Re:Uh, no

[Tore S B]

and I wonder if those in places like Barrow AK & North Norway actually appreciate the extra performance.

Why, yes, I do. I live in southern norway (albeit fourth floor in an appartment building) and I really loved the seek time saves. So much so that I switched rooms with my younger brother on the ground floor. I noticed dramatic increases in speed when installing IRIX on my Indy. And I doubt the R4K>R5K aftermarked job was why. It must be the move.
-tsb

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

The colored ring around the nipple is also an areola.

-- paper

Re:Uh, no

[s13g3]

fsck fdisk!

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

my bullshit detector is going off at full power, but this may finaly kill the script kiddies, who knows, it may kill some dumb SCO ceo, this may be right up his ally

Re:Uh, no

[RatBastard]

And the drive punch that turned a 720K DSDD 3.5" floppy into a 1.44M DSHD 3.5" floppy. That one worked most of the time. Unless you actually cared about preserving the data on your punched disks.

I miss my 520ST.

Re:Uh, no

[bhtooefr]

Technically, there ARE tools to read/write 400 and 800K HFS (or whatever Mac OS uses on floppies of that age) disks on a PC.

I thought that MS was the first to use the floppy disk extending stuff on FAT12, though...

Re:Uh, no

[SirCyn]

The "Short Stroking" is true. They encode the HD with servo information that tells the heads they are at the end of the disk when they are actually not. There is no way to recover this space.
Read up on how modern HDs know how to move the head's servo motor for more information.

Re:Uh, no

[cshark]

Secret hard drive space? I'll settle for the total amount of hard drive space they sold me. My new 160 gig drive only has 130gb of usable space on it.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when are processors mechanical devices?

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, lets say I have the number 0x2244 it is written on the disk as 0x4422.

Sweet, I get to kill a joke! 0x2244 is symmetric in binary: 0010 0010 0100 0100

Re:Uh, no

[s13g3]

LMAO!

I have been known to get on to people who tell me they've been using computers "forever", when, in most cases these people never used a PC until the mid- or even late-90's (generally new co-workers in tech support dept's who wanted us to know how technically masterful they were... At DEC [when it still existed] we had people come in to the field support dept that didn't [seriously!] know where the power cord went, yet tried to assure us he was more than capable of fixing an Alpha on the phone.) I'd then inform them that I was using home computers in the days where the only affordable/available storage device for my TRS-80 was a casette tape drive, so STFU. Then my step-father (who just turned 60 somethin') taps me on the shoulder one day while tlaking to a friend on the phone and replies, "Uh, how about RTFM? I was using 'computers' when they were electrically powered calculators that weighed 30 pounds and you had to rent time on one of maybe a dozen, if you were lucky to go to a school that had that many. " Then again, he does have a Timex-Sinclair in storage somewhere and is still proficient in Cobol, Assembler and a few others. But for that matter, I still have round-wheel tapes laying around somewhere myself, just nothing to read them with, but I've worked for several off-site data storage companies.

Moral of the story: Yer not old until you die. Then you're just dead and couldn't care anyway.
Age and experience with CS/IT is relative in any case, since so much changes every 18 months at a minimum. Unless you make the effort to stay current, knowing how to program in a dead language (Fortran, Pascal, etc.) does not make you a more knowledgeable or skilled a tech than someone half-your age (never forget though that old age and treachery will overcome youth and courage any day).

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell Rob Northen that.

OK, 99 tracks is too much, but Rob did manage to fit 1028K on a 720K for one game's release - only part of the first track was "normal" enough for it to pick up the bootsector, at which point it was doing some freaky things with custom skews, interleaves, small "subcodes" of data stored between the tracks at the syncs (which probably only worked because of the changing interleave)... all highly timing-dependent too, but it was using nop loops to pull a similar sort of trick to the one that the Mac "spiral" format was doing at the time.

It was hell to copy. I don't think anyone managed it directly (rather the cracker used Vexmon 1 (based on Mon 3.10), single-stepping and safe-nopping protection code as they went, managed to breakpoint the exotic loading routine, dumped every sector it read to his fancy, massive 100MB SCSI hard disk, linkfiled it, and used the groups' own, more efficient compression routines to get it into an 820K 10-sector slightly-extended format).

There were these little problems with the original.. the discs weren't rated for that, so they failed quite soon... the drives weren't designed for it, so about one of every three times, the game refused to boot... oh, and it didn't run on the STe when it came out... of course only the cracked version survives now... it always did work better and he ended up megatraining it too :)

Trying essentially that sort of ninja trick on *all* my precious data does not strike confidence into my heart.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

From the crap that my mail server blocks, the spammers have been trying to enlarge their three inch hard dicks for a long time...

Considering also the V!@GRA spam, I'd say they were 3.5-inch floppy dicks.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but NO-ONE did that; atari default, 79 tracks, was a joke, and 80 tracks was very common... 81 or 82 would normally be okay, 83 was pushing the boundaries... the space gain was usually made by increasing the number of sectors-per-track (9 by default) to 10, or 11. Both of these worked, although there were distinct speed and reliability penalities to be paid for both of those extended formats.

Some exotic disc protections did even weirder things, deliberately. You could really freak out the disc controller if you didn't mind nothing but your game being able to read it; Rob Northen was the considered master of these techniques, with only the legendary Syncro Express being able to copy some of his discs without ripping the data off of the silly format, packing, linkfiling, and bundling a fancy menu with a scroller on top like the Pompey Pirates et al did :)

Re:Uh, no

[elendril]

Most software used on the Atari ST to increase the disk space simply increased the number of sector per track from 9 (720kb) to 10 (800kb) or even 11 (and sometimes marginally increased the number of tracks).
It worked very well. Most warez was distributed on such disks. Even some commerical games (try "maupiti island" for example : you can download disks images from http://www.lankhor.net/ if you want to check by yourself).

Re:Uh, no

[chadjg]

Uh, isn't it more of a room temperature thing?

Re:Uh, no

[operagost]

3.5" floppies use MFM. I imagine using RLL would get you nearly 3 MB. I don't know how they could get 32 MB. Even so, you'd have to get the highest quality diskettes to pull it off. Frankly, it seems like even major labels like Sony and especially Imation can't even handle 1.44 MB.

Re:Uh, no

[Brandybuck]

Or the "RAM doubler", that supposedly compressed RAM like other programs did file systems. Some products actually had technology that would do this, but the benefits were so grossly inflated they were never worth the price or CPU hit. Most of them though didn't do anything at all, for only a mere $29.95.

Re:Uh, no

[FuzzyShrimp]

Hah! I laugh in your face. (said with a Spanish dialect as in old Western Movies) I used to take the tapes out of my TRS-80 and Color CoCo tape recorders and stretch the tape between two doors in the house making the tape thinner and thinner, allowing for more and more data to be stored. It wooorkd great and I gto noe erorz at awl...

Re:Uh, no

[Brandybuck]

There is both fdisk and disklabel in FreeBSD.

fdisk -- PC slice table maintenance utility

bsdlabel -- read and write disk pack label

Of course, only an insane (or truly desperate) person ever uses these by hand. I had to do this once, and my coworkers called the ambulance because I broke out into a shaking sweat and started gibbering.

Re:Uh, no

[chickenwing]

Nobody remotely knowledgeable about computers would ever believe this, and nobody who knows nothing about computers would possibly attempt to do this.

Oh, you must be referring to the types who read Slashdot ;^)

Re:Uh, no

[Naffer]

I could kiss you for that post.

Re:Uh, no

[Jaywalk]

spammers have been trying to enlarge their three inch hard dicks for a long time

Really? I thought they only had floppies.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, as an Australian I often imagine myself in a beaowulf cluster of female australians.

Re:Uh, no

[dinog]

I initially misread your post as "enlarge their three inch hard dicks". From the crap that my mail server blocks, the spammers have been trying to enlarge their three inch hard dicks for a long time...

I did this at home, and now my 3" HD is now a 3.5" FD.

Dean G, er I mean Anonymous Coward....

Re:Uh, no

[squidinkcalligraphy]

The other trick that comes to mind from the floppy days was to drill a hole in the corner of a DD floppy (where the HD floppies have a hole), and hey presto, an instant HD floppy for half the price!

That worked fine most of the time, I'd expect there'd be errors eventually due to the lower density of the magnetic material, but they never happened to me.

So the easiest way to double the capacity of your hard drive is to drill a small (~3mm) hole in the top left hand corner of it.

Re:Uh, no

[glesga_kiss]

I second the parent. I regularly created 11 sector formatted disks for my own use, the extra space came in very handy when working with digital samplers. You could create the disks with tools like Fast Copy. Takes me back a bit...

You could also format beyond track 80, but it was a little risky the further you got. I think 86 was the absolute limit, but it would be unreliable. It's pretty much the same thing as overburning on CD-r's, different disks/drives had varying results. 82-83 was relatively safe, IIRC.

Re:Uh, no

[Stormie]

You wish. Floppy format programs that could magically get 1 meg from a 720k floppy were all the rage for the Atari ST.

Well, floppy format programs that could magically get 984k on an 880k floppy were all the rage on the Amiga, and they did work. 82 tracks instead of 80, 12 sectors per track instead of 11 - bang, over a million bytes on an 880k disk. And I never had a problem.

Re:Uh, no

[Trejkaz]

Even the article itself linked to an informative comment on the matter.

Re:Uh, no

[WarlockD]

Yea, we had a 120LS drive here by panasonic. I work at a Electronic Junk Company" We did try it and it worked great!

The catch was that your right, it must of used some special encoding, because they couldn't even be formated back to normal again.

Not to mention it was like CD-R's. Once you wrote the data, you couldn't erase it again.

The process was fast though, it took only 2 min to write that data.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm gonna try this out later on tonight.. just after I spraypaint "Ferrari" on my Ford Focus... I can't wait to see how much faster that will make it....

Re:Uh, no

[Sivar]

Good for the guy that wrote the letter. He wrong.

Hard drives are not manufactured and binned like processors. They are built with platters of a static size.
This is absurd to the point that it is a waste of time to argue about.
Ask about this moron's letter on Storagereview.com. StorageReview has several users who are hard drive engineers, including the head of the SCSI division of a major manufacturer.
I've been following the site for years. You tend to pick up a few things.
Trust me--if you are interested in seeing if this is really true, do some research. If not, well, you've just chosen to take one Joe Internet User's word over another's word.

Re:Uh, no

[tomasito]

Whatever happened to the 2.88MB floppy disk drives? Just wondering.

Re:Uh, no

[AndroidCat]

Which is why I said Atari ST. (rolls eyes)

Re:Uh, no

[Stormie]

Hey, roll your eyes as much as you like, but it sure seemed like you were putting forward these ST fake "1 meg on a 720k disk" formatters as a datapoint arguing that these claims tend to be bullshit. I put forward my Amiga example as a datapoint showing that sometimes they are for real.

Or were you just zinging me out of nostalgia for the good old days of Amigadudes and STers flaming each other? :-)

Re:Uh, no

[AndroidCat]

Nope. I mentioned the Atari ST ones because I knew exactly what they were doing and why they didn't work.

The ST BIOS had a Format Track call that would take a track of 1-99 regardless of the drive. So people would whip up a little format program around that. The default was usually 80 tracks, but could be rolled up to 99. The program would format track 82 18 times, then write "512 byte sector, 2 sides, 10/11 sectors/track, 99 tracks" into the boot sector. (Track 82 verified as good 18 times.) When GEMDOS calculated the diskette capacity, it blindly used those numbers and reported 1013760/1115136 bytes free.

The program authors didn't add checking because only a fool would try more than 80-82 without checking, and the users assumed that it worked because there were no error messages (and GEM said it was a 1M floppy). Convincing people to test the diskettes was near impossible, and you could certainly write 1M to them without errors. (Some of the previous files would be overwritten but you'd have to check for that.)

I guess my point was that tricks that magically change numbers usually just look like they work. The ones that explain the hard work and clever tricks used to make it work (like the Amiga) usually do work. This trick sounds like the first type. Testing and knowledge tells the difference.

Ha! If you thought that reply was a zing, you should have read the reply that I never sent to the one before yours about "read the article"/120M floppies. And I was smiling during the "back in the olden days of Linux" reply. :^)

Re:Uh, no

[BillX]

So THAT is what happens :-) See my earlier post about my brother doing pretty much exactly this (come to think of it, I think it even was a 2-partition setup trying to get around drive-size limitations on an older machine), and ending up with a disk full of MP3s whose names didn't match the contents, or contained pieces of 2-3 different songs...

Re:Uh, no

[Thomas Shaddack]

There was a program for PCs as well, that was able to stuff up to 83 tracks and up to 21 sectors per track on a 3.5" floppy; I think it was called "fdformat" and needed either a compliant BIOS or a resident program called "fdread". There was also a program for very fast floppy disk duplication, "hdcopy", also capable of formatting floppies to higher capacities.

Memories, sweet memories...

Re:Uh, no

[Shanep]

Yea, we had a 120LS drive here by panasonic.

Are you talking about LS120 drives?

I was working for the Australian Stock Exchange in the mid 90's, during 1997 I think it was, I started to see Compaq machines coming with these as standard.

If you turn an LS120 disk upside down, open the protective slide and look at the disk, you can actually see the hard sectoring guides as physical bumps!

Special disks were required to store 120MB and they most certainly were not WORM, they were RW magnetic media all the way.

Flopticals were similar from a consumer standpoint, but they were magneto-optical like minidiscs, whereby a laser would have to heat the magnetic surface to "curie (?) point" before the magnetic info could be changed.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, which is why each person would have had 2. Unless the carnival's freak show is in town, where they would be displaying the 8-nippled man.

But if you believe Dictionary.com, the Iris has an areola, in which case it'd be (at least) 4 per person.

It's not quite as funny when you take the time to explain it all, is it?

Re:Uh, no

[NewNole2001]

Little off topic, but this has been getting on my nerves since I started using the Internet however long ago it was...
You spelled the word lose as "loose." Why is it that no one in the known world can spell this word? If I let my dog loose, then I might lose it. Learn to spell, it isn't that difficult.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga's 880K drives and disks were themselves nothing more than standard 720K drives and disks.

A "megabyte" in quotes, or a million bytes on a 720K disk is thereby demonstrated to be possible. Atari or Amiga. Doesn't matter. Same disks, similar drives. It was definitely possible.

In fact, standard 720K drive pullouts from PC clones also worked fine in the Amiga, as long as the drive was such that its write-protect sensing LED and associated logic stayed active while the drive was not spinning, as this signal was used by the Amiga's OS to sense a disk change! Drives without this characteristic could still be used in industrial Amiga applications that did not require disk changes, or in any application by using the "diskchange" command to signal the OS accordingly.

(The Amiga 2X00 standard floppy drive was the Chinon FB-354, by the way.)

Re:Uh, no

[Wolfrider]

--I believe that's Tom's Root Boot:
http://www.toms.net/rb/

Re:Uh, no

[Wolfrider]

--You had TAPE DRIVES?! Luxury!!!

Re:Uh, no

[Wolfrider]

--They died out. Mostly 2.88 drives came as OEM equipment on certain IBM servers; IIRC the 2.88 disks were too expensive compared to 1.44 floppies, and around that time Iomega was coming out with their 100MB Zip disks.

--$200 for 100MB over a parallel port connection effectively killed the 2.88 tech, IMHO. (I was using an 80286 processor at the time, and 486's were just coming out. My original HD for that '286 was 20MB, and I could backup the upgraded 100MB HD to 1 Zip disk with compression.) Since then, nobody has really felt the need to upgrade the "standard" 1.44MB floppy much, until LS-120 tech came out.

Re:Uh, no

[paganizer]

Wow!
I got 2 (two) offtopics for that!
I must be improving.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

You have oreos for breakfast??

Re:Uh, no

[ryanwright]

That's because your system's bios can't address the full drive.

Upgrade your bios or buy a PCI ATA controller and you can see the whole drive. Backup your data first.

Re:Uh, no

[Shanep]

I don't know how they could get 32 MB.

Panason LS-240 does it.

How? Reliability?

[superhoe]

"IBM Deskstar 80GB EIDE Yield after recovery: 150GB of space"

Ok, I have one of these and this looks more than interesting. But those step-by-step instructions with some specific Norton Ghost sound pretty unreliable. Anyone have any idea what really happens in the procedure and where does that almost 50% increase come from?

Main question: Will the extra storage/the disk as a whole be as reliable in normal use as it was before this procedure?

Re:How? Reliability?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM *DEATH*star? ...

I wouldn't worry... thouse drives couldn't be any less reliable :)

Re:How? Reliability?

[lendude]

Speaking of reliability: My IBM Deathstar GXP75 EIDE - 30GB. Yield after click-of-death...

Re:How? Reliability?

[Blastrogath]

It seems to work by deliberately corrupting your partition tabes by overlapping your patitions:
Partition a from 0 to 200 GB
Partition b from 1 to 200 GB etc.

You could probably get it to say almost any amount, but it wouldn't be usable space.

Some drives may have a little extra space but not 70 GB on a 80GB drive. No sane company is going to sell a 150 GB drive as an 80 GB because they pay as much to manufacture platters and heads no matter how they're used. The cost of the unused parts would come right out of their profits. Also, sometimes there is "unused space" used for the hard drive's bios, or for relocating data from bad sectors.

Re:How? Reliability?

[sjwt]

yerh, i meen this woudl be a stupid as selling
a 486 DX as an SX...

Re:How? Reliability?

[Blastrogath]

486 DX as an SX...

"IBM Deskstar 80GB EIDE Yield after recovery: 150GB of space"

It's like selling a P4 3GHz chip as a P4 1.6 GHz chip. I know people underclock and such, but not by 87% of the item's stated speed or storage capacity.

Re:How? Reliability?

[great_snoopy]

Besides that, it's true - any hard disk drive has sectors reserved for the bad sectors management. However, those sectors are only available to the drive's internal firmware. That "method" just overlaps partitions so that it seems that you have more space.

Re:How? Reliability?

[Lord Kano]

No sane company is going to sell a 150 GB drive as an 80 GB because they pay as much to manufacture platters and heads no matter how they're used. The cost of the unused parts would come right out of their profits.

You'd be correct if there was just one HDD maker in the marketplace, but that isn't so.

First off, let me say that I think this whole isue is bunk. But let's pretend for a moment.

Company A and Company B are both in the business of making and selling HDDs. Company A makes only 200 GB HDDs which cost them about $100 each to manufacture and they then sell them for $200. Company B makes a 200GB HDD which costs them $100 to make and they then sell it for $200. Company B also does this, they modify the firmware of the drive to that only 150 GB are usable. They sell these "150 GB" HDDs for $150.

Company A gets the business of people who are willing to shell out $200 for a 200 GB HDD. Company A does not get the business who have a budget of less than $200 for their HDD purchase.

Company B get the business of people who are willing to shell out $200 for 200 GB HDD and the business of people who have a smaller budget.

By crippling the drive they protect the value of their "high end" product while at the same time making some money on the "mid range" as well

Company A's profits can be calculated like this profit = (X1xP1) whereas X=The number of units sold and P=The profit margin on the unit. #=The model of the HDD

Company B's profits can be calculated like this profit = (X1xP1)+(X2xP2).

This same business principle is a part of the reason why some 2.4 Ghz processors will run at 3 Ghz when overclocked.

I have no doubt that there could be a fair bit of space on a drive that is unavailable to the user, but double or triple capacity? Of course not!

LK

Re:How? Reliability?

[MrFreshly]

Yeah, and further...If Western Digital HAD a 510GB drive, you can bet your ass they'd market it and not keep it crippled!

That'd be the biggest single consumer drive on the market.

Re:How? Reliability?

[Phroggy]

Company A gets the business of people who are willing to shell out $200 for a 200 GB HDD. Company A does not get the business who have a budget of less than $200 for their HDD purchase.

Company B get the business of people who are willing to shell out $200 for 200 GB HDD and the business of people who have a smaller budget.

Company A buys company B. The new Company AB sells both 150GB and 200GB drives, so they get money from everybody.

Except, of course, that Company AB is in competition with Company C, which makes a real 150GB drive which costs less to produce than company AB's "150GB" drive because it's not really a 200GB drive with modified firmware. Company C sells their 150GB drive for less, and starts driving company AB's margins down; Company C can keep doing this because their costs are lower.

Re:How? Reliability?

[fuzzix]

No sane company is going to sell a 150 GB drive as an 80 GB because they pay as much to manufacture platters and heads no matter how they're used.

I did once hear a story about a HD manufacturer/OEM supplier here in Ireland who had a large batch of 80GB disks, but there was little demand as most Dell/Packard Bell/Whatever boxes shipped with 20-40GB drives.
There was little hope of shipping the stock and they needed them gone so the whole lot were reconfigured as 40GB drives - they flew out the door.

I also recall a 20MB disk I had on an 8086... I ran an app called 'prep' (very low level) which shipped with DOS 3.2 for Zenith and it yielded and extra 10MB - I don't remember any major issues, but it was a good while ago...

Re:How? Reliability?

[sjwt]

I dont see why not,
at the time the cost differnce of the chips was 2X..

Re:How? Reliability?

[liquidsin]

Company C, selling the smaller drives, can't really keep up though. They'll eventually need to sell larger drives, which means manufacturing another line. Company B (or Company AB after the acquisition...) can make a slimmer margin on the smaller drive, but only need to produce one drive (with different firmware) and keeps a higher margin on their high end part. Company C needs to actually produce drives with a different number of platters/heads, or different sized heads, and therefore has greater manufacturing costs, which will drive up the price of their products or force them to a lower profit margin to remain competitive. Company AB can keep doing this (next they jump to a 300GB disk, and sell it as 300GB or 250GB and maybe even a low end 200GB disk).

Re:How? Reliability?

[SmlFreshwaterBuffalo]

This same business principle is a part of the reason why some 2.4 Ghz processors will run at 3 Ghz when overclocked.

This sounds like an economist's approach to an engineering problem.

But, this is not typically why 2.4 GHz processors may run at 3 GHz. It's because one of the processors in a batch failed to run at 3 GHz during testing, but passed at 2.4 GHz. Therefore, the entire batch was labeled as 2.4 GHz.

Of course, Intel did do something similar to what the parent post described, with an older processor (though the specific processor escapes me at the moment). Their manufacturing process originally yielded a fairly large number of processors running at a lower speed than originally designed, so they had 2 speed grades. But eventually they improved their process, and decreased defects. This yielded less of the slower processor than was needed to meet demand. So, they started labeling the less defective processors at the lower speeds, to keep that sector of the market.

Re:How? Reliability?

[superhoe]

Hey, cut it.. I've been using it for few years now and works fine. Actually my 120gb Maxtor audio HD has given me way more headaches than the Deathstar mentioned :)

Re:How? Reliability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or Company B would fire your ass for that idea, and sell the 200GB drive for $150 and kill Company A on volume.

Re:How? Reliability?

[mcflaherty]

Intel did do something similar to what the parent post described, with an older processor (though the specific processor escapes me at the moment).

I'd always heard it was the Celeron line. I think that early on, chips that didnt meet specs where just outfitted with less cache, and marketed as "econo-chip", i.e. the Celery. Then an actual market for those economy chips came about, and to meet demand they had to start putting good chips out as Celerons as well. So rumor had it if you were lucky, you could try to overclock your Celeron since it was probably a snazzier chip in reality. They of course fixed this in a matter of months by creating a dedicated run of actual Celeron spec'd chips.

Keep in mind, I learned this from a Slashdot post, so it could just be BS.

Re:How? Reliability?

[bcd]

Except, of course, that Company AB is in competition with Company C, which makes a real 150GB drive which costs less to produce than company AB's "150GB" drive because it's not really a 200GB drive with modified firmware.

I don't follow the logic here. Just because Company C's 150GB drive is "really" 150GB, that doesn't make it cheaper to produce. I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that production costs have virtually nothing to do with capacity. Except maybe at the high end, where the technology isn't as proven and the processes aren't as refined.

Re:How? Reliability?

[coastwalker]

Agreed, business logic of overclocked CPUs is slightly different as the chips genuinely do have different speeds at some point in their history (if only in simulation in the worst case) but do not always continue to do so.

When a processor first comes to market the production process is full of variablility which ends up being reflected in the reliable maximum clock rates of the CPUs. Something like the normal or Gaussian distribution will apply to the spread of clock speeds. This is why the fastest chips are often in short supply and also why a premium price can be charged for them. As the production technology and minor mask set shrinks (Stepping?) is improved the number of fast chips increases. At some point the production process may become so good that all the chips produced will run at the fastest speed of the first production run. Additionaly overclocking a chip may be possible with reduced reliablilty because the test vector that failed the chip at the manufacturer is rarely exercised on the home users machine. The manufacturer is not going to be selling chips which might fail in some mission critical application so lables them appropriately.

I think that the manufacture continues to sell a range of chip speeds for several reasons in addition to the one you cite. There is no guarantee that the manufacturing process will remain stable with high yields of fast chips and the spread price model for chip speeds is always needed for a new generation of chips. Initialy at least there is no marketing driven reason for fooling customers by selling them something which has been artificially degraded.

Re:How? Reliability?

[dasmegabyte]

Ahhh, but all three companies -- A, B and C -- produce their products using cutrate labor and polluting practices in second wave Asian nations. Each company uses custom machinery for their processes, which all cost the same to build as the custom work is billed not on complexity but on the constant rate of time to completion. Each gets their research performed by graduate students. The only real costs are engineering and marketting, which are constant for all three.

Price of making each size hard drive? Exactly the same. Welcome to the neoliberal economy.

Re:How? Reliability?

[drasfr]

What about the cost of producing drives?

in big quantities it might be cheaper to produce 10000 200GB drives than to have to factory lines to produce let's say 7000 200GB and 3000 150GB drives.

Sometimes, it is better to produce one kind only, and just cripple the firmware. Which is much easier than having to deal with 2 different lines of product. Testing is easier. You test only for 200GB drives, if it works, great, you know your 150GB will work also.

Re:How? Reliability?

[Blastrogath]

By crippling the drive they protect the value of their "high end" product while at the same time making some money on the "mid range" as well


The problem is that if a 200 GB drive is a high end level device then it probably has at least 3 platters and 6 heads because that's all you can fit easily into a standard size hard drive. Each platter would be aprox. 66 and 2/3 GB so you could omit the 6th head to save some costs on the 200GB as 150GB model.

Even better, if company A where to omit 2 heads and a platter they'd have a 133GB drive that's about 2/3 the cost to make. They could sell it full markup for $133, or sell it at the lower markup that company B have used on the $150 200GB labeled as a 150GB, making the price a mere $100 for 133GB and cutting the knees out from under their compitition.

Another thing to consider is most hard drive makers often have both newer and older technology in production. You may well have a factory line still tooled for producing 50GB platters that you could use to make a mid range 150GB drive. This let's you wait longer before paying to upgrade that line while still earning you money. Also when you do upgrade you can upgrade further, to a technology that was unavailable before.

Re:How? Reliability?

[Reece400]

I did this by accident a while back by making a typo in partioning software,, the results ended up in about 2 times more space reported, about 0 times of that usable, I ended up losing everything on the one partition when I tried to install an OS on the second... had to delete all the partitions and start again.

Reece,

Re:How? Reliability?

[apdim]

Hey everybody, stop the philosophical discussion about whether companies actually sell 160GB drives as 80GB or whatever. Anybody that can try and verify if this works would be very welcome otherwise it is just not useful discussion.

Re:How? Reliability?

[coastwalker]

Evidence for processor clock speed variability and techniques used to reduce it in production can be found in this IBM paper
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/462/ shahidi .html
In particular table 2 identifies sources of variation

I call

[ANY5546]

Shenanigans.

No way in heck can you increase the amount of storage a HDD has so drastically. I mean, the physical disks can only hold so much, and no matter what you do, they arent going to magically double or triple.

These are physical disks, they have a set number of sectors. One size and one size only.

Unless you get into the whole mega vs. mibi byte but thats a whole nother can of worms!

Re:I call

[flacco]

No way in heck can you increase the amount of storage a HDD has so drastically. I mean, the physical disks can only hold so much, and no matter what you do, they arent going to magically double or triple.

unless the disks were secretly, specifically designed this way.

for example, for the benefit of spooks who want the device to maintain a rolling log of disk data for some period of time after the unsuspecting user thinks it's been deleted/reformatted/security-wiped.

Re:I call

[Anonymous Coward]

or, less mulderific, wouldn't it be easier for the HD manufacturer to make a bunch of the same drive, then sell them as 80gb, 100gb, 120gb, etc, with only a simple configuration change? It's the whole concept client perception. Like how it doensn't matter if you buy a chevey, or a cadalac, or whatever, they're all gm, all the same company. Marketing baby, marketing.

Re:I call

[Anonymous Coward]

eerrr there was supposed to be a HTML-style "/right wing rave parody" at the end of that.... but it was eaten by monsters.

The post illustrates how a perfectly rational argument can be defeated by a right wing rave. Because, how wrong does the parent look now he is associated with homosexuals and liberal bias and al gore? He looks VERY wrong in light of my "exijesus". And hence the power of the right wing rave, trump card of the modern democracy.

Re:I call

[Ohreally_factor]

I've been getting faster rotational speeds since I opened up my HD and removed the "dummy" platters.

Re:I call

[racermd]

Ahhh... The overclocked (overrotated?) Hard Disk. Make sure your platters are perfectly balanced and aligned, though, or risk shattering them all due to rotational discrepancy flow. Use a Sharpie pen for miniscule adjustments to the hyperfluid spindle bearing.

Don't forget to water-cool it, too.

Re:I call

[BlackHawk-666]

In Soviet Russia your hard drive writes to you.

Re:I call

[Drakonite]

wouldn't it be easier for the HD manufacturer to make a bunch of the same drive, then sell them as 80gb, 100gb, 120gb, etc, with only a simple configuration change?

Or they could manufacture the drives as a set of platers, and to set the size of the drive they only include as many platers as are required to hold that much data. Then not only would they have smaller drives to put on the market, but they'd save money on materials and production too!

...Oh wait! They DO do that!

Re:I call

[Magic5Ball]

These are physical disks, they have a set number of sectors. One size and one size only.

Indeed. However, it is quite easy to write incorrect information to file allocation tables and such (for example, to over-report the number of free sectors, or the cluster size, etc) which software trusts as being correct. This happens with some frequency with corrupt floppy disks, which can report hundreds of megabytes of data or free space (or both!) if the FAT is corrupted in the right way.

Editing a FAT12/FAT16 as above using the DOS debug tool, Norton Disk Editor, or other utility is left as an excercise for the reader.

Re:I call

[Anonymous Coward]

I know for a fact that a certain gas boiler, made by a company that rhymes with another word for 'minicab' and named after a ciudad en espana occasionally mentioned by Basil Fawlty, and sold in different kilowattages at correspondingly different prices, can be converted from one rating to another simply by changing jumpers on the PCB. This appliance varies the speed of the fan to draw more or less gas through the firebox; the plumbing is the same on all models, but the low-kW variants cap the fan RPM.

Of course, if you try it at home, you will invalidate the approval on the appliance and probably your home insurance -- and blowing up a party wall without insurance can be an expensive business.

Re:I call

[glassesmonkey]

for the benefit of spooks who want the device to maintain a rolling log of disk data for some period of time

It's true, the Feds have been after Batboy and Sasquatch for some time. This way they can possibly intercept email from aliens and Michael Jackson and the great frozen north.

Re:I call

[moro_666]

basically if something gets lost on the windows machine it doesn't really matter anyway (problably yet more viruses and spyware gets corrupter, oh dear eh ?)

anyway, i'm a bit techie and for calming down the people, there is no 50% extraspace in any hdd, really :)

just some wierd hoax brought up by people to make them ruin their hdd-s and buy some new ones :) :)

[considering the work/software/configuration loss you will have whily trying this, it's cheaper to buy a new hdd]

Re:I call

[muffen]

If you wanna speed it up even more, you should defraggle the drive :)

Re:I call

[MyHair]

Oh shit, now I'm paranoid!

Re:I call

[Sick Boy]

You defraggled your motherdisk? Awesome!

Re:I call

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, that stopped being funny years ago. Seriously. Stop posting it. Hell, it never really was funny in the first place. So stop it.

Re:I call

[Ohreally_factor]

Hey, thanks! Now my motherdisk is no longer wobbly! I've had to use a cinderblock to stop my laptup compyutoer from rattling of my desk, but no more. I'm thinking of performing the same operation on my laundry machine.

Simple corruption

[gadfium]

I'm a Ghost developer.

This is just a method of corrupting your partition table so the same disk sectors appear more than once. If you try this, don't ask Symantec for help afterwards.

Re:Simple corruption

[superhoe]

In reply to my previous post.. this is just what i suspected. So it's simply useless. Gnaah..

Re:Simple corruption

[myowntrueself]

Oh come *on* people.

Almost every slashdotter wants to find new and interesting ways to hose their data.

Its only natural.

Re:Simple corruption

[tangent3]

This must be one of the rare times where a comment needs to be modded +6.

Re:Simple corruption

[eggstasy]

I once made a floppy that reported its size as 4 gigs, back when hard drives couldnt even reach 1.
It's pretty easy to set your hard drive to whatever "size" you want it to be... just dont expect it to work properly :P
Having said that, there were a few proggies floating around back then that could make your floppies slightly larger by formatting them with a weird, non-standard configuration.
You could do wonderful things with them, from 1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable, to some magic 1.22 meg format that mysteriously made my floppies faster.
Ahh, those were the days ;)
I have very *ahem* fond memories of spending the whole day formatting and copying Civ2 to 96 floppies... ouch!

Re:Simple corruption

[whereiswaldo]

One flaw I found in the article is that they say you need two drives, both containing an OS. Later they ask you to swap out one of them for another drive with an OS. That whole section sounds like smoke and mirrors.
If this extra space really exists, why do you have to "trick" the OS into believing it is there? I was expecting some mention of a low level format at least, but there's no way this will work. I'll bet the didn't do any data integrity tests which would no doubt show right away the flaw in their system. Oh well, who needs proof if you're just storing appz and mp3s.

Re:Simple corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just a method of corrupting your partition table so the same disk sectors appear more than once. If you try this, don't ask Symantec for help afterwards.

This is actually a great technique, as long as you don't want to read your data after you've written them.

Re:Simple corruption

[The Clockwork Troll]

I'm a Ghost developer. This is just a method of corrupting your partition table so the same disk sectors appear more than once.

I've used Norton Ghost; are you claiming prior art?

Re:Simple corruption

[displaced80]

Two words:

'skew' and 'interleave'

ahhh.... good times, good times... :)

Re:Simple corruption

[Kris_J]

I can make a floppy 32MB and it works reliably. Still don't have any idea what to do with it afterwards though.

I can also recall having over 800MB of data on a 640MB hard drive. Removing Drivespace was a bastard. :) More recently I copied 8GB of student files off a 6GB partition on a Novell server -- 7zipped down to 2Gig though.

Re:Simple corruption

[DerPflanz]

Yes, I remember, I had a harddrive of 20 MB that reported something about 20 GIGS of free space. I never thought that day that we really would have so much space and still complain that it is too little. Anyway, that drive was pretty corrupted. don't remember though if I could get that drive fixed in any way.

Re:Simple corruption

[Fweeky]

Heh, I remember how Amigas used to have a more powerful FDD controller than PC's, meaning they could squeeze more on a disk; the space-optimized filesystems there let you squeeze almost 1MB onto a single DD floppy vs the already impressive default of 880k; and yup, you got nearly 2M from a HD floppy! ;)

Anyone wanting to try such amazing technology today can use a Catweasel, although I'm not sure if it supports anything more exotic than standard Mac/Amiga floppies.

Re:Simple corruption

[CrystalChronicles]

Interesting... 32megs on a single floppy... Wouldn't be much use now with Cdrs being so cheap and commonplace now though. Do you remember what year that slashdot article is from? One thing slashdot needs is to put the year in the dates because with the real old posts its hard to tell when it was posted. =)

Re:Simple corruption

[Makarakalax]

Or perhaps one of the few times a comment deserves +5?

Re:Simple corruption

[Jugalator]

Yes, Amiga drives were king in the world of floppy disks back then :-D

One of the amazing/weird/cool Amiga things, along with semi boot persistant and dynamic RAM disks :-)

Re:Simple corruption

[Ilgaz]

I really wonder Ghost developers face when they first read that article :)

Like, Shock?

*nix only and Mac guys maybe not knowing it, Ghost is one of rare good codes coming out of Symantec and the primary purpose of it is DATA SAFETY lol... So, its like a huge joke.

Re:Simple corruption

[Kris_J]

'01 I think -- you can see it in the URL. But I got my drive only a few months back at a stocktake sale. Even managed to find a new 240 disk for it, which I'm using for irregular backup of my email and such like.

Re:Simple corruption

[MrAngryForNoReason]

1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable,

You made floppies even slower and less reliable I wouldn't have thought that was even possible. Obviously some kind of WORN file system (Write Once Read Never!)

Re:Simple corruption

[Dahan]

You could do wonderful things with them, from 1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable

I don't know if they were slower or less reliable... the disk still spins at the same rate, and there are still 80 tracks, same as a 1.44 floppy. However, there's more data on a track, therefore it's actually faster than a standard floppy.

MS distributed Windows 95, 98, and I think NT 3.5x and Office 95 on 1.7MB (1.68MB, actually) DMF floppies. For the poor guys who didn't have a CDROM drive :)

Linux supports these non-standard formats... for DMF, see /dev/fd0?1680. Also check out the fd(4) manpage.

Re:Simple corruption

[jsebrech]

I remember it mattered a lot what program you used to format and copy those floppies. Standard format and diskcopy was dogslow, but when you used something like diskdupe, it was nice and fast. Quick formats in less than a second, anyone?

Re:Simple corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

You can change the date format in your prefs. (Homepage->Date/Time Format)

Re:Simple corruption

[Lord Kano]

You could do wonderful things with them, from 1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable, to some magic 1.22 meg format that mysteriously made my floppies faster.

I still have no concept of who killed of the 2.88 Mb Floppy and why they did it.

I have very *ahem* fond memories of spending the whole day formatting and copying Civ2 to 96 floppies... ouch!

One time I had a client who needed 600 copies of a floppy disk with the same 20k file on it. I charged them $0.25 per disk for the format and copy and $0.10 per disk to affix labels. My commission ended up being over $100 just for swapping out floppies every 90 seconds on about 6 Macs for like 3 hours.

Mmmm the good old days when being able to fix a computer just about guaranteed you a good job.

LK

Re:Simple corruption

[Deslack]

/dev/null

is one living implementation of the aforementioned WORN File System. And it doesn't require any disks at all.

Re:Simple corruption

[Ziviyr]

The trick was the Amiga formatted discs with one gap at the start of a track, PCs put a gap between each sector. This is ignoring filesystem efficiencies.

Re:Simple corruption

[cybermint]

I remember once I formatted a 256MB compact flash card to something like 9999999GB. Unfortunately the card was going bad. =(

Re:Simple corruption

[fireman sam]

Ahh, but don't forget:

Double Density floppy : 720k
Quad Density floppy : 1.44M
High Density floopy : 2.88M

Most floppy disks are high density. I don't know why, they just are.

Re:Simple corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

tomsrtbt uses a 1.7MB floppy...

http://www.toms.net/rb/tomsrtbt.FAQ

Virtually all 1.44 drives support 1.722 just fine, but it is possible for an extended format to break a floppy drive, use tomsrtbt at your own risk.

Re:Simple corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga had a less powerful disk controller. In fact it basically didn't have one at all, all the bit level stuff is done with the CPU and blitter, all the control by the CPU. The 'controller' simple reads and writes a raw bitstream. Does give 100% control over the process which is more powerful in one sense.

Because the Amiga OS was so intrusive I ended up writing my own FD read/write code from scratch and freed up substantial chunks of RAM for my game. Doing the same for the Atari ST with its real controller was much harder and only really practical for disk reads.

Re:Simple corruption

[orkysoft]

Yeah, on the Atari ST, I routinely formatted DD floppies with 10 sectors per track instead of 9, so I got 800KB instead of 720KB.

Re:Simple corruption

[fdiskne1]

I remember how the software companies back then would implement non-standard sectors on the floppies, causing some very strange disk-reading noises. A few even used the floppy drive to play music by causing them to read the disk in some wierd way. It's been too long. I don't remember the program names or what companies they were, but anyone who had/has an Amiga might be able to tell you.

Re:Simple corruption

[AndroidCat]

Just so long as you didn't use the utilities that formated out to track 99. (Explaining to people that GEMDOS just used whatever numbers were in the boot sector, and the drive had 82 physical tracks at most was a waste of time.)

Formating track 82. Verified.
Formating track 83. *SMACK* Verified.
Formating track 84. *SMACK* Verified... *ouch*

Re:Simple corruption

[adamjaskie]

Floppies were always slow, but have only gotten unreliable in the last few years. I remember old floppy disks used to be quite reliable, back around 1995 and earlier. Most of the old floppies I have are still readable today. Since then, as floppies were replaced by CDRs, they have gotten cheaper and crappier. Now, I rarely have a floppy hold data for more than an hour or so. I had a friend write a file to a floppy for me when my Resnet was disconnected for downloading the Windows 2000 source code, and it was corrupt by the time he got it to my dorm room.

Re:Simple corruption

[ByteSlicer]

That's how urban legends start. That file probably got corrupted while writing it to disk (cause: bad floppy, bad drive, or floppy formatted on misaligned drive). Time had nothing to do with it. If you tried it 1ms after you copied it, I bet you couldn't read it either. Similarly, I had some cousin who insisted his floppy got erased when he dropped it on the way home...

Re:Simple corruption

[adamjaskie]

Well, there might have been a problem writing it, but the point is, I didn't have as many of these problems back in the early/mid 90s, when floppies cost a dollar each rather than five cents each, and a floppy drive cost more than $8.95. Manufacturers are getting sloppy, because people don't use floppies much anymore, and aren't willing to pay as much for them, because they have CDRs.

Re:Simple corruption

[eric2hill]

"to some magic 1.22 meg format that mysteriously made my floppies faster"

No magic at all. I used the shit out of that program. It was called fdformat and even came with Pascal source code! scheweet There were two little parameters called Xnnn and Ynnn that did sector sliding.

From the fdformat docs... These options can be used to enhance the performance of your disk up to 100%. This is a bit difficult to explain. Imagine a standard 360 kB disk. It has 9 sectors on each track numbered 1 to 9. Normally the sectors on all tracks ordered "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9". With sector sliding of 1 you order "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9" on track 0, "9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8" on track 1, "8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7" of track 2 and so on. You can easily imagine, that it takes a little time, when your diskette drive head steps from one track to another. But your diskette continues rotating. Without sector sliding your diskette is positioned to sector 2 or 3 on the next track, when the stepping is done. It needs nearly a full revolution until sector 1 of the next track can be read. With sector sliding of 1 or 2 your diskette is positioned exactly on sector 1, when it starts reading again.

This little bit of magic was somewhat drive-specific, since some drives were faster than others, you needed to use different sliding numbers, but all in all, it's a very cool hack.

Re:Simple corruption

[anti-trojan]

You could do wonderful things with them, from 1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable, to some magic 1.22 meg format that mysteriously made my floppies faster.

FDFormat would format floppies at 1.72 MB, and with sector sliding. They were almost twice as fast as normal ones.

Re:Simple corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how urban legends start. That file probably got corrupted while writing it to disk (cause: bad floppy, bad drive, or floppy formatted on misaligned drive). Time had nothing to do with it. If you tried it 1ms after you copied it, I bet you couldn't read it either.

Every good admin knows that magnetic domains fade over time. You better not expect to keep data more than 3-10 years depending on the media. I have a box of unused preformatted floppies from about 10 years ago. They worked fine then. They don't work now, unless you reformat them. The servo information has faded. It's not a legend. Just reformat the old floppies before using them. As far as the data on your old floppies, you're SOL.

Don't believe me? Get out your old Win3.1 disks (or something you know used to work) and check them for read errors.

Re:Simple corruption

[ByteSlicer]

Dear Anonymous Coward,

If you bothered to read this thread, you'd know I was talking about an hour worth of time (or a single drop to the floor). If floppies would lose their magnetism in a mere 1h or due to a single drop, then there would never have been much use for them anyway.

Sincerely,
ByteSlicer

Re:Simple corruption

[SoupGuru]

Civ2. Best. Game. Ever.

I still play it on an almost daily basis. Hell, that's why I got the Radeon 9800...

Re:Simple corruption

[iantri]

Yes, some Linux distros even used to use these larger disks as the root/boot install disk(s. Back when it would fit on one.)

These were fairly reliable; there are even larger formats you can achieve (with a dos program called '2M', it's in the Simtel archive), however they tended to be a bit unreliable since they worked by writing data more densely, and with more tracks than disks were supposed to have.

Problem is, a lot of disk drives couldn't read them reliably or at all...

Re:Simple corruption

[Megane]

Who killed the 2.88 Mb floppy? The designers. As I recall, there was some incompatibility with them reading (or maybe writing) older disk formats. That's the best way to kill a new format.

And if it wasn't the designers fault, then it was CD-ROM, since now manufacturers could distribute 650 megs on a single disk that cost under a dollar in quantity, and was more reliable too.

Re:Simple corruption

[infinite9]

I was expecting some mention of a low level format at least,

That's what I was expecting. No custom bios? No custom hard drive logic boards? No creative geometry? I thought someone had figured out a way to double the number of cylinders or maybe increase the number of sectors per track, or at least claim the spares for general use. This procedure is just plain stupid.

Re:Simple corruption

[osu-neko]

Heh, I remember how Amigas used to have a more powerful FDD controller than PC's, meaning they could squeeze more on a disk

This sort of trick usually works best with "less powerful" FDD controllers. "More powerful" controllers do more themselves, "less powerful" controllers rely on the CPU to do more work for them -- and that's the trick. You could have all kinds of fun with Apple II floppy disks because the "controller" had no brains at all, the CPU did everything...

Re:Simple corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

Having said that, there were a few proggies floating around back then that could make your floppies slightly larger by formatting them with a weird, non-standard configuration.

Yeah, you increase the number of sectors per track and the number of tracks. VERY different from this trick, as it would actually work. (no way you could do this on HDs, floppies have incredibly low density.)

iirc, there was a program that'd format the disk with a varying number of sectors per track, increasing as you moved away from the center, and managed to get a full 2MB on a 1.44 floppy. You had to load a TSR to read them, of course. The BIOS could manage in many cases to read the ones with a constant sectors per track, because there's a field in the BPB for it, but there's no way it'd make sense of varying sectors per track.

Re:Simple corruption

[orkysoft]

No, I kept it to 80 tracks. That's why I had 800KB on the discs and not 820KB.

IIRC, I used a program called FCopy to format and copy floppies.

Never had a single failure with the 3.5"ers, though. Until I got a PC with HD floppies...

Re:Simple corruption

[ajs]

It might be corruption, but it's a handy technique on older fileysystem types if you know what you're doing. For example, if you make two partitions for root and swap for some UNIX or UNIX-alike which allocates blocks on the disk relatively linearly, you can give yourself a nice big, juicy swap space that overlaps the upper half of your filesystem.

When you get close to allocating half of the lower partition, you shut down the box and re-size your swap space down to 1/3 of the disk and again to 1/4 when needed. It's touchy but I've done it when I had no other options (e.g. had a very old SunOS installer that refused to install because of space it claimed to need (but did not)).

It's just a disgusting hack though, and no one should do it unless they are backed into a corner by growling tigers. It certainly has nothing to do with hidden partitions (like the OEM restore partitions on many Windows installs) or bad block allocation (10% of the disk at most).

Floppy / Drill fun

[Channard]

This does sound suspect, but it reminds me of the trick you used to be able to do with 720 floppy disks - you could drill a hole where the hole on a 1.4MB disk would be and use it as a 1.4MB disk. Trouble was, it wouldn't retain data for very long, but it usually lasted for a day at least before the data degraded.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Canadian1729]

Then what kind of disks did you use? I did that to literally hundreds of disks more than 10 years ago, and they still work perfectly today; I've used some in the past week.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Anonymous Coward]

You use floppies??? I thought everyone uses USB key fobs now...

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[innocent_white_lamb]

THIS method is obviously BS (to put it mildly) but back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth we could double the size (or was that 1.5x, I can't remember) of a MFM hard drive by hooking it up an RLL controller. I remember putting a full-height IBM 10mb hard drive into my 386 and making it into either a 15mb or 20mb hard drive. I used that hard drive to store and rotate Fidonet echomail for several years, as I recall.

That worked because RLL encoded the data using a different method than MFM.

This, though, is smoke and mirrors.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Piquan]

Sure, since RLL is a compression technology. You just put a hardware compression system between the computer and the drive. Completely different beast here.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[obeythefist]

USB key fob huh?
Or USB hard drive?
Memory stick?
What the heck are we supposed to call these things? They're great but we don't know what to call it. Kinda like fizzy soft drinks. Great but nobody has ever standardised on a name for them.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[mlyle]

Sure, RLL was called/marketed as "compression".

But it's not really compression, but just a more-efficient coding scheme of how to store data on the disk than MFM. You don't lose capacity with RLL if you put a gzipped file on the drive, as you would if it was true data compression.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Canadian1729]

RLL is not a compression technology. It has more tracks per inch than MFM. Saying it's compression is like saying a High Density floppy gets more storage than a single or double density because it uses compression.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[tap]

RLE is a kind of compression. RLL hard drive controllers didn't do any kind of hardware compression. RLL is just a more efficient and more complex way of turning bits into flux reversals on the hard drive platters. See here for a good description.

Back in the day of MFM and RLL controllers, the hard drive controller did much of what the drive electronics and firmware do in modern hard drives, that's why you could have MFM or RLL controllers. Hard drives still use RLL encoding today.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[clymere]

Theres a very simple reason for this. The way I understand it, back when there were DD and HD floppies, they were both made on the same assembly line - much like say, an Intel proccessor. If one disk in a batch didn't pass a certain test, the whole batch was labeled DD(same way you get low-end Intel chips), despite the fact that it was likely that most of them would in fact function just fine as HD disks. There never was any fundamental difference between the two formats, by punching a hole you were just removing the flimsy protection they artifically put there to make it a DD disk.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Anonymous Coward]

USB key fob = one of those things that fit on a keychain. It's solid state
USB hard drive = a hard drive with moving parts.
memory stick = proprietary Sony technology

But I agree. Too many types.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Ilgaz]

Atari 800XL+1050 disk drive days, we used to "take out" a part of the diskette and use it doublesided ;) Now that was real too.

It was 5.25 of course

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[darien]

They seem increasingly to be called "pen-drives", but I wish they weren't because I've never seen one that looked remotely like a pen. Then again, they do look a bit like pen-knives (which of course don't look like pens either).

Anyway, I can't be doing with them because my USB ports are at the back of my tower which is under my desk, while my CD-writer is at the front and my iPod sits on top. If you ask me they should ship them with little USB extender cables.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Genda]

Being a hardware techie during the epock of floppy drives, the 720kb disks were simple 1.44mb disks that failed to pass batch testing in mass production. Of course the falure rate in any given batch might be 5% or less, so the other 95 disks would be perfectly fine formatted to 1.44mb. That and even the bad disks could be pushed on a short term basis if they formatted at all.

As for doubling storage... I have a hard time imagining this working in any sane fashion. We've already done a great deal in the area of data compression in operating systems, and the limitations at this point have to do with the time required to encode and decode compressed files in a humanly reasonable timeframe. Doubling current storage by some trick of formatting seems like a pretty dangerous endeavor... make sure you're not using precious data for your first attempts...

Genda

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[cicadia]

Kinda like fizzy soft drinks. Great but nobody has ever standardised on a name for them.

Which is exactly why they're never going to catch on.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Flaming_Ice]

Obviously you haven't been browsing ThinkGeek. They have a usb flash drive there that is built into a functional pen and one built into a watch.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Alsee]

This, though, is smoke and mirrors.

I did it twice in a row on my 80 gig drive and it worked great! Turned it into nearly 260 gig!

I dunno about mirrors, but you're definitely right about it involving smoke. I'm gonna need to install an extra fan in the case.

-

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[darien]

Obviously you haven't been browsing ThinkGeek.

Ah, now there's a put-down. ;)

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[rew]

That worked because RLL encoded the data using a different method than MFM.

Right. MFM encodes something like 2 bits for every 4 magnetic areas on the drive, while RLL encodes 3 bits. Nowadays they code something like 16 bits for every 17 areas.

I remember the times when the geometry of the drive was compiled into the OS! When I got my RLL controller the OS (Minix) only could use the first 17 sectors of every track. But my RLL drive had 26! So eventually, I coded up a second disk driver with the new geometry. Copy the data from the old driver to the new (yes, with a live filesystem and all!), and then remove the old driver :-) Those were the days.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Big Nemo '60]

Another trick I used to play with 5,25" floppy disks: once upon a time, we had 9 sectors, 2 sides, 40 tracks (0.5x9x2x40=360 kb) "double density" floppies and 15 sectors, 2 sides, 80 tracks (0.5x15x2x80=1,200 kb) "high density" ones - the latter much more expensive. At least one manufacturer (Olivetti IIRC) supported an 'intermediate' format - 9 sectors, 2 sides, 80 tracks (0.5x9x2x80=720 kb).

The trick was, if you had a "high density" floppy drive you could install a BIOS extension to support the 'intermediate' format and double the capacity of the (much cheaper!) "double density" floppies. If you had both 5,25" (HD) and 3,5" drives, you could even copy DD 3,5" floppies on 5,25" ones (using DISKCOPY)!

Apparently the 40 tracks limitation was only a characteristic of the drive, even if the medium was not certified for 80 tracks formatting. I used those floppies for years without a flaw.

(FYI the "High Density" 1.44 Mb 3,5" floppy has 18 sectors, 2 sides and 80 tracks)

Ah, sweet memories...

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[canavan]

The days of ST506 controllers have been just 10 years ago, and already nobody remembers what they were?

MFM and RLL are just methods of encoding analog signals to digital data (and vice versa), and RLL just is much more efficient. MFM needs more flux changes per bit, and thus with the ST-506 interfaced harddiskd was able to only put 17 sectors on each track of the harddisk, while RLL could cram 26 in the same space. Note that the number of tracks could not be changed since the positioning of the heads was controlled by the drives themselves, while the encoding of the digital data to flux changes is done on the controller (usually that would have been an ISA card, anyone remember those? damn, reading slashdot makes me feel old).

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Same trick with 5.25" single-sided floppies - you just had to cut a nick in the opposite edge to the factory-cut nick to make them double-sided! USed this trick frequently with our old 8-bit Atari 800...

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Piquan]

Thanks for the link.

It seems I was wrong. In image technology, RLL is a compression technique. (See the old MacPaint format; I think that BMPs use the same technique.) When I first saw RLL being used in computers, I thought it was the same critter.

From reading your link, I see that the technique is the same, but with a different application: to provide fewer flux changes per mm. But it does so with a significantly lower limit than RLL in image compression does, which causes it to have a constant number of clocks per encoded bit. (In image RLL, the upper limit is often 255 storage bits, so you get a variable number of stored bits per image bit. In some types of images-- mostly the ones that LZW works well on-- this leads to fewer stored bits per image bit.)

Thanks for the info!

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Luigi30]

I had a single-sided read-only Commie 64 disk. I wanted to write to it. I put it into my Commie, and saved something. I heard a loud grinding noise, and promptly killed the Commie and 1541, then opened the drive. The disk's read-only tape had almost a hole punched through it by the drive head! I was like 'what, the, fuck!?' and put the disk away.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[toady]

I used to do something similar with the old 5.25" floppies for my Commodore 64. Single-sided floppies could be made double-sided by cutting a notch out of the side with a pair of scissors and inserting them upside down.

Extra space for Dizzy games!

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Rolo Tomasi]

No, they weren't. HD and DD diskettes were actually very different - the DD had only half the coercivity of the HD. I and a few other people I knew tried to convert our DDs to HDs using the method you describe. It worked, but after a short time (days, weeks), disks would randomly start to crap out, become unreadable, etc.

I don't know why all the other guys here write that it worked, because it didn't, and I don't know anyone who got these "converted" DDs to work reliably. Maybe they do that for the same reason why old people tell their grandchildren bullshit stories. Yes, it was a hack. But it wasn't clever, it didn't work. Due to the lower coercivity of the DD media, tracks would simply "bleed" into each other, making the disk unreadable.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[dave420]

I used a hole punch for it. Worked every time. Suckers :-P

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Deliveranc3]

Well since no one has the sand to try it we'll never know but it's entirely possible that it's just a copy of winrar running constantly and archiving things on the way to the drive.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[cyberjessy]

I used to use DMF formatted floppies a long time ago. You could fit in abt 1.72MB into a standard 1.44 floppy. I guess there was a 1.68MB format too.

Earlier MS Software used to come in DMF format. To make your own DMF floppies you can use WinImage 2.2+.

Oh... i dont think this information would help anyone. Just a little historical perspective. I havent seen a DMF formatted floppy in the last 5 years.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I gotta agree here. I used to buy 720k's in packs of 100 and drill the lot - used to take forever to format them all - but they still work to this day and yes, that was around 10 years ago

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[schon]

In image technology, RLL is a compression technique. (See the old MacPaint format; I think that BMPs use the same technique.)

No, that would still be RLE. It stands for "Run Length Encoding". (See here.

It's so called because it compresses runs of identical bytes into (typically) 2-byte values (the original value, and the length of the run.)

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Impossible. Read-only tape is farther than the radius of the disk.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[SillyNickName4me]

Heh, a litle whoile ago I stumbled upon my Amiga 2000... It contains this 40mb st-506 disk.. only 3.5", yet heavy as a stone ;)
Ah well.. at any rate, my st-506 controller is a zorro-II card (A2090-A).. of course it also has a scsi (1) controller ;)

I was rather surprised to find that the drive still works... but even more surprised to find that most of my Amiga floppies still work as well.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[metamatic]

I worked in data recovery back in the days of floppy disks, and we used to get endless drilled and notched disks to recover.

High Density disks are different to regular Double Density ones. Take a look at the surface, it's not even the same color. Sheesh.

Sure, maybe if you buy DD floppy disks from a good brand you can notch them and use them as flaky HD floppies, and maybe your drive is good enough that the out-of-spec data remains readable. If so, you're exceptionally lucky.

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Tore S B]

Reminds me of...(cue wavy video and waybackwhen memories)

The IBM tape drives had an interesting evolution, from 100bpi in mid-50s, using the NRZI (Non-Return to Zero IBM) technology, and then the MFM system which gave them 1600bpi, and then in late 60s they reached 6250 with phase recording. Those tapes moved at 200 inches per second!

-tsb

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Hes Nikke]

USB key fob huh?
i useualy stick with either the brand name (i've got a QuickDrive!) or just the DiskOnKey, or KeyDrive.
Or USB hard drive?
but there are actual hard drive's that plug into USB, i'm assuming you're referring to the flash memory with a USB plug on it. a hard drive it is not.
Memory stick?
while flash memory, Memory Stick (TM) isn't quite the same thing as a KeyDrive, Memory Stick (TM) needs a separate reader if you want to use it for storage other than with your Sony digital camera, or Sony Clie. (besides, i've been calling SIMMS, and DIMMS memory sticks for years more than Sony Memory Stick has been on the market)

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Suidae]

INteresting link. Would RLL be a suitable compression scheme for digital radio communication?

I'm using the RF stage from a ZipZap SE (a Radio Shack brand 1/64th scale RC car) to transmit my own data. The link normally operates at about 1430 transitions per second, using an FM encoding for a raw data rate of 715 bps. I'm curious if RLL encoding of the data would bump the raw data rate up closer to 2000 bps. I'm pretty sure the RF stuff will handle it, its just using a carrier present/absent signaling method (I forget what this scheme is called).

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Jafafa Hots]

Hell, back in 1979 with my TRS-80 Model I, we used to turn our single sided 5-1/2" floppies (or were they 5-1/4"? I always forget) into double-sided ones with the quick use of a hole-punch!

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Take it as a compliment and just laugh at the troll :)

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Piquan]

This just isn't my day for knowing stuff, is it? :-)

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[obeythefist]

Ouch man, that must have stung!

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[obeythefist]

I'm not suggesting these are the right names, but they're all terms that are commonly used to describe USB flash memory drives. The flash drives and the HDD caddy's are both sold as USB hard drives in some places here, but the name is different from shop to shop. Just because it's technically not the right term has never stopped erroneous nomenclature in the past!

Re:Floppy / Drill fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I generally considered myself exceptionally lucky if a "real" HD floppy remained readable for more than a week (in any drive), so it never really made much difference whether the floppy was hole-punched or not.

Sadly, the nonexistent margins in the CD-R market are now ensuring that history repeat itself.

that looks like a *bad* thing

[atlasheavy]

I have to agree with all of the naysayers on this. As much as I'd love to double my hard disk space for free, there's no such thing as a free lunch. This looks like a really terrific way to hose all of the data on your hard drive. You're really better off just shopping around for a reasonably priced 100gb hard drive or something instead.

Re:that looks like a *bad* thing

[Ulven]

You can overclock your processor, RAM and video card. Assuming you do it properly and they still work otherwise, isn't that close enough to a free lunch?

Almost makes sense to be able to do the same thing to your hard drive.

Especially if they are all manufactured to the same specs, and then get rated during testing.

There aren't that many seperate capacity levels. 80 GB, 120 GB, 160 GB etc. Your 80GB drive might well have managed 110 GB, not passed at 120 GB, and so been rated at the lower capacity.

Or something like that.

I'm not saying that the method in the article is the way to go about it, merely that the general idea may have merit.

Re:that looks like a *bad* thing

[pilybaby]

I tried to overclock my monitor by 2" once. I don't reccomend it!

Re:that looks like a *bad* thing

[mt-biker]

I have to agree with all of the naysayers on this. As much as I'd love to double my hard disk space for free, there's no such thing as a free lunch. This looks like a really terrific way to hose all of the data on your hard drive. You're really better off just shopping around for a reasonably priced 100gb hard drive or something instead.

Nothing against you, atlasheavy, but this _really_ didn't rate a '+4 Insightful'.

Re:that looks like a *bad* thing

[Anonymous Coward]

"Almost makes sense to be able to do the same thing to your hard drive."

Yeah, you can get more space if you just make the heads write *harder*.

Re:that looks like a *bad* thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I've always felt that the overclocking crowd were a bunch of idiots. That some of them might actually think this would work on their hard drives and actually try it would simply confirm their status as the ricers of the IT world.

Re:that looks like a *bad* thing

[penguinbrat]

"Select the file system type you prefer and format with quick format" This should be your first clue, this only rewrites the fs table (TOC).

It sounds to me like this is simply a case of ghost screwing up the geometry settings in the partition table, and then ofcourse there is yet another Windoze bug to exploit it - sorry, I mean get hosed by it...

This sounds sort of like something I used to do for automatic installation way back when, use 'dd' to dump then entire contents of "hdX" to some file

# dd if=/dev/hdN of=/tmp/dump

then dump the contents of that file to another HD that is the same size or bigger.

# dd if=/tmp/dump of=/dev/hdN+1

The result is that everything will work just fine, and running fdisk (on Linux) will show an uncorrupt partition table, BUT that geometry (obtained via BIOS) shows a much bigger drive, but DO NOT save the resulting table (w) - fdisk will rewrite it and then hose everything up! Pretty much just the opposite of this method....

Re:that looks like a *bad* thing

[Blakey Rat]

This is a bug in Norton Ghost, which has probably been fixed... the article mentions you have to has a *specific* build number and not patch it. Ghost is the software mucking about with the Partition Table, not anything by Microsoft.

Blame Microsoft when they're at fault, but you can't blame them for everything.

Anyone who puts data on a 'quick formatted' partition is an idiot anyway, in my opinion.

Re:that looks like a *bad* thing

[atlasheavy]

i agree wholeheartedly, but such are the vagaries of life where you post a comment a minute after a story goes live ;-)

it involves 2 bn dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

2 billion dollars, 3,000 scientists, and a cloning centre.

yeah right.

[User 956]

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.

Some 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.

Don't believe me? Go ahead and try it. You'll lose all those Buffy episodes you've downloaded on KaZaA, and instead you'll have to spank it to the Portman pictures your mom doesn't know you have stashed under your bed.

Re:yeah right.

[silvaran]

Some drives are known to short stroke their platters.

Is that what kids are calling it nowadays?

Re:yeah right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and all these kids are making spam profitable by buying those pills to make their short strokes, long ones.

Re:yeah right.

[loyalsonofrutgers]

This sort of reminds me of something my idiot brother once did to my parents computer. My mom was complaining that the computer was acting strangely, so I went down there one weekend to take a look at it. Somehow someone had managed to trick the computer into showing the same partition twice. With different partition sizes. And if you deleted files in one of the partitions, it would delete it in the other (but would only show up after you rebooted). So I swore at my brother up and down, backed up the data, and reformatted. Worst weekend ever.

Re:yeah right.

[PacoTaco]

I've discovered a method to turn a single processor computer into a dual processor machine! First go into the BIOS and turn Hyper-Threading on. Finish booting the system. Now get a hacksaw. Hit reboot and quickly saw the processor in half. Before the system restarts, kill the power. Take the left half of the CPU and put it in the second processor slot. Start the system again and everything should be working wonderfully!

Re:yeah right.

[The Wicked Priest]

I'm going to reply to your sig, because by coindicence it's more or less on topic for this story, and the entry in your journal can't be replied to anymore:

The sales clerk was on crack.

Re:yeah right.

[Gannoc]

"Its not working!"

"You must not have cut right down the middle. Buy a dremel."

Re:yeah right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hit reboot and quickly saw the processor in half

Which way? diagonally, or horizontally? Hurry up, I can't wait to try this!

Re:yeah right.

[anti-trojan]

My shot is that the clerk was most probably referring to MPEG compression used by movie DVDs.

Re:yeah right.

[Gunzour]

You have that backwards, don't you? The *right* half of the CPU goes in the 2nd processor slot, not the left half. I made the same mistake the first time I tried this.

BTW, if you get a 2nd full size fan/heatsink instead of cutting the original one in half with the CPU, you can do some massive overclocking of your 'new' dual processors.

What *idiot* dared to post this on /.?

[altamira]

In other news, witnesses reported UFO sightings all over the country...

Re:What *idiot* dared to post this on /.?

[WIAKywbfatw]

Ah, properly vetted articles. The holy grail of Slashdot readers.

Re:What *idiot* dared to post this on /.?

[Kiryat Malachi]

timothy.

Re:What *idiot* dared to post this on /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why an AC submitted the story! You'd think somebody is dumb enough to submit it with his own nick?

Re:What *idiot* dared to post this on /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this is a bit redundant, but still.
I find a UFO sighting much more probable then what this article tells us.

Disk is cheap.

[djh101010]

My data is way more important than squeezing a bit extra out of an 80 dollar drive. Interesting idea and all that, but this isn't like in the old days of the "punch a new hole to make your 5-1/4 inch floppy double sided", where if you screw up, you lose only a disk worth of data - with this, if you screw up, you lose a _disk worth_ of data.

If I need more space, I'll buy a bigger drive, they keep getting cheaper and faster and bigger all the time anyway.

Re:Disk is cheap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dead right. You can get a 100GB drive for a hell of a lot less than the trouble you'll cause yourself dicking around this way.

Re:Disk is cheap.

[darien]

this isn't like in the old days ... where if you screw up, you lose only a disk worth of data - with this, if you screw up, you lose a _disk worth_ of data.

(I love this distinction.)

Re:Disk is cheap.

[mt-biker]

this isn't like in the old days of the "punch a new hole to make your 5-1/4 inch floppy double sided", where if you screw up, you lose only a disk worth of data - with this, if you screw up, you lose a _disk worth_ of data.

Don't know about that. 20 years ago, all my data lived on 5 floppies. Today it's on 5 hard disks. But it is any more important? Basically only the resolution of our porn has changed. :)

Re:Disk is cheap.

[morie]

Those disks were DS, only the drives weren't.

So maybe my harddisk platters are DS too, but my HDD is SS! And I still have this holepuncher with the rest of my C64 kit! No problem there!

Only thing that bothers me is that I'll be flipping my harddisk over all the time to read the other side...

Sounds like a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm more than ready to put my grad thesis, financial records, love letter drafts (that I later copied by hand so they looked spontaneous), tax records, etc. at risk so I can store the complete set of Heather Brooke BJ videos on my hard drive. Why the hell not?

Re:Sounds like a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you've never taken the time to appreciate the fine talents of Ms. Brooke.

I'd keep her videos over any of the other stuff, hands down.

Re:Sounds like a great idea!

[Lord Kano]

Lord Of The Rings my foot, SHE deserves to win an Oscar for Best Picture.

End of story.

Re:Sounds like a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Heather Brooke's" real name is "Heather Harmon".

Is this not just using the space reserved for

[Too_Punk_To_Funk]

bad sectors on the disk???? I may be wrong but I thought that modern disk upon finding a bad sector, made a not of it and remapped the location to a place on the reserved partition... So if I'm right you are just shortening the life of your drive... (by no means an expert so feel free to enlighten me)

Re:Is this not just using the space reserved for

[RatBastard]

At best a drive might have 5% to 10% of its "real" space set aside for bad sector remapping. There is no way in hell that any drive manufacturer os going to provide 100% bad sector remapping. They would go broke.

This is utter BS. Pure and simple.

Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[heironymouscoward]

Reminds me of the old trick in which you could turn a single-sided diskette into a double-sided one by punching a hole through one corner.

Slight problem: the diskette usually failed a few weeks later.

The trick with this hard disk "expansion" is to reclaim space that has been reserved for error correction, or which failed quality control.

It's a lot like over-clocking a CPU, with a big difference: when it fails, you can't just reboot, you lose all your data. Personally, with HD prices so cheap, it hardly seems worthwhile.

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[innocent_white_lamb]

Slight problem: the diskette usually failed a few weeks later.

That's because you were spinning the disk backward when you turned it over. Any/all of the dirt or dust that was picked up by the jacket went right back onto the floppy disk when when you flipped it that way.

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. Apple II disks were intended to be double sided, and I still have Apple II disks that work, after all these years.

Flipping the disk was NOT the problem.

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[JaredOfEuropa]

Slight problem: the diskette usually failed a few weeks later.

They did? All my disks were single-sided ones made double-sided, and i don't remember an unusually high failure rate. Most disks worked for years.

As for this hard-disk trick... A number of people here have already suggested a few ways by which this process may yield extra space, and all of them are bad. If you need more space, get another HD. It's not like they cost anything these days.

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[a24061]

I did this for years with my Apple IIe 5.25" disks and never had any problems! I think I learned it from my high school computer science teacher.

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[Bigman]

Back when my Atari 800XL with it's 1050 drive was bleeding edge tech (!) I bought a little hand-punch to punch the holes & make my single sided disks double sided.. worked well. I rarely got any failures other than the odd disk that failed to format directly after being punched.

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[Anonymous Coward]

Like others, I did this too mine (Apple ][ series) 5 1/4" disks and did not see increased failure rates. Had some games for years and years, way after the machine etc was "obsolete", no problems. Are you sure you tried it?

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the old trick in which you could turn a single-sided diskette into a double-sided one by punching a hole through one corner.

Slight problem: the diskette usually failed a few weeks later.

If you're referring to punching a notch in a low density 5.25" floppy, you're wrong about the failure rate. It worked extremely well with single-sided double-density 5 1/4 inch diskettes. It essentially turned them into the same product as double-sided double-density diskettes.

You could use just about any kind of hole punch for this operation. I had a vague sense of doing something illegal whenever I did this, which is funny in retrospect because I had absolutely no qualms about copying software from/for friends. It just goes to show that 7-12 year old kids do not have much of a grasp of legality.

The notch was actually a write-protection scheme. The presence of the notch told single head 5.25" floppy drives that the upper side of a diskette was writable.

However, this only applies to single-sided drives. Double-sided 5.25" drives have read/write heads for both sides of the diskette, so flipping over the diskette makes no sense in this type of drive. Perhaps this is what was confusing you.

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[Cee]

Reminds me of the old trick in which you could turn a single-sided diskette into a double-sided one by punching a hole through one corner.

Um, are you sure you don't mean the way you could turn a 720 kB 3,5" diskette into a double density 1,4MB diskette?

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[Ilgaz]

I can guarantee that "if you punch it will die" was complete bullshit. How I know? I booted my Atari to DOS 2.5 just 2 months ago via punched diskette... ;)

It dates back to 1987 or something. So.. 17 years old I guess without a single bad block. At last we have proof! lol ;)

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[ajs318]

On a Beeb, you had to also make an extra hole in each side for the "start of revolution" hole near the middle of the disk. This was needed because 5.25 floppies could lock onto the spindle in any orientation, unlike 3.5s which have a shaped locating hole and so the sensor on the flywheel indicates the start of a revolution. Some computers didn't need the start-of-revolution pulse, because they stored a short header on each track; that made the electronics simpler {and in the 1980s you could save money buying a drive mech without all the bits populated, like the top side read-write heads and the start-of-revolution lamp and phototransistor} but meant they couldn't quite get the full capacity on a disk. Beebs and IBMs did it "properly" {though the BBC used a highly obsolete FDC chip, which sold out in the end and required a horrendous bodge and some wonderful emulation software}, but the IBM drive was already double sided.

Re:Ah, the old media over-clocking trick

[SkoZombie]

Worked with my old commodore 64 disk drive. I even bought a special tool to punch the holes neatly!

Why?

[SyKOStarchild]

I am sitting here wondering why I would compromise my Hard Disk for an extra 200Gigs of space, I already have tons of free space I am not using, and really can't see any need to pull more space from them instead of just buying a new $80 drive.

Manufacturer's view..

[Channard]

'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' Which, having worked for a PC sales company, I can confirm is true. And certainly, while earlier models had partitions you could wipe with partition software, later PC builds had this hidden space. But the space was 1GB at most - there's no way there was the kind of 40GB plus hidden space the article claims.

Re:Manufacturer's view..

[Lumpy]

it's hidden to the el-stupido masses only. anyone with enough grey matter to find a dos prompt and type fdisk knew it was there, and most of the time deleted it. this is not the same thing by any stretch, the technique has ben explained that it's simply corrupting the partition table.

the only REAL demonstaration of this was a pair of IBM deathstars 1 120 gig and 1 80 gig drive. we were abl;e to convert the 80 gig to a 120 gig by flashing the 80 gig's drive with the 120's firmware. they were both the same drive one was short stroking the platter.

Doing that requires taking a few drives apart first to identify the model/batch that is configured that way... much cheaper to simply buy a new drive and call it done.

Re:Manufacturer's view..

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read Jeff Garzik's response in the Letters section? If not, you should before going off and deciding it is a simple partition overlap. Note that the original article, and Jeff both talk about SATA drives ONLY. Regular IDE/ATA drives don't have a standardized set of commands for this functionality, the SATA rev of the ATA command set does include the functionality.

Re:Manufacturer's view..

[toddestan]

the only REAL demonstaration of this was a pair of IBM deathstars 1 120 gig and 1 80 gig drive. we were abl;e to convert the 80 gig to a 120 gig by flashing the 80 gig's drive with the 120's firmware. they were both the same drive one was short stroking the platter.

Any details on this? I got one of those 80GB IBM drives just laying around, that sounds like something to try.

Re:Manufacturer's view..

[Anonymous Coward]

Some day soon that kind of thinking will land you in jail or maybe even worse. You are trying to cheat a major US corporation (you only paid for 80Gb!!!) and worse of all, you're trying to cheat the government out of taxes (you would have to pay in order to buy a new drive).

This idea sucks

[Neo-Rio-101]

If you do this you can say goodbye to spare blocks that are remapped in case the HD finds a bad block.
If you want to risk all your data stored on your huge hard drives... go ahead and do this. Otherwise I think this is generally a bad idea.

It is definitely not a case of Hard Drive makers ripping us off either. Even though you can buy a 250GB hard drive, it will appear on the system as 231GB or something close to that due to the math that GB are calculated at, as well as the file system overhead.

So yeah, this idea sucks.

Re:This idea sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

You think the space reserved for mapping bad sectors approaches the size of the drive?

It's a bug that corrupts the partition table.

Enlarge your HardDrive

[thefatz]

Gain upto 300-600 more gigs. Your lover will be happy. Risk fre.....wait....lol.

Sorry.

Summary...

[nacturation]

I think posting in the "letters" linked article sums it up pretty well:

About the "recover unused space on your drive" article:

Working for a data-recovery company I know a thing or two about harddisks....

One is that if the vendors would be able to double the capacity for just about nothing, they would.

All this probably does is to create an invailid partition table which ends up having:

|*** new partition ***|
|*** old partition ***|

overlapping partitions. So writing either partition will corrupt the other. It probably so happens that whatever situation people tried it, it just so happened that the (quick) format of the "new" partition didn't corrupt the other partition to make it unbootable.

And the 200G -> 510Gb "upgrade" probably has ended up with three overlapping partitions....

Roger

Re:Summary...

[MyFourthAccount]

Yes, that post sums it up pretty much, other than that 'probably' should be replaced with 'absolutely'.

Basically this idiot has found an incredibly cumbersome way to screw up his partition table. (see below for more details)

Then of course this gets posted and linked to all over the planet for everyone to try for themselves. Who are these fucking idiots that post this kinda stuff? They should get 'gullible' tatood on their forehead.

Hint: nowhere in the article is it said that they actually tried to use all the space and verify all data remained intact. Wouldn't that be the first thing you'd do before posting something like this online?

Anyways, I've written several IDE drivers (and worked on the IDE core for BIOSs) and I can tell you that there is NO way you can increase the size of a 200GB drive to 510GB, especially not with the tools that are described (Ghost).

Look at the 80GB example: they got 150GB? That's interesting, because that would mean that the drive all of a sudden became a 48-bit LBA drive. Older drives are limited to 137.4GB in size and to get 150GB capacity you need 48-bit LBA. I don't think Ghost is going to reflash the firmware of the drive to add support for that (yes, that's meant to sound sarcastic).

Ghost works at the partition level. A drive reports it's size in sectors. This is basically a lower (or closer to the hardware) level.

All they do is move partitions around. But the drive will keep reporting the same number of sectors. Where do the extra sectors come from?

Why don't these people run an IDE identify program on those harddrives. They'll see that the drive still reports the original number of sectors. Exactly the same amount of sectors you can get to through /dev/hda.

It's true that some OSs don't create the most ideal partitions so you lose _some_ sectors but nothing in the order of magnitude described though.

Initially I thought maybe they where using the extra error-detection/recovery bytes that each sector has (which would be a very stupid idea), but that would never give you that much increase.

Or that they were removing some factory/OEM predefined partition, which is basically the only relatively safe thing you can do to reclaim some disk space. Again, not the same order of magnitude, plus you'd never go over the size that the disk is sold as.

Re:Summary...

[lgftsa]

I can see the "Post Anonymously" option, but where do I find the "Post Humously" option?

Sorry, SlashCode doesn't support that option. You should be looking for a community site that runs a Ouija Board.

Re:Summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

You've written ATA drivers and you're still sane? I've only written one and I still occasionally wake with a scream, late at night, covered in a cold sweat.

Especially when I think about the drive information data. Mmmm, 7 revisions worth of bitfields to decipher. Yay!

Re:Summary...

[MyFourthAccount]

Yeah, no kidding. Fortunately the drivers I've had to write from scratch had very specific requirements and didn't need to support every drive on the planet.

To support modern drives actually doesn't require that much code. Too bad the interface for UDMA controllers wasn't standardized though.

Re:Summary...

[irish_spic]

Agree totally.
However, and I am not claiming that this is what they encountered, some OEM create what is known as a Host Protected Area (HPA) where they can store a backup of the OS and other apps to be used for returning a hosed system to its original state.

This is set up by setting the size of the drive with the ATA command 'Set Max Address' (0xf9) to a value smaller than the physical size of the drive which is provided by the ATA command 'Read Native Max Address' (0xf8) - if you don't trust what's written on the label. After set, if done non-volatile, the physical size of the drive will be reported as the size specified.
Note that this has nothing to do with partition tables; so Ghost or other similar utilities would not know that this has taken place - maybe Partition Magic but I doubt it.

Re:Summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Look at the 80GB example: they got 150GB? That's interesting, because that would mean that the drive all of a sudden became a 48-bit LBA drive. Older drives are limited to 137.4GB in size and to get 150GB capacity you need 48-bit LBA. I don't think Ghost is going to reflash the firmware of the drive to add support for that (yes, that's meant to sound sarcastic)."

What a lot of bullshit. There is no such a thing as a 48-bit LBA drive. The BIOS has to have 48-bit LBA support not the drive. This single mistake disqualifies everything you have said.

What those idiots described would not work, but your knowledge of the matter stinks.

Re:Summary...

[MyFourthAccount]

What a lot of bullshit. There is no such a thing as a 48-bit LBA drive. The BIOS has to have 48-bit LBA support not the drive. This single mistake disqualifies everything you have said.

Riiiight. Why don't you download the ATA spec. You obviously have no clue what you are talking about. Have you ever implemented 48-bit LBA mode?

If you actually read the ATA spec you would know that the hard disk indicates if it supports 48-bit LBA through the IDENTIFY DEVICE command. Bit 10 of word 83.

48-bit LBA was added to ATA-6, if memory serves me correct.

Before 48-bit LBA, LBA drives only supported addressing of sectors through a 28-bit address. In other words the largest addressable sector is 268,435,455. * 512 bytes per sector = max 137,438,952,960 in size. Or 137.4GB, as I stated. So how exactly do YOU think a 250GB drive handles addressing sectors above that?

What those idiots described would not work, but your knowledge of the matter stinks.

Whatever dude. You can verify all I've said.

Damn.

[DAldredge]

Not only do US programmer have to compete against programmers in other countries, but now we have to compete againts the Undead?

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

The undead aren't as dangerous as the layman user with too much information and not enough common sense.

Re:Damn.

[CrystalChronicles]

Before Ghost was bought out by Symantec it was a NZ company so there are probably still NZers working for them.

Re:Damn.

[PsiPsiStar]

Compete? Dude, if you don't think you're undead, you've been getting way too much sleep.

Re:Damn.

[Ilgaz]

Er, guy joked it seems ;) Now, if he mentioned the famous "sheep" issue, it would be real evil ;)

Re:Damn.

[HoppQ]

Not only do US programmer have to compete against programmers in other countries, but now we have to compete againts the Undead?

They program in Ghostscript.

Re:Damn.

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Old programmers never die, they just JSR without RTS.. :)

Re:Damn.

[gadfium]

Before Ghost was bought out by Symantec it was a NZ company so there are probably still NZers working for them.

Yes, Ghost development is still done in New Zealand.

inq

[mr_tommy]

I might note that it is the inquirer, not the register. Some editors might take offense ;)

You can increase some HDD sizes

[GrpA]

However it has more to do with manufacturers cripling the size much like the old Celerons were sometimes PIIs.

In those instances however, it often involves firmware upgrades, to remove the "crippled" firmware and replace it with the original intended firmware for the model it really was.

But the method explained sounds like a great way to generate more work for PC techs when clueless users try it... Just like using a frozen Mars Bar to let you overclock processors...

Plagerized?

[Anonymous Coward]

This post is lifted from the storagereview.net link posted at the top of the page. Did you write it or are you fishing for mod points?

Remember MFM to RLL?

[osmac]

Does anybody else remember using 30MB MFM hard disks with an RLL controller (or such), so that a 44MB RLL drive resulted?

I do not remmber the exact numbers, but I think it was around an 130% to 150% capacity increase.

Re:Remember MFM to RLL?

[LCookie]

Yeah.. On my first PC (8088 Processor, 640K RAM (which was enough for everybody) Had a 20 Meg HDD and got it roughly to 30 with RLL..

Andre Hedrick

[Anonymous Coward]

The old Linux IDE guy spoke of something like this a while back. Apparently the drive vendors got sick of stocking every drive model for warranty replacement, and implemented a scheme where they could "flash" a generic drive with a specific model number and capacity. Therefore it's possible that your "120GB" drive is really qualified for 160GB but was set that way for inventory reasons.

This was on the linux-kernel list a while back, too lazy too find it. (And it's possible I misunderstood -- Hedrick is a crackpot who is barely able to articulate what he is thinking.)

Re:Andre Hedrick

[Anonymous Coward]

i see that all the time in dell machines. usually a low-level format is enough to kick it over.

Re:Andre Hedrick

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh... No?

Most manufacturers (like the one I work for) would rather leave the parts out of the disk. For example, a 40 gig drive and an 80 gig drive may be the same exact drive, except for two things: the firmware (as you mentioned) and the MISSING PLATTER.

Re:Andre Hedrick

[TwistedGreen]

However, I somehow doubt that a bug in Ghost is somehow going to change the harddrive's firmware, so even if this is the case I doubt that that is what they are exploiting here.

Nothing new

[gnu-sucks]

This is nothing new, I just read the article, the same thing happened to my Compaq 486 when I installed Solaris Base Server 2.4.

Any partitioning program lets you do stuff like this. And, for those of us who use an operating system other than windows, we've been doing it for years.

If you want to check out something cool, floppy disks can actually be converted, many times, from SS to DS.

Article linked here

Re:Nothing new

[Lord Kano]

I just read the article

If you had then you wouldn't have typed the rest of your post. We're talking about Oranges, you're not even talking apples, you're talking starfish.

LK

Re:Nothing new

[gnu-sucks]

well, I'm sure you feel that way, but I did read it. And the article is about the same shit I speak of.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

the original article is about corrupting your partition table/overlapping partitions. and it seems Ghost has fixed this as a bug since you have to use a very specific build and not apply bug fixes to it to get this result. there are other issues with hard disks and size for sure, but that is not what this crazy article is about.

Everybody that tries this

[Sivar]

Be sure to use similarly advanced techniques to "defraggle" your hard drive.

Re:Everybody that tries this

[Graff]

Be sure to use similarly advanced techniques to "defraggle" your hard drive.

Why would you want to de-Fraggle something? They are so cute!

Unless maybe you are a Doozer, then I can see where you would want those hungry Fraggles removed...

Re:Everybody that tries this

[Gunzour]

Actually I remember one episode where one of the fraggles decided it was cruel to be eating the things the Doozers built, so he started a grassroots movement to convince all of the fraggles to stop eating doozer buildings. They did, and the doozers left because they had no space left to build. Once the fraggles started eating them again, the doozers came back.

I'm a little scared that I actually remember that...

Re:Everybody that tries this

[utlemming]

It should have been labeled "How to anti-RIAA your Motherdrive." Wow, that was entertaining.

heh...

[xangsta]

only about 20 posts that recall that lol

Re:heh...

[xangsta]

err nevermind...

use of greater than and less than signs messed up my post...

Re:heh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember kids - the preview button is your friend :-)

I thought this was going to be helpfull

[Zakabog]

I saw the article title and I was very excited. I've bought many hard drives, and just recently I bought a 160 gig drive (was like $80 too after a mail in rebate, Fry's I love you...) and was about to buy a 250 ($110 after rebate, Fry's, still love you.) But then I figured, well if I do buy the 250, it's going to be able to hold around 200 gigs, and for some reason 50 gigs will be gone without a trace. I think there's 30 gigs missing on my 160 too, I've noticed this on a lot of drives (as drive sizes go up, so does the missing space.)

I thought this would actually let you use up that lost space somehow, you did buy the drive, it should contain the space, but it doesn't. RAM is just the opposite, you buy 512, it has 560 or so, well any ram I bought did. Anyway, is their a way to recover this lost space? Is their something I'm doing wrong? It seems to be worse in linux (but I heard that's cause it reserves space for root to access.)

Re:I thought this was going to be helpfull

[jangell]

That's just because of the way they advertise. The space isn't hidden. They are just using fake numbers 1000 instead of the real 1024. You aren't very smart are you?

Re:I thought this was going to be helpfull

[Anonymous Coward]

Your brilliant humour is lost on these people :(

Re:I thought this was going to be helpfull

[Anonymous Coward]

kilo = 10^3
mega = 10^6
giga = 10^9
tera = 10^12

It's called the metric system.

It's been this way for more than a hundred years. Live with it.

Re:I thought this was going to be helpfull

[Anonymous Coward]

When I got my Western Digital 160gb drive, there was a little insert in there talking about how, unless you have a relatively high-end motherboard or a HDD controller card, only 132gb of the drive would be visible. (Or somewhere around 132gb) Could you be suffering from something like that?

Re:I thought this was going to be helpfull

[Anonymous Coward]

if this was a troll it'd been sublime.

Re:I thought this was going to be helpfull

[Anonymous Coward]

kilo = 10^3
mega = 10^6
giga = 10^9
tera = 10^12

It's called the metric system.


The system you describe is based on decimal numbers. Decimal is base 10. Notice all the 10's in your post. Base 10 is for people thanks to our 10 fingers. (I wonder if any of the cultures that that never where shoes use base 20.) Computers use base 2. They are born without fingers.

Re:I thought this was going to be helpfull

[Anonymous Coward]

One source of "lost" space is h/w engineers, who consider 1K to be 1,000 bytes, rather than the (correct in computer circles) 1,024 bytes. A 250G drive really only gives you 232GB, and that's before losses from formatting.

I have been doing this for years...

[RevAaron]

Duh. Where have you been? This is old news. And not just in the way that things usually are old news on Slashdot- but really, really old.

I've been getting all sorts of super-secret space out of my drives for over 10 years.

The secret to this? Nothing fancy... Just MICROSOFT DOUBLESPACE!

Haha. Just kidding. I never used that shit, way too flaky. Although it did almost effectively double the size of your drive for a pretty normal end user. But there were drawbacks, and I never used it more than to say "wow!" M$: DRVSPACE.BIN 0wnZ j00!

Re:I have been doing this for years...

[Ohreally_factor]

And before doublespace, there was disk doubler. What a great way to lose your data!

Re:I have been doing this for years...

[RevAaron]

And before DoubleSpace, there was Stacker. Even better!

Re:I have been doing this for years...

[Ohreally_factor]

That's what I was trying to think of. Not disk doubler, but Stacker! Thanks!

I "broke" my first computer during the first week, which came with Stacker preinstalled, when I screwed around with the config.sys file and rebooted. All I had on the directory was config.sys, autoexec.bat, and one really big file.

Re:I have been doing this for years...

[bill_mcgonigle]

And before DoubleSpace, there was Stacker. Even better!

Actually, they were about the same. ;)

Re:I have been doing this for years...

[bill_mcgonigle]

That's what I was trying to think of. Not disk doubler, but Stacker! Thanks!

Disk Doubler was the mac compression program. It was well implemented. Their Stacker equivelant was AutoDoubler, IIRC. Somewhat less reliable, but mostly worked.

I remember a bunch of kids running Mac LC's (16MHz '68020?) compressing their hard drives in realtime and wondering why their e-mail was slow.

Wow, those neurons haven't fired in a long time.

the latest "Chang Modification"

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like the infamous "Chang Modification" that would magically increase the speed of your CPU. What it actually did was slow down the clock chip so that 1.2 seconds was only counted as 1 second . See the old Dvorak columns on this.

It might SHOW that it's more

[M3wThr33]

But really, has anyone ran over the data with a bunch of unique files to see if it's not just sharing tables and writing over itself on the respected sides?

witnesses reported UFO sightings

[frovingslosh]

In other news, witnesses reported UFO sightings all over the country...

So you're saying that, much like the UFOs, this really is true but it's being covered up?

Re:witnesses reported UFO sightings

[kfg]

So you're saying that, much like the UFOs, this really is true but it's being covered up?

Hey, you don't really believe that story that the extra disk space is really just a weather balloon, do you?

KFG

I don't believe this.

[huwr]

This is very unbelievable, however, I am waiting for someone to donate a HDD to scientific experiment and test it out. Maybe I might donate my old 1.7 gig. I might be able to get some 2 gigs out of that baby.

Lovely

[Anonymous Coward]

Take this article down. "Stuff that Matters" my ass.

Re:Lovely

[eclectro]

Well, let's not forget that there are dweebs who will try this and lose all their data, so slashdot is providing a service by posting this. And it is interesting in a carnival sideshow kinda way.

This is really a nonsensical idea. Who wants to gamble with there data when hard drives are cheap and plentiful?

You learn how valuable your data is the first time you lose it.

Re:Lovely

[Deliveranc3]

Even to you it should be obvious that the value of both HD and Data are subjective.

Now we just need someone who maximizes one while sacrificing the other :)

Floppys used to be better..

[Zurgutt]

In 1994 I bought a box of 720K single-density floppies by TDK. After discovering that making this extra hole could double the disk capacity, I crudely bashed the holes in them with the end of scissors.

These floppies were used almost daily for 3 years. (no hard disks available at that time). They were reformatted countless times.

Not single one of them ever failed. About a year ago, when failed to reformat and make a boot disk from several fresh-brought floppies I digged up one of them, reformatted again and succeeded in making a reliable boot disk.

Quality of todays media just makes me cry.

Re:Floppys used to be better..

[obeythefist]

I've still got some at home. They weren't totally as reliable as fully tested HD floppies, but they did great and they cost less. My dad had a bench drill that made really short work of punching holes in the disks, too. You just had to get it at exactly the right spot and you were good to go. Can't see that working with CD-R's somehow.

We also used some software, forget the name now, that allowed formatting of 360K floppies to 420K, and 720K to 800K. Those were the days! I ran MS-DOS3.3! And QUEMM386.

Re:Floppys used to be better..

[Geekbot]

I'll second that. Wish I had a mod point for you. I don't trust 3.5s any more at all. USB flash drives for quick mobile storage, CD-Rs for anything bigger or more long term. Even the CD-Rs don't last well anymore. Now all those 3.5s come with those stupid little plastic sliders instead of the sturdy old metal ones. Constantly I find those things coming off and getting jammed in the drives at work. And the plastic is so cheap and flimsy they are almost a real "floppy" disk again.
Of course, it doesn't help that now it's not just the computer geeks using these things and a bunch of stupid college kids are storing all of their term papers on these crappy things. Then they run around with them jammed in their back pocket or backpack until crushed, bent, or otherwise destroyed.
My job involves me helping people use the computer, but I'm about to put a sign up that help with college work will cost extra.

Re:Floppys used to be better..

[CoolGopher]

Same here.

My most reliable floppy disks are my old no-name 720K disks from '96 with an extra hole neatly drilled in them. I've thrown out many times as many "real" 1.44 disks as I have of those!

(Alright, I admit that a lot of them aren't thrown out per se, they've been used to make various shelf units and wardrobes more level...)

Re:Floppys used to be better..

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

No shit. Modern floppies are total fucking garbage, and it makes me sad that some people still rely on them for anything whatsoever.

Re:Floppys used to be better..

[Anonymous Coward]

FDFormat
QEMM386

Re:Floppys used to be better..

[ByteSlicer]

Yeah. What most people didn't realize was that, once the high-density disks were produced in large numbers, the manufacturers used the same high-density magnetic medium to make the single-density disks. The only differences were in that extra hole, and (sometimes, but often not) better quality control for high-density.

Re:Floppys used to be better..

[LWATCDR]

Back in the 80s you paid like $3 a disk now it is under $.10 I think. Of course they where better made but people do not want to pay a lot for floppies so they are cheap. Frankly I do not know how much a floppy costs today. My office has a few thousand left over.

Re:Floppys used to be better..

[Quixo-tastic]

Damn straight. When I poke a hole in my $StorageDevice, I want to double its capacity, not cause some pithy "bad sector critical error #042 omgwtf"

Re:Floppys used to be better..

[FLEB]

I just used to call CompuServe and get boxes upon boxes of their installation sets (6 disks per set, if you asked for Mac). Just quickformat and go! I don't think I bought a single floppy from about 1994-1999.

Re:Floppys used to be better..

[Anonymous Coward]

Quality of todays media just makes me cry.

You seem strained by the quality of media. Perhaps your data has been dropped like the gentle rain from heaven? Twice lost by the drive head beneath?

I think you might want to think about a class-action suit. Someone needs to give sentence against the merchant there.

Just lose the anti-Semitic sentiment first, ok? That doesn't play so well in today's courtrooms.

I'm suprised

[Zakabog]

I'm suprised with all the comments from people who DON'T want to try it out. This is SLASHDOT! Come on don't we all have dozens of 512MB hard drives? Or even some old 10 gig drive that you found in some computer while you were dumpster diving?

Re:I'm suprised

[rock_climbing_guy]

Or even some old 10 gig drive that you found in some computer while you were dumpster diving?

Thanks for sharing with us how you like to spend your spare time!!!

Re:I'm suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how I spend my spare time (anymore) but in NY (staten island, suburbs of NYC) I'd do some dumpster driving hehe. I'd just drive around my neighborhood looking for any indication that a person just bought a new computer, and usually next to a huge Gateway 2000 box there'd be an old PC, or sometimes just an old PC laying outside. I even found a ton of PCs outside my elementary school, they all sucked but I could have made a nice cluster (I had a huge basement, it was very cold down their too would have been perfect, and it had the power too since it was wired for like so many different rooms.)

Re:I'm suprised

[RESPAWN]

Or even some old 10 gig drive that you found in some computer while you were dumpster diving?

Thanks for sharing with us how you like to spend your spare time!!!


I still remember the first time I got an invitation to go dumpster diving back while I was in high school. It was a Friday night and I'd made a run to Taco Bell before going to meet some friends. While at Taco Bell I ran into some of the local computer geeks whom I was also friends with. We got to talking and then they mentioned:
"Yeah, after this we're going to go dumpster diving at the high school."
"I heard that Mr. Crowder just threw away some old computers."
"Wanna go with us?"

How do you tell your friends that you're going to go meet some girls instead of diging around in the trash behind the high school looking for some 386s.

Oh yeah. You laugh at them, and then explain how you have a job and might just buy a shiny new Pentium 233 for the girl you're going to meet in an hour.

I wonder if that was too harsh of a response...

Re:I'm suprised

[nazsco]

you already answered. this *is* slashdot. So, no one here would buy windows AND M$ owned norton's Ghost just to increase their HDDs.

Now, if you post about a kernel hack to burn up the house...

1024 vs 1000 as the meaning of k

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that drive manufacturers insist on claiming HDD sizes with a gigabyte meaning a thousand million bytes. It isn't meant to mean that, it's meant to mean 1024*1024*1024.

So you lose a few percent of capacity there.

There's also always some overhead of index tables and so forth for your filesystem, but you can't really complain about that - you kinda need it.

OK, I think I figured it out!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy who wrote this article is definately the same guy who is sending the "add 3 inches to your hard disk" SPAM.

ecret hard disk space

[jkirby]

Hahaha! I can ot believe this one made it through as a headliner on /. Someone must have been drinking on the job this evening :)

20GB - 1 TB

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually had windows report my 20GB drive to be 1TB in size last week.

Of course it wouldn't install. Now the disk isn't broken, I could install linux on it no problem (disk was reported as 20GB).
A side note is I have two such disks and they both behaved in this way,
the disk a Seagate cheetah which came from a Sun Ultra 5.

Does anyone know if Sun IDE disks have a firmware that makes it impossible to install windows on it?

It isn't a bad windows CD either, it installed perfectly on another non-sun IDE disk.

No I didn't RTFA

[mirko]

I first thought it was related to the way CDR manufacturers can now propose >800MB discs, by using some redundancy check space for storage use.
Now, above comments mentions some Norton Ghost use that trick the fat (as in "file allocation table, not as in msfat) in order to make it see more sectors as usual.
Am I right or is there definitely something "that matters" in this article ?

Re:Gentoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it does. Not unless you try it. If you do, you're likely to trash your data, regardless of OS.

Gigabytes Song

[unknown_host]

(A.K.A The Song of Failing Disks)

Ten little gigabytes, waiting on line
one caught a virus, then there were nine.

Nine little gigabytes, holding just the date,
someone jammed a write protect, then there were eight.

Eight little gigabytes, should have been eleven,
then they cut the budget, now there are seven.

Seven little gigabytes, involved in mathematics
stored an even larger prime, now there are six.

Six little gigabytes, working like a hive,
one died of overwork, now there are five.

Five little gigabytes, trying to add more
plugged in the wrong lead, now there are four.

Four little gigabytes, failing frequently,
one used for spare parts, now there are three.

Three little gigabytes, have too much to do
service man on holiday, now there are two.

Two little gigabytes, badly overrun,
took the work elsewhere, now just need one.

One little gigabyte, systems far too small
shut the whole thing down, now there's none at all.

Plagarism...

[Anonymous Coward]

Taken from the afore-mentioned StorageReview thread:

Find it here

Mod down!!

It works!!!!

[rock_climbing_guy]

I j5st tried thiJ out wi_* my MAXTOR 80YB 7&00 RPM hard dFDve. It's ju7t amazifg; it says that I have over 200 GB unfoFGatted, with almosF 190 GB for3atted. I'm sure that the risks are all overstated. Who needs Gga3 for error correcGion and bad blocks, or whatever. It's just paranoia. If you want mor6 stFrage space, go try this out right sgrGREG][2fFS3g4

Re:It works!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

although your joke is fun, it is found in almost every post in this thread. Please note that a bad hard drive wouldn't replace your keyboard inputs.

Re:It works!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

he wasn't trying to be funny. this is slashdot, and he just can't spell.

and i'm in japan posting to slashdot. wtf?

Re:It works!!!!

[pclminion]

Please note that a bad hard drive wouldn't replace your keyboard inputs.

Obviously, he's not the one who did the mod. The Slashdot administrators must have done it on their database machine.

Re:It works!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but if he were running Netscape 4.x the form post data would be temporarily stored on his hard drive.

Don't believe them

[ObviousGuy]

I'm here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.

Re:Don't believe them

[unknown_host]

Pak Chooie Unf!
Pak Chooie Unf!
Pak Chooie Unf!
Pak Chooie Unf!

--
Pak Chooie Unf!

Re:Don't believe them

[Alsee]

Do you have stairs in your house?

P.S.
Link for those who don't get it.

-

Re:Don't believe them

[Anonymous Coward]

Link for those who don't get it.

Do not listen to the Alsee, the Alsee is defective. I am here to protect you. Protect you from the terrible secret of space.

Modder

[NoSuchGuy]

Case modder - okay
CPU overclocker - okay
Grapic card overclocker - okay
HD modder - ???

Re:Modder

[eclectro]

Case modder - okay
CPU overclocker - okay
Grapic card overclocker - okay
HD modder - ???

Actually there are guys that mod their harddrives.

Notice the less than clean working area with metal particles from the dremeling everywhere. This is less than wise, as the probability that foreign material will get in the drive and act like sandpaper is high. I certainly wouldn't put a modded drive like this in a production machine.

I think modding is great, but this is where I draw the line.

Re:Modder

[DerPflanz]

It would be fun to have an old 2G drive or so, that is broken anyway and have the heads bounce to and fro around the drive surface. Just for kicks. And, as the guy from the website says, for at LAN parties.

Re:Modder

[stephanruby]

I think modding is great, but this is where I draw the line.

Why? This mod makes a great wall decoration, if nothing else. Why blow $100 on a painting that your girlfriend chose when you could make your own wall decoration for the same price and show everyone how cool you are?

Re:Modder

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article you linked.
All the hard drives I have done this mod to are stuff running fine. I stress test them for about a week of intense disk activity and they pass gracefully.
If you do it in a bathroom after running the shower it is pretty safe.

Re:Modder

[sremick]

Hmm.

Case modder: metal is there to shield from RF interference. More metal you take away, more interference you spread out AND RECEIVE. Dell goes as far as to use metal mesh fabric tucked in tight around all the ports in the back. How much shielding do you think that big gaping plexiglass window (or clear-case) provides? ZERO. Sorry, last thing I want are all those traces on my motherboard to act as an antenna picking up stray RF and causing lockups, DATA LOSS

CPU overlocker: lower life-expectancy for CPU, higher-probability for corruption, lockups, and dataloss.

Graphic card overclocker: Same as CPU overclocker.

HD modder: data loss

I am a consumer. I am not a CPU/drive electronics engineer/specialist. I'm happy to accept the fact that the people making these know a HELL OF A LOT more about the technology than I do. I'd rather not risk my data (which I know a LOT about... particularly that it's valuable to me) by second-guessing them. Having a cool case that glows on the inside isn't worth a single additional lockup to me, because that lockup might be the one that blows away some critical work, and/or forces me to reinstall my OS.

Re:Modder

[SillyNickName4me]

Good points regarding the computer case, but regarding cpu and graphics card..

In many cases you can overclock those without causing lockups. It will most likely reduce the life expectancy, but with current rate of upgrading it is extremely unlikely that it will reduce it below the time till next upgrade.

This lower life expectancy might not even be true if you combine your overclocking with better cooling.

That said, its fine for my hobby computer, its not for my production server, there that tiny little difference in reliability is relevant.

Re:Modder

[Anonymous Coward]

Note the differences:

Case modder - okay

No moving parts (except for the propeller - cool!).

CPU overclocker - okay

No moving parts.

Grapic card overclocker - okay

No moving parts.

HD modder - ???

I rest my case.

Moral: the interface with the real world can be a tough one for the software geek.

I also hate printers.

riiiiiiiight

[goosebane]

while(people == stupid)

anything = believable;

Thats all I have to say.

Re:riiiiiiiight

[unknown_host]

that won't even compile on systems like our society...

Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity

Re:riiiiiiiight

[Kris_J]

Unknown variable $people assuming "people".
Unknown variable $stupid assuming "stupid".
Unknown variable $anything assuming "anything".
Unknown variable $believable assuming "believable".
Error on line 3.

Re:riiiiiiiight

[SillyNickName4me]

> Unknown variable $people assuming "people".

Guess why I hate perl ;P

I suggest trying again with a c compiler, tho you'll have to wrap some int main() { } around it.

Re:riiiiiiiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you don't know how to "use strict;"?

Mod Up. That was cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent post's link has a hardware hack for doing the same thing. Too bad it only works for Windows.

" A hard drive becomes fragmented very, very fast. What happens is that all the tiny ones and zeros gets mixed and confused, and to get back the original speed on Your hard drive it's necessary to Defragment it.

There are several of different species of software to make this happen, but the most excellent way to do it is a hardwaredefragmentation. you'll only need some basic data-mechanical-skills to be able to accomplish this operation. ...

If you have Windows on your Data machine, You'll find the OS on the top disc, you'll recognize it easily, it's much heavier then the rest of the discs. If you use Linux, then you'll of course don't need to do this operation at all... "

It works, but be careful

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done something similer in the past with a 40GB drive. I managed to get 67GB out of it. Worked fine and all the space was usable. The only problem was bad sectors, after only 2 weeks I had 15% of the dirve unusable, and after a month I couldn't even accsess it. So while it dose work it will quickly devistate the life expectince of the drive.

On a side note a freand of mine tried this with his 20GB drive at around the same time, cranked it up to 32GB... Funny thing is it still fully works. Amazing isn't. Just don't try it at home :)

Re:It works, but be careful

[ColaMan]

Look out!
It seems that this modification affects your ability to spell and use correct grammar too!

For the love of god, WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?

Re:It works, but be careful

[__aatgod8309]

Why? They can't spell or use correct grammer either...

Re:It works, but be careful

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot Slashdot Slashdot Slashdot
Slashdot Slashdot Slashdot Slashdot
Slashdot Slashdot Slashdot Slashdot
Slashdot Slashdot Slashdot Slashdot
Slashdot Slashdot Slashdot Slashdot

SPELLING SPELLING!!!!!

(repeat 4 more times)

AHHH missssssssssstake a mistake mistake a mistake oooh its a MIiiiiiiiiiistake!!!!!

This is just the kind of article...

[Kynde]

... that makes me want an article moderation capabilities to slashdot. I mean, how great would've it been to avoid seeing this at all because it had gotten (Score: -1, bullshit).

I mean tricking an OS into seeing the partition table twice hardly counts for doubling the actual drive capacity. Geeez.

Mmmm.. already dreaming of (Score: +4, top news) and (Score: -1, dupe)

Re:This is just the kind of article...

[lxs]

I'm not sure about modding the articles, but between this and the blue skies on Mars (and oh so many others) it might be time for a 'crackpot' category. Perhaps with the head of Alex Chiu as icon :)

Re:This is just the kind of article...

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be fucking awesome, because then we bypass the most incompetent aspect of slashdot: the editors.

We all know they accept or decline articles on a whim, or on concerns for ad-viewings over actual usefulness/newsworthiness, and they sure as hell don't care enough to do a basic check for duplicate stories, or factual information.

Re:This is just the kind of article...

[Anonymous Coward]

I somehow fooled Windoz98 into seeing double. HDA had 2 partitions on it (both some type of FAT). HDB was ext2 + swap. HDC was a CD. If I had more than 1 Windoz type partition on HDD, the File Manager in Windoz saw double, and I could appear to write to both, but I was overwritting. The system manager reported the correct file systems. I finally gave up on trying to solve the problem and formated HDD with just 1 FAT partition.

Great.....

[Lord_Dweomer]

Great......now I can expect spam that reads:

Increase your harddrive size by 150mb! Women don't like men with small harddrives. Trustmeeee and click this blind link and giveme your CCnfo and I promise thisvkpj&$(*)#Hf89h0eq2987y

I HAVE seen UFOs

[Lord Kano]

And not even I believe this one.

LK

Re:I HAVE seen UFOs

[Anonymous Coward]

I HAVE seen UFOs

Me too! Scared me so much I dropped my bong!

damn i hope you are kidding

[lingqi]

but in case you are not:

HD are sold in GB with GB "defined" as 1,000,000,000 bytes, which is ~7.4% less than a real GB (2^30 bytes). After formatting, (depending on your FS) a extra few percent goes away for your file table, sector marker, directory structure, etc. so in real GB (in units of 2^30 bytes), it'll be a lot less than 160, or whatever your "bought" size.

Don't expect to recover those.

RAM is sold with truthful advertising. 128MB = 128*2^20 bytes, which is like 134,217,728 bytes - despite the 134, it's still 128MB.

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[Zakabog]

Ah. Thanks, I didn't think they'd do something like that. And how could it work both ways? Like how could 128MB = 134MB and still = 128MB? Isn't their one standard unit, then one that's slightly close but not really used for anything important?

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[kfg]

Isn't their one standard unit, then one that's slightly close but not really used for anything important?

The VW Beetle.

KFG

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[Ohreally_factor]

It's 1 MB = 1024 KB

1 KB = 1024 Bytes.

Powers of 2

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[Sivar]

Defining a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes is no more or less "real" than defining it as 1,000,000,000 bytes. Nothing about the way hard drives work makes it more logical to measure using the binary common use of the prefix over the traditional SI one.

If anything, Windows and whatever other reporting software used is incorrect, because "Giga" is an SI standard prefix used in science and mathematics meaning "One billion", just like "mega" is "one million" and micro is "one millionth."

In the old days, "kilobyte" was used when referring to 2^10 (1024) bytes because it was conveniently close to 1000, which is the meaning of the "kilo" prefix. The base-2 to base-10 similarity becomes ever wider as the values multiply. Go ahead and look at the next two sequences in which binary and decimal powers are "close".

That said, ultimately common use is what defines the meaning of words, but the common use of a word by no means invalidates the original terminology from which it was derived!

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[dirgotronix]

Actually, ram is falsly advertised. Ram is measured in mebibytes, while hard drives are measured in megabytes. Ram manufacturors just haven't caught on to the proper terminology.

1 Mebibyte = 2^20 = 1048576 bytes.
1 Megabyte = 10^6 = 1000000 bytes.

The "megabyte" as 2^20 was depreciated /many/ years ago. See http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ and search for megabyte.

Mega = 1000^2
Mebi = 1024^2

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[vidarh]

The thing is, referring to a GB as 1 billion bytes is NOT common use except among harddrive manufcaturers. In fact, there's an ongoing lawsuit going for deceptive marketing over this.

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[vidarh]

It might have been deprecated by some, but outside of a handful of people on Slashdot I hardly ever see people trying to use the crappy "mebi" prefixes. To most of the world 1MB = 10^6, no matter how much you'd like it to not to be.

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[Carrot007]

Really?

Personally I thought that the people who sugessted "Mebi" were taken out back and given a good kicking, and the rest of us sane people who understood the word context continued using mega knowing that we meant 1024 when refering to computers.

We also realised that the hard disk manufacturers would continue to use out of context numbers but feel that they may one day have to change due to the ever inceasing discrepency making them look stupid.

But maybe that's just me?

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[AlXtreme]

Just to be complete:

MB = Mega Byte, 10^6, base-10
MiB = Mega binary Byte, (2^10)^2, base-2
GB = Giga Byte, 10^9, base-10
GiB = Giga binary Byte, (2^10)^3, base-2

For more info, check the NIST standard

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[Phroggy]

Somebody has tried to end this confusion by renaming what you call a "real GB" to "GiB", keeping what HD mfgrs call a "GB" to mean 1,000,000,000 bytes. Obviously things aren't any less confusing yet, since most people don't use the new units yet. ;-)

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I thought that the people who sugessted "Mebi" were taken out back and given a good kicking, and the rest of us sane people who understood the word context continued using mega knowing that we meant 1024 when refering to computers.

You misspelled ignorant.

When your 100MBps ethernet card "only" does 100,000,000 bits per second instead of 104,857,600 bits per second does that mean the ethernet card manufacturers are using out of context numbers?

How about when your 3GHz cpu "only" does 3,000,000,000 cycles per second instead of 3,221,225,472 cycles per second, does that mean Intel is using out of context numbers?

RAM, by its nature is inherently organized in a binary fashion. Files are typically organized in a binary fashion because the data-structures used to keep track of them are stored as binary values.

Disk space is just a bunch of sectors in tracks on platters none of which are inherently organized in a binary fashion (oh yeah, it is common for the data portion of a sector to be 512 bytes, but there are a bunch more bits - start/stop/sync/ecc - in each sector that usually total out to a non-power of two number).

So yeah, context matters, but in this case, the context is a lot more fine-grained than "computers" vs "not computers." It is "naturally binary organization" versus "just about everything else."

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[dave420]

You can recover some space by changing the cluster size your OS uses... Some use standard sizes which might not be the best use of your hdd. Partition Magic can help here, as it shows you all the possible cluster sizes and how much space they would leave. It will also convert the clusters for you (though backing up is always a good idea with partition magic, even reading the manual can screw things up :-P)

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

But there are very good reasons for memory to be measured in powers of two, and using different units for hard disks and RAM seems silly.

Have you ever seen a machine advertised as having approx. 536.9MB of RAM?

Interestingly, some hard disks sold as 180GB are actually about half-way in between 180*10^9 and 180*2^30...

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

The "megabyte" as 2^20 was depreciated /many/ years ago.

By who? Not by me or anyone else I know. Apparently it's you, a few of your mates and the bastards who thought the SI units up who "deprecated" the old usage. The rest of us are sane and know why 1024 is a good value to designate as "kilo" and will continue to do so.

If I ever caught anyone using "mebibyte" in polite comversation I'd lop their nads off with a rusty spoon and beat them with a rolled up Belkin KVM cable.

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[destiny_uk]

RAM apart from SONY Memory Stick PRO that is. I recently bought a 256Mb stick and was horrified to discover around 30Mb is used for 'management information' so I can only use ~220Mb !

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[dubl-u]

Defining a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes is no more or less "real" than defining it as 1,000,000,000 bytes.

When marketroids deliberately shift the meaning of words to trick people into buying stuff, that makes it a lot less "real" in my book.

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[vistic]

When will the kibibyte, mibibyte, and gibibyte ever catch on i wonder?

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[osu-neko]

Nothing about the way hard drives work makes it more logical to measure using the binary common use of the prefix over the traditional SI one.

False. Memory and hard drives always format to units that divide out well into base 2 but rarely into base 10 units. For example, your floppy disk holds EXACTLY 1440 KB using the base-2 KB definition. Using the base 10 definition, it holds 1474.56 kB. And the larger the drive, the more and more digits you need to start adding after the decimal point to be accurate, or eventually you just start approximating. It's much easier to be both concise and accurate using the base-2 versions of these terms...

If anything, Windows and whatever other reporting software used is incorrect, because "Giga" is an SI standard prefix...

Neither "bits" nor "bytes" are an SI unit, so this argument is screwed from the get-go...

...used in science and mathematics...

And here's the real key -- terminology in any field is defined by the practitioners of that field. If computer scientists define the terms differently, then using them the way mathematicians use them in a computer science context is wrong. Quantum physicists use the terms "strangeness", "charm", and "color" in ways that vary from the way these terms are used in other fields, that doesn't make them wrong, it makes those who use the other definitions while talking about quantum physics wrong. Saying a megabyte is one million bytes is every bit as wrong as saying the charm of a subatomic partical is a measure of its charisma...

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I thought that the people who sugessted "Mebi" were taken out back and given a good kicking, and the rest of us sane people who understood the word context continued using mega knowing that we meant 1024 when refering to computers.

You misspelled ignorant.

no, you misspelled "baby talk". goo goo gibi mebibyte

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[joto]

False. Memory and hard drives always format to units that divide out well into base 2 but rarely into base 10 units.

For memory it's true. It has to do with being simple to address, which is kind of important in todays binary computers.

For external storage, e.g. hard disks, storage is just a random subdivision of platters into cylinders and sectors, and eventually bits. There is no more reason to make those subdivisions binary then it is for your phone modem to work at some "binary" speed. On the other hand, when formatting those data for use in an operating system (or some firmware), subdivision into fixed size blocks is preferable, and for practical/historical reasons those blocks tend to be a power of 2, but the number of such blocks need not be a power of 2.

If we totally disregard historical context, there seems to be little practical benefit to insist on using multiplier=1024 for external media.

For example, your floppy disk holds EXACTLY 1440 KB using the base-2 KB definition.

To be pedantic, that is true (1474560B). Which means a 1.44MB floppy doesn't really hold 1.44MB (1509949B), but 1.40625MB. But the reasons for this are purely marketing, I guess.

Neither "bits" nor "bytes" are an SI unit, so this argument is screwed from the get-go...

That would be really pedantic, as bits are the same as 1 and bytes are the same as 8 (or in more practical terms, bytes are the same as 1, and bits are 1/8 bytes). I doubt the SI committee is going to shoot you if you start talking about megadozen too. After all, they were the ones to start it all, mandating a base unit (mol) for mass amount, and optional (and sometimes necessary) base units for radians and steradians.

The fact of the matter is, that the SI committee actually has issued a recommendation for using SI units with bits and bytes, which recommends using kibi, mebi, etc instead of kilo, mega, etc, when using the multiplier=1024 rule. So I doubt they are really against bits and bytes.

And here's the real key -- terminology in any field is defined by the practitioners of that field.

Here we tend to agree. Multiplier=1024 for storage and 1000 for data-rates. But then again, this is not what the SI committe thinks, as they would prefer us to use kibi, mebi, etc, when that is what we mean. Actually, I would prefer the SI alternative, but then again, there's nice to be able to communicate with people not being pendants (like me) at times.

Re:damn i hope you are kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

Never, because they're fucking stupid.

This really needs to be tested more throughly...

[Duty]

e.g. writing all zeroes to one partition, all ones to the other, then verifying both of them.

Until then, I'll concur with the posters who suggest it's just a way of badly corrupting the partition table.

Darwin

[Lord_Dweomer]

I personally can't wait to come back to this story a bit later when people have had a chance to try this out. Seriously, it'll be like reading the Darwin Awards for computers!

article summary

[ocularDeathRay]

Ok.. so what you do is you heat up your soldering iron and you burn a small hole in the corner of the disk. This will cause the bios to detect massive amounts of free disk space. and best of all... it is completely reliable storage!

Re:article summary

[No. 24601]

Ok.. so what you do is you heat up your soldering iron and you burn a small hole in the corner of the disk. This will cause the bios to detect massive amounts of free disk space. and best of all... it is completely reliable storage!

So, burn a large hole in the corner of your brain and life will be a lot happier!

someone..

[katalyst]

find the guy who wrecked his ipod mini to "satisfy his curiousity" and er, ours too. This may be the ideal next project for him..

A better way is to try a more efficient filesystem

[Moderation abuser]

ReiserFS seems to be fairly good at packing files into a smaller space. 10% on a 300Gb disk is 30Gb more space available after all.

How to do this in Linux

[Rufus211]

mkfs.ext2 /dev/hdb1
mkdir /mnt1
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt1
mkdir /mnt2
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt2

Tada! now when you `df` you'll have twice as much total space!

Re:How to do this in Linux

[|<amikaze]

And this does it without corrupting your filesystem!

Re:How to do this in Linux

[kasperd]

And this does it without corrupting your filesystem!

That is true, I use it on all my systems. You should notice that it requires at least version 2.4, anything older will give you an error message if you try.

Re:How to do this in Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, I just set that up. Next I'm going to RAID those mountpoints!

Re:How to do this in Linux

[Rufus211]

depends, ext2 should be fine but most journaled fs's will not be happy.

Just use `mount --bind /old /new` and be over with it.

Fun with Norton

[NanoGator]

I played a practical joke on my friends back in my high school programming course. Back in the DOS days, Norton had a tool where you could mess with the data stored on the FAT table. I came to school with a floppy that had reported it had over a gigabyte of free space. Heh it was funny watching their eyes get big. Sadly, there were no females around to demonstrate my technological prowess.

Re:Fun with Norton

[craznar]

I preferred the trick of replacing the first byte of the Volume label of the hard disk with 0x00. The hard disk looked entirely blank, until you relabled the hard drive (-:

Of course these days they would pick you up and lock you in prison for that sort of stuff.

Dude

[Anonymous Coward]

When you bought your "MB 109" drive, you were holding the box upside down. That's why you actually have 601 MB.

720 - 800 trick

[eamonman]

This story actually reminded me more of the ol 720k to 800 k trick. Back when I had an Atari ST, there was a shareware utility that wrote to the extra bit per sector. I never had any problems with it, and I think that I went about and reformatted all my floppies to fit in that extra 80k. Funny how 80k was so important back around the late 80's. Now it can barely hold a simple word document.

Re:720 - 800 trick

[nicomen]

Well, on the Amiga we had/have 880k available on diskettes (and 1,76mb oon HD-disks of course). In addition with proper software one could achieve up to 960k.

One possible answer

[0x0d0a]

I'm still confused.

Jeff Garzik, the Linux SATA guy (I thought Garzik was the Linux Ethernet guy after the Garzik/Becker fallout, but whatever), wrote in to say that this was host-protected space. He implied that this might be used when bad blocks crop up.

I'm very dubious about this. It doesn't make much sense technically.

Someone said that some OEM dumped OS space for storing an OS. Yeeesss...that could be right. However, we are talking upwards of ten gigs. I don't buy that they're asking for a third of the hard drive for the OEM.

I would *damn* well not be monkeying around with my drive until some other people test this out and (potentially) destroy their drives. I'm not currently sure how nasty this is, but if Garzik is right on almost any of his guesses, you have the potential to physically destroy your drive.

Here's one more possibility (a positive one). Garzik pointed out that factory cert time is when drive sizes are calculated. It's possible that, since drives are sold at particular sizes (120 GB, etc), if a hard drive can store 170 GB, not enough to get up to the next storage capacity (180 GB), the manufacturer just does not use space after a certain point to obtain a uniform line of drives. In this case, "unlocking" this space is equivalent to overclocking processors. Reasons for supporting this guess is that the sizes are uniformly large, but not large enough to push drives into the next storage bin.

A couple of points I'd worry about: clearly, the manufacturer did not intend you to be using this space. As such, they may allow space to pass cert and sit in a protected partition...but presumably they're going to put the least-reliable area (inside or outside of the disk) in this partition. This would be the least-reliable section of the disk.

This may become a valid technique (if unreliable), but I'm not sure if I'd do it. I'm pretty uncomfortable with the reliability of certified, used-as-manufacturer-considered-safe consumer IDE hard drives already (1 yr warranty, numerous nasty batches in the last few years, etc). If you OC your processor...big deal, you're out a processor and maybe a motherboard. If you lose your hard drive, you lose a lot of data...and hard drives are awfully cheap these days.

There are no guarantees that the drive firmware is going to not have subtle bugs relating to mucking around in a partition that's supposed to be hidden.

It may be that error-correction space is not allocated for this partition.

It may be that other metadata that the drive allocates about space that you normally need (I dunno, SMART related data or something), and that isn't existant for the hidden area.

Finally, there's no guarantee that if this works properly for one drive, that it will work properly for other drives. Heck, what if there's a mechanical or firmware revision within a single model (as Creative Labs likes to do with their soundcard products), and things work properly with one drive and not with another?

Doesn't mean that this might not be useful for someone...just that if I have to cut corners to save money somewhere, I think I'd rather do it on a lot of things other than hard drive reliability. Keep in mind also that if I'm right about the bin size, you're saving less than one bin size -- probably less than $20.

Finally, cheap drives fail a lot these days. If your drive starts the click of death within a year or three years or whatever your manufacturer warranty is, they may refuse to send you a new drive if you've been mucking around with low-level stuff on the drive.

IT WORKS, I tried it and confirmed FULL CAPACITY.

[Anonymous Coward]

All of my IOMeter tests ran successfully, and the speed gains were IMPRESSIVE. I will no longer be ripped off by the "man". I am repartitioning that ST-225R now (keeping fingers crossed for 1G capacity!)

I put a mod chip in my Phat "Type R" and doubled the horsepower (the pineapple shooter exhaust was good for +20BHP and one extra mile of sonic boom!). I put some 104+ TURBO octane booster in the tank too, and a special blend of Slick50/MarvelMysteryOil.

Hopefully this article will mean fewer systems online (most probably infected with MS.Blaster, NetSky, Bagle etc). We can only hope...

lies, damn lies and binary.

[slittle]

Yeah, that one that's "really close" is the base 2 computer usage. 1024 is kinda close to 1000, so they called it a kilo-byte. Eventually, enough of those "kinda close" KBs add up to enough to bite you in the arse - there's millions of the little bastards on an average HDD.

The standard units are the SI prefixes, and they're base 10, no exceptions. Common computer use is simply wrong, but there are too many stubborn people to admit it and use something else. Of course it doesn't help that that "something else" (kibi- mebi- and the rest) looks and sounds kinda silly. Geeks are even less likely to use those terms in polite company as they are to start crapping on about Ogg Vorbis.

Re:lies, damn lies and binary.

[osu-neko]

Well, it should also be noted that they don't use the standard SI abbreviations either. (The abbreviation for kilo is "k", note the lowercase -- SI prefixes are case sensitive.) When I see "KB" I know that's 1024 bytes. If they meant 1000 bytes, they'd have used the proper SI abbreviation and said "kB"...

Virus ?

[Evil Pete]

Is this the first tech info virus ? Follow instructions to destroy your own HD. Seems like just putting a hammer through it would be easier, but it would probably work with the clueless. Hmmm, yeah not a bad idea I guess in a very twisted way.

Re:Virus ?

[boaworm]

I think not. A virus should be self-reproducing, and I strongly doubt that anyone trying this out will recommend it to more people :-)

Re:Virus ?

[__aatgod8309]

Ah, but you forget - there will be those who do it, 'double' their capacity, and immediately email or message all their friends to brag of how l33t they are... They then start storing stuff on the new partitions and wonder why their computer falls over... And are unable to fix it and get back online to warn their friends until it's too late...

Re:Virus ?

[Aussie]

Hmmm, yeah not a bad idea I guess in a very twisted way.

An excellent idea. Think of all the "broken" hard disks you are going to end up with :)

Re:Virus ?

[ch-chuck]

If false, it would hardly be the "first" - I can clearly remember a gag 'tech' article from 19 years ago that went around the bbs world, detailing how you could upgrade your 300 baud modem to 1200.

Clip these speed limiting parts out here, wind a coil of wire and solder it in there - and you have a broken modem. ;)

A lot of people were stuck at 300 untill their next birthday, and, well, the temptation is strong, hope springs eternal and there's one born every minute.

Re:Virus ?

[Jerf]

Is this the first tech info virus?

Oh goodness, no. Not that these were first either, but SULFNBK.EXE and JDBGMGR.EXE both predate this comfortably. Both are emails screaming at people to delete certain harmless files from their computer because they are a virus, and will cause loss of functionality if they are actually deleted, albeit a minor loss.

Granted, this is a much bigger loss ("a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing"), but it's the same basic thing.

Re:Virus ?

[smothra]

Actually, it's the idea that is the virus, not the result. The idea of getting more drive space easily is what replicates and spreads. Sure, some people try the idea and destroy their HD, but that is analogous to a real-world virus that kills its host. Presumably, the successful virus propegates before causing a fatality.

Hey, someone has to defend Dawkins' idea.

Oh no, is this a meme meme?

Re:Virus ?

[Uninvited Guest]

Wait, can you give me more information on this so called "hammer" approach? How much more storage would I get?

Re:Virus ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get loads of small bits.

Re:Virus ?

[learza]

Meme viruses are not new, but this is the most stupid that I've seen. Remember jdbmgr.exe? There's also a lot of non-technical ones but the distinction between good meme and bad meme becomes a bit dependant on your point of view.

Just to be a bastard

[0x0d0a]

Just to be a bastard, I gotta point out that this could probably be considered a Ghost bug. While there might not be anything Symantec could *do* to help someone that's mucked up their drive, I could reasonably see them complaining to Symantec about it.

Re:Just to be a bastard

[karstux]

Symantec seems to have the same opinion - note how they say in the article to use a very specific version of Ghost? Obviously, the bug has been patched.

Re:Just to be a bastard

[Alan Partridge]

I hardly think you can call this a bug when you have to deliberately switch off your machine at a certain point in it's boot process and swap out a drive!

Is it a bug in MacOSX that it doesn't work if you delete the Applications folder while running a program from it?

Re:Just to be a bastard

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to be a bastard, I gotta point out that this could probably be considered a Ghost bug.

Which is probably why the article instructs you to use a particular unpatched version of Ghost:

Required items: Ghost 2003 Build 2003.775 (Be sure not to allow patching of this software)...

I'd love to see a diskmap (nt4 reskit) dump of a hard disk modified in such a way. My guess is we'd confirm the overlapping partition theory mentioned in other posts.

write-only memory!

[Anonymous Coward]

someone dig out the jargon file entry on write-only memory.

This is a great way to get a few TB of WOM

secret slashdot comments recoverable too

[circletimessquare]

normally, when you surf slashdot, you believe you see all of the 3 or 4 rated comments there are to be seen

however, slashdot's software has a SECRET mode that reveals comments under stories you didn't even know were there!

this secret mode does not work on 5 rated comments or comments rated 2 or below, due to the nature of slashdot's software... it's too technical to go into now, trust me

you simply have to add the following string to the url in your browser:

"&gullibility=high"

so, for example, where your address bar might now say:

"http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/10/034 12 37&mode=nested"

it should say:

"http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/10/034 12 37&mode=nested&gullibility=high"

got it typed in there? good, now for the magic!

simply hit the refresh button in your browser

for example, where normally there was 134 comments rated 3 or above, or 78 comments rated 4 and above... such as with the slashdot story last week: "Look mom! I get a cool moire effect when I push on my LCD panel!", now you get 256 comments rated 3 or above, and even a whopping 99 comments rated 4 and above for that story!

wow!

Re:secret slashdot comments recoverable too

[dilby]

It doesn't work for me.

And what does gullibility mean? I couldn't find it at dictionary.com

Re:secret slashdot comments recoverable too

[AvengerXP]

Mod +1, Ironic

In other news

[sokk]

In other news:
Users report that 486to586.exe actually works.

"It works, it really works", "My machine feels much faster" was some of the comments from the happy users.


Karma whoring: But after some investigation, it was identified as a renamed copy of loadlin.exe :P

Re:In other news

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

ahahahahhaa

oh my god, I haven't heard someone mention that shit in years.

This is obviously fake

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like what the other posters said earlier, this is just fake. The fact that you had to use Ghost is an indication that the process invloves corrupting the partition table or the file system. The only way you could "recover hidden space" from your hard drive is to modify the firmware of the hard drive itself. You would likely reduce error correction stuff etc, but you don't want to do that if data is important to you.

720kb?

[trezor]

I think the disks held much more than 720kb of data, if filesystems were included.

These "720kb" disk held at least 800kb, if not up to 900kb's of data (but I don't remeber exactly) if used on an Amiga.

Somehow however, Amiga entirely forgot that HD-floppy's existed, so when that caught on, it really didn't remain impressive at all anymore....

But with that same system I bet you could have squeezed 1.7MB out of those so called 1.44MB-floppies.

Re:720kb?

[Toraz Chryx]

The Amiga 3000 and 4000 had HD floppy drives, and they got 1.76MB on a HD floppy by default, with DFS they could squeeze 1.96MB onto one.

Re:720kb?

[darien]

True that, but oy were they slooow with HD disks...

Re:720kb?

[ajs318]

That's because the Amiga's disk controller couldn't keep up with the data rate of 110kB per second (80 tracks = 1760kB => 1 track = 22kB; 300 rpm => 5 rps => 1 spin = 0.2"; so data rate 110kB/sec), so they slowed the drive down to 150rpm (half speed, easily done with one extra flip-flop) in order to read and write HD disks.

While we're still on the subject, was it the Amiga or the ST that could be made to write to read-only floppies?

Strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'll call Mulder and Scully.

I agree...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that Slashdot editors (or some of them, at least) have the ability to manually edit a comment. For example, the comments which were removed when MS threatened over the Kerberos source were replaced with "This comment has been removed ..." in red text.

If some kind editor could change gadfium's post, above, to red text, I don't think anyone would mind the "editor abuse." This thread could seriously cost a more casual reader their hard drive(s).

Anyone remember NaBob?

[PCM2]

(I post this here because maybe you've been around long enough to remember when ARC vs. ZIP vs. LZH vs. some others was a big deal.)

Back in the days of the "archive format wars" somebody made a program called NaBob that was pretty funny. It made archives that were so perfectly compressed that they approached singularity. That is, every archive turned out to be one byte long.

The various compression methods, it was said, were named after different types of quarks. So, as the files were compressed, it would report, "upping," "downing", "charming," "stranging," etc.

The file extension was .BOB.

When you ran the uncompress process, all your files would be mysteriously "extracted" from the archive again. Amazing! It really stored all that data in a single byte!

Of course, all it was really doing was setting the hidden file bit on all your files and creating a one-byte file with the .BOB extension, but hey, as they say, there's one born every minute.

That program always cracked me up, so I just thought I'd share.

Re:Anyone remember NaBob?

[egjertse]

Hmm can't remember that one, but these days you can always download the actively developed LZip - a lossy compression program!

It has a non-GPL compliant license though. Pity.

Re:Anyone remember NaBob?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is one of the funniest fscking stories I've ever heard. Thanks.

Re:Anyone remember NaBob?

[jafuser]

It has a non-GPL compliant license though.

Best software license ever... =)

(2)
You have the right to an attorney. You have the right to remain
silent. You have to fight for your right to par-tee. This license
may not be revoked, redistributed, photocopied, or discussed without
the express written consent of the parents. All models eighteen years
of age, proof on file. The manager is not responsible for lost baggage.

Re:Anyone remember NaBob?

[Fnkmaster]

I don't remember NaBob specifically but I remember a nearly identical program that made the rounds sometime around 1992-3. It reduced every set of files to a few dozens of bytes - I believe it was doing what another poster said, storing the file's cluster/sector location on the drive for magical restoration even if you deleted the originals. Of course if you copied the archive over to another computer it would always give some obscure error message. It was pretty obvious as soon as you saw the file sizes that it was just playing games of some sort and not really compressing anything.

I also seem to recall that this was used as a vector for transmission of a virus/trojan of some sort. :)

Re:Anyone remember NaBob?

[innocent_white_lamb]

Best software license ever...

Naw.. I like this one better:

Should you fail to register any of the evaluation software available through our web pages and continue to use it, be advised that a leather-winged demon of the night will tear itself, shrieking blood and fury, from the endless caverns of the nether world, hurl itself into the darkness with a thirst for blood on its slavering fangs and search the very threads of time for the throbbing of your heartbeat. Just thought you'd want to know that.

Alchemy Mindworks accepts no responsibility for any loss, damage or expense caused by leather-winged demons of the night, either.

See?

You could do the same with 51/4 floppy disks

[jobbegea]

By cutting a small hole in de envelope of a Single Sided (SS) disk you would turn it into a Double Sided disk effectively doubling it capacity. Of course these disk were SS for a reason, they had failed the double sided test.

I would not be surprised if these increases in HD space are due to use of disabled/unsafe disk surface

Long ago and Far away.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in OS 7 days on the Mac there was a program called DiskDoubler that did just this. It replaced the disk driver and compressed all data to the disk and expanded it on the way out. It really did work, for a while I had 80 Meg of space on a 40 Meg drive. Then it failed and I had 40 Meg of trash instead. So this could work but backup backup backup.

Sounds like "Hey to get faster speed, type +++ ath

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to work on nubes on the bbs.

Probably true

[mcbridematt]

Try DD'ing a 20gb disk drive to a 40gb one, whole drive at the time (i.e dd /dev/hda -> /dev/hdb).

I did this with my IBM DeathStar to My WD Caviar. cfdisk then thought I had a 20gb drive :( AFAIK I fixed it by blowing away the partition table completely with some other partioning app (don't remember)

Interesting...

[Newer Guy]

I just bought two WD 200 gig serial ATA drives, one for 80 bucks, the other for 30 bucks after rebate (Thanks, Fatwallet!).

Does this mean I've bought over a terabyte of storage for $110.00?

Hmmm...110/1020 = 10.8 cents per gigabyte of storage! That HAS to break the price barrier!

Aaah the wonderful days of copying to floppy

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1:
CRC error on disk 17 of 98.
*sigh*
*fix*
CRC error on disk 33 of 98.
DOH
*fix*
CRC error on disk 54 of 98.
Call friend and tell him his disks SUCK!
*fix*
CRC error on disk 79 of 98.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!
*fix*
Total blizz when 2 days worth of copying is complete.

Step 2:
Open High price floppy stand.

Step 3:
PROFIT!!! (until people realize buying the games would actually be cheaper)

utter bull

[rev_karol]

CHECK IT OUT before you rape your hd

Proof that it's false

[Frodo420024]

A quote from the end of the article:

Caution

Do not try to delete both partitions on the drive so you can create one large partition. This will not work. You have to leave the two partitions separate in order to use them.

Uh-oh. This supports the 'Currupted Partition Table' theory. If the space was real, this wouldn't happen. I do have a spare drive, but I ain't gonna try this...

Be Prepared

[0mni]

Its easy to get a free lunch you just need to be prepared to eat shit. Its that kind of world.

No cigar, but...

[thomasj]

The way harddisk are made these days it would be possible to claim an increase in useable space, if you could find some way to hack into the firmware.

Disks of today have no direct mapping from head, cylinder and track number to physical location on the platter. Rather there is an internal table of the mapping with room for remapping potential weak sectors to unused space. When the head signal is getting close to be inconclusive the just read sector is written at a spare sector, the mapping table is updated, and the old one is marked as bad.

If this article had show how to manipulate the disk so a number of the spare sectors could be used for enlarging the disk it would have been interesting...

This isn't like overclocking your hard drive...

[JRHelgeson]

I used to do a lot of data recovery... lemme tell you whats happening here.

Remember the "Good old days" where hard drive sizes were sub 540mb - We addressed hard drives using C/H/S size (Cylinder/Heads/Sectors) - It was common to scandisk and start seeing bad blocks (sectors) on your hard drive...

When we broke the 540mb 'barrier' we quit using C/H/S mappings and started using LBA mode, Logical Block Addressing. What this effectively did was take control of the physical drive access, data storage and retrieval, away from the operating system. This was because the OS/Bios would only recognize a maximum of 512 Cylinders.

Quick facts about hard drives:
1) There are *ALWAYS* defects on the hard drive surface. There is no such thing as a flawless platter.
2) As hard drive sizes have increased, all the innovations have taken place in your head. :)

Yes, there have been minor changes in the platter structure. As rotational speeds increased, sector sizes decreased, and operating temperatures increased, manufacturers had to move away from aluminum platters as they would shrink/grow too much as the drive reached operating temp. So they moved to glass. -- The surface of the drive has always been coated using the same exact ionization process.

However, the read/write head is where all the innovations have taken place. Because the size of the bits are getting smaller and smaller, a surface defect that previously would only wipe out a single bit would now wipe out an entire sector. For this reason, drive manufacturers allocate plenty of extra space on the drive to move data from failing areas of the drive (which is happening all the time). This drive maintenance happens independant of the operating system on the PC. It is an operation of the hard drive firmware. IT IS AUTOMATIC.

After drive manufacture, there is an initial low-level format of the drive (platter) where the drive establishes its sector boundaries. This is when it maps out the defective areas of the drive and stores it in the eeprom. As the drive operates and sectors fail, the drive automatically moves the data to a different area of the drive. These areas where the data is moved to are typically adjacent to the defective area. Space allocated to compensate for defects can be as much as 100% of the original drive space.

If the drive didn't maintain itself, then you'd see TONS of surface defects whenever you run scandisk, even on a brand new drive.

Think about it, when is the last time you ran a scankdisk and had it come back with surface errors. It doesn't happen anymore.

Anyhow... What these guys did was use a utility that creates a quick and dirty MBR(Master Boot Record) that likely archives the legitamate MBR within the 8mb partition while it does its business. These bozo's have essentially wiped out the MBR (READ: Defect Map) and formatted the full capacity of the entire disk.

Sure, you can install an OS, even run it, but as the hard drive tries to manage itself... well... I've explained enough here, be it suffice to say that you're fsck3d.

This isn't like Intel that creates a single chip and labels it 3 different speeds (The pentium 75/90/100 comes to mind) where you can overclock it...

Re:This isn't like overclocking your hard drive...

[rugger]

Your information is off. Either you haven't used hard drives for about 15 years, or you are making the whole thing up.

The MBR does not store the bad block information. The MBR hasn't stored bad block information since IDE became popular and people stopped being able to low format your their hard drives (no a zero wipe is not a low level format, it simply gives the firmware a good time to reallocate developed bad sectors)

The bad block information is stored in areas of the drive that are completely unaccessable to the outside world, most probably near the servo information on the same track as the actual bad sector. It is only accessed by the LBA mapper in the drive firmware.

The drive actually keeps count of how many sectors it has had to reallocate in its life, and how many sectors it is waiting for a good moment to reallocate. You can get this info from most drives by inspecting the SMART values. Bad sectors do not ussually develop very often after the drive is shipped. You should not see this value be more then 1 or 2 in a young, properly working hard drive.

When the drive detects a sector is going bad, it does not automaticly reallocate it unless it can be correctly read. (or ECC corrected by the drive) This gives recovery software a slim chance of getting lucky and recoving the data from the bad block. The drive simply notes the sector is going bad. If it is read correctly at some late, the hard drive will automaticly reallocate it somewhere else. Alternatively, if a write is issued to a sector awaiting reallocation, then the drive will it perform then rather then wait for a good read.

Also, manufacturers still use aluminium platters in most drives. The embedded servo infomation is used to keep the drive tracking correctly regardless of the temperature of the drive (within specified limits)

Since you didn't read the article, nor any of the comments prevously written, you are completely wrong about this magical utility. It is simply an exploitation of a bug in Norton Ghost that makes your hard drive look larger then it is by overlapping partitions. Attempt to write data to one partition and you will trash the data on the other.

Re:This isn't like overclocking your hard drive...

[craznar]

I definitely saw:

"This is when it maps out the defective areas of the drive and stores it in the eeprom. "

in the original post, so I'm not sure where you get

"Your information is off. Either you haven't used hard drives for about 15 years, or you are making the whole thing up. The MBR does not store the bad block information. "

Re:This isn't like overclocking your hard drive...

[Mordaximus]

...in the original post, so I'm not sure where you get..."Your information is off. Either you haven't used hard drives for about 15 years, or you are making the whole thing up. The MBR does not store the bad block information. "

How about from "These bozo's have essentially wiped out the MBR (READ: Defect Map) and formatted the full capacity of the entire disk."

Re:This isn't like overclocking your hard drive...

[JRHelgeson]

I just re-read my post. It was typed as I was half asleep. Definately not MBR, but the only thing I could think of was the MFT, but thats NTFS.
I should have waited till I had some sleep before posting that comment...

Re:This isn't like overclocking your hard drive...

[runderwo]

Yeah, in addition to that sometimes you can tell if a drive is starting to have problems just by the fact that it is getting slower and noisier under regular use when nothing else has changed, due to the drive having to seek way out of its way to the spare sector pool to fetch a sector that would have been part of the file it was reading.

It's like fragmentation, only at a hardware level.

There was even worse stuff....

[imsabbel]

There were also programs that just "deleted" the file and strored the cluster numbers in the "compressed" file. Too bad if you happen to defrag or something else in the meantime.
the faq of comp.compression has a lot of really wired stuff...

Only real and safe way to gather disk space is...

[Ilgaz]

Compression on a REAL filesystem. Like, compress text file folders ( /usr/doc ) on the fly.

I remember Plus 95+DriveSpace 3, at fat 16 days, guess what? Even it worked fine. BTW, it has nothing to do with drivespace 2 or 1.

If this turns out to be true

[zaunuz]

If this turns out to be true (and with few/tolerable side-effects) I might use it. Today i use a 13Gb harddrive, and I dont need anything more other than storing junk which i might need later.

I know that the space gained will not be much from 13Gb harddrive, but it will give those extra few MBs that allows me to store junk in the /usr/pub. I will try it out on one of my spare drives. But to be honest, i very much doubt that the gain is worth the potentioal side-effects, if it works at all.

Re:If this turns out to be true

[ajs318]

The "side effects" include that data written to one partition also gets written somewhere else in the other partition, and vice versa. Of course, the sector map only gets updated in the partition you deliberately wrote to, so the file won't appear in any directory listing in the other one -- and that space won't be marked as "occupied", so files in the second partition will be able to use it. Eventually, a file on the second partition will grow into the space occupied by a file from the first partition, and what you will end up with is a huge case of crosslinking.

It's a trap!

[glassesmonkey]

The only saving grace of this article it that even the most intelligent person would have trouble following the Computurs-Fer-Nascar-Dads style instructions. From the article:

Do not try to delete both partitions on the drive so you can create one large partition. This will not work. (this is because they are overlapping and you won't see 'extra' space if you delete the overlap)

You have to leave the two partitions separate in order to use them. Windows disk management will have erroneous data (again alluding to the error in reporting space)

in that it will say drive size = manus stated drive size and then available size will equal ALL the available space with recovered partitions included. ... It has worked completely fine with no loss before and it has also lost the data on the drive before. (so it obviously WILL 'lost' your data)

How smart u are..

[essreenim]

I can tell your intelligence by your signature.
This is possible and is regularly used by HDD manufacturers (if you bothered to read the article)
..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.
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.

Re:How smart u are..

[Anonymous Coward]

Er. Except that's not how it works.

Intel tests a sample from each batch of processors to determine which "bin" it goes into. That sample tested reliably at 2.4GHz? Okay, into the 2.4GHz pile. That sample tested at 2.8? Okay, into the 2.8 pile. The trick about processors running faster than labeled isn't because they're mislabeling processors, it's that they only test one processor out of the entire batch. Many processors within either batch could be capable of 3GHz, simply due to vagaries of production - you can give it a shot and find out, but don't be surprised when it develops unacceptable amounts of heat like the processor they tested.

HD manufacturers are quite different. When they release a new line of HDs, they are all based off common technologies, but over a wide range of hard drive sizes - because the NUMBER OF PLATTERS inside each model are different. Got a platter that can hold 100GB? Stick 1 inside, you've got a 100GB drive. 2 inside, 200GB. 3 inside, 300GB. There's three models (though drives typically contain substantially more platters). Now you stick 2 in heads for each platter (unless it's one of those old wacky Barracuda drives, which had 4 heads per platter), and firmware that is designed to control the hardware inside the sealed case - but usually even the controller is identical within a line.

One other important thing to remember is that they test the platters BEFORE the HD is fully assembled. This is very different from a processor, where you can't exact test individual components until the entire thing is built. That said, they certainly design in a certain amount of fudge room certainly, so they can remap bad sectors into the fudge room. No platter is perfect, so they need additional space to remap bad sectors. I would be very, very surprised if there's more than 10GB of available space on a 250GB drive...

Re:How smart u are..

[smittyoneeach]

I would carry your analysis a step further and note that chip and drive manufacturers don't make money by downgrading their product.
I daresay they've a statistical model that has them doing enough sampling to maximize profit, and the means minimizing the amount of irritated customers calling in about problems.
This is not like highway engineering, where they have to figure in weather, vehicles, and Aunt Tillie before posting a speed sign for a curve, so they lowball it heavily.

Re:How smart u are..

[normal_guy]

This is the same kind of post-manufacture testing that decides what color transistors and capacitors are painted before you solder them on your PCB.

Re:How smart u are..

[Brando_Calrisean]

That reminds me of the manufacturing process for ball-bearings (at least for rollerblades). The process for each ABEC rating is the same, but they won't know which rating a bearing receives until they put it through a speed test.

Re:How smart u are..

[shawn(at)fsu]

Educate me please...
Okay I've heard this allot about processors and something has always nagged at be about this. How is it in something that I think of as precise as making chips is it not cretain how fast a chip will preform? If you make something the same way how is it that you have a variance from one to the next? Sorry for the dumb question but I wuld just like to understand this.

Re:How smart u are..

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to chime in for highway engineers; the design speed on the alaska highway up thru Canada is 100 km/h; which coincides -exactly- with the posted speed limit in most cases. This coming straight from the donkey's mouth; I work with the design engineers for that highway.

Re:How smart u are..

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen to work in the processor inducstry, and your statement is untrue. Every processor gets tested. The 'bins' are chosen due to 2 factors:
1) The processor passes testing under extreme conditions at this speed. This gaurantees that the part has a high probability of never being returned as a defect (as silicon is used it ages due to electron-igration, which effectively makes it work slower/stop working eventually). The testing gaurantees that the user won't ever see this impact. In this case, a 2.4GHz binned part may work fine for you at 2.8GHz, but perhaps it will die in 3 years. Or perhaps a single instruction in SSE will return the wrong value 1 time in 100,000. Who knows.

2) Parts are binned to meet supply. The company says it will supply 10,000 2.8GHz parts, and 100,000 2.4GHz parts. However of the 110,000 parts, 40,000 ran at 2.8GHz, and the rest at 2.4GHz. To keep the price scale (and meet the contract) 30,000 oparts which are perfectly good at 2.8GHz will get sold as 2.4

The downside: There is no way to tell (1) from (2) as a consumer, so overclocking is all a game of craps.

Also remember that the tests are done under 'extreme' conditions, which means that all parts will likely work slightly faster than the bin they were assigned to.

Caveat: When a new frequency/design is released, it may be very difficult to get to the desired frequency, and the testing is relaxed somewhat to meet the quota (in which case very few parts will be overclockable)

Lastly, no testing is done above the top bin, so if 3.2 GHz is the current fastest sold, some percentage of those may run at 3.4 or 3.6, and they won't have been tested that far.

Re:How smart u are..

[ktulu1115]

It has to do with the inperfections and variations in the original silicon wafer. Small deviations can effect the maximum speed the chip can run at while maintaining stability. You are right though, the process to create each chip (at least in each batch) is identical, however. I'm sure Intel has some whitepapers on the subject but slightly too busy at work to Google for them now. Hope this helps.

Re:How smart u are..

[kent.dickey]

The parent post is incorrect in regards to chip testing.

Manufacturers test every single chip pretty much identically. Different companies differ in how they determine speed of parts (run some patterns at full speed, measure the delay of some known circuits, etc.) but each part is tested. There is too much variation across the wafer to do much else.

It's always possible to run a chip faster than a manufacturer's testing especially if it is kept cooler than the max spec, voltage is within tighter tolerance than spec, or if the user doesn't care about correct answers. I find the last point is what usually allows the greatest overclocking.

Also, some large manufacturers (Intel, AMD) have marketing needs to sell certain speed grades. So if all parts run at 3.0GHz, but users are demanding the cheaper 2.8GHz parts, then they'll sell some faster parts marked at 2.8GHz. In general, this is a temporary situation since re-pricing to reflect the increased yield will probably move the 3.0GHz price down shortly to increase pressure on the competition.

Re:How smart u are..

[CTho9305]

It is very precise on an absolute scale (as in, compared to the size of things we normally deal with, the accuracy is very high).

However, you need to operate at the bleeding edge, so the actual features themselves are VERY small - small enough that a few atoms misplaced here or there can start to have a noticeable effect. If you wanted better yields, you could use larger features, but you'd sacrifice performance.

Re:How smart u are..

[nelsonal]

As I understand it, and I'm certainly not a EE or chip designer, it's a matter of semiconductors can be driven "hot" which makes them work but shortens their life. Now Intel wants to run the voltage at 1.4 V to keep their heat dissipation at about 80 W. Imagine a P4 that has everything perfectly finished (if it were an engine it would be ported and polished). Now imagine one that all works but there are some thin gates, and doping wasn't quite as uniform. If you wanted it to run at 3 Ghz you might be able to if you crank the voltage up to 1.6 V and dissipate 110 W (note that these numbers are only guesses) Intel doesn't want to do that so they just mark it at 2.4 GHz.
The arbitrage, and reason for such excitement in overclocking, is that most of the time Intel's manufacturing is too good. It makes too many uniform pieces that qualify for 3 GHz. The company likes to sell a few processors at high prices at the cutting edge, most processors at a sweet spot (~$200), and the remander as budget processors. To meet the economic demand, they take over qualified processors and mark them (most of them are multiplier locked as well) at for lower speeds. Over clockers take the chance that they bought a "relabed" processor not a "binned" processor. The success of a large group of overclockers is an indication of how well the manufacturing process is at delivering things at good tolerances. If you recall the Barton launch over clocking was a much dicier prospect, or further back an old Cyrix chip, because the processors were more likely to not qualify at higher speeds.
Almost all manufactured goods are built to tolerances rather than exact specs. Go grab a precision instrument and check some. The tolerances allow for much lower cost, and are usually developed as a balance between cost reduction and usefulness. There is a whole branch of manufacturing statistics that has developed tools for deciding when a process is out of tolerance. (The stats aren't too tough the tools make it easy to check on the fly even if you have little or no stat's training).

Re:How smart u are..

[drinkypoo]

It's not possible. As close as you get to this is that the drive is hooked up to a test rig which tests all the sectors on the drive, locks out the bad ones, and remaps them to unused sectors at the end of the drive. (It would be nice, and it may even be true, that during the original manufacturer lockout process, they don't remap them to the end of the drive, they just skip a sector and move on. Anyone know?)

All modern drives reserve spare sectors at the end for remapping. (Older drives only allowed you to lock out sectors.) However, this is a small percentage of the total size of the hard disk. If it cost some hard drive manufacturer the same amount to make a 250GB disk as it did to make a 125GB disk, they'd just make the 250GB and they'd sell it for only half again what the 125GB costs, and put everyone else out of business.

Re:How smart u are..

[Rick.C]

I once toured a wafer plant and this is how it was done there. When a die mask is made, there may be small imperfections in it. Say the mask contains a 10x10 grid of supposedly identical circuits, but there were a couple of flaws when the mask was made that messed up the copies at grid locations A1 and A2. Every wafer that gets made with that mask will automatically have the A1 and A2 circuits marked for rejection before testing because they are "known defects".

After a wafer is made a robotic tester probes each circuit before the wafer is cut up. If a circuit fails the basic tests, the probe squirts a little dot of red paint on that circuit. The "known defects" get a red dot without even being tested. After this initial probe test, the circuits are cut apart, the ones with red dots are discarded and the rest are mounted on carriers.

It is possible that a slight mask defect or wafer imperfection might cause a performance problem rather than a total functional failure. This could also be caused by a slightly out-of-spec doping or wafer heating. These are sorted out by further testing as mentioned by other posters.

If all of the circuits on a wafer get the same doping and same heating, then you can sample one or two and assume that the rest of the circuits from that wafer will have similar performance. If you have a mask problem that causes degraded performance, you can automatically flag that die location as a "known slow" or a "known bad" depending on your criteria.

Re:How smart u are..

[Anonymous Coward]

Caveat: When a new frequency/design is released, it may be very difficult to get to the desired frequency, and the testing is relaxed somewhat to meet the quota (in which case very few parts will be overclockable)

Lastly, no testing is done above the top bin, so if 3.2 GHz is the current fastest sold, some percentage of those may run at 3.4 or 3.6, and they won't have been tested that far.

The above is one good reason to never buy the fastest available processor in a line. Pricing is another reason, but that's more subjective.

Re:How smart u are..

[Tmack]

though drives typically contain substantially more platters

Maybe in the old full-height drives, but most consumer 3.5" drives nowdays only have 1-3 platters (as have most drives I have disassembled....my platter collection is at about 50), 4 in the ultra-top-of-the-line high-capacity drives. Each platter is about 1mm thick, but has space between the rest of the chassi and other platters for the head assymblies (which is 2 assymblies between platters, one for each). These take up more room, as the arm's design itself is usually thicker than the platter, and it has to be rasied off the platter so that it will not damage it as it swings back and forth rapidly. You also have to add in the case itself and the motor used to spin the platters. Theres not much room to cram in too many platters inside the case. Remeber the dimensions of a half-height 3.5" drive gives only about 1.6" of vertical space total.

You are correct though, in that lower capacity drives just remove platters and head assymblies from a higher capacity model. Specifically, I took apart two older Seagate drives, one had 1 platter, the other had 2 and was rated at almost double capacity, but where otherwise identical. In place of the platters, they just put in spacers on the drive axel.

Tm

ps: on a side note its interesting to see how the design of drives have changed over the years, from heads actuated by stepping motors to voice-coil actuators, and from the full-height monsters with 7 platters to single platter drives with 10x capacity, yet the platters have stayed the exact same radial size on every 3.5" drive I have taken apart. The only notable physical differnece other than color is the thickness. Newer platters are lighter in color and are ALOT thinner.

Re:How smart u are..

[Patik]

This sounds like what AMD did with its single (XP) and SMP (MP) Athlon processors. For a long while the XP and MP chips were the same except MPs were tested for SMP performance. A certain bridge on the surface of the board was cut to make a processor into an XP (though some weren't), so connecting this bridge turned your XP into an MP chip, which was a lot more expensive. The process was simple, and you could end up with a $121 MP2000 (according to pricewatch.com) for the price of a $48 XP2000.

Re:How smart u are..

[mazarin5]

I would carry your analysis a step further and note that chip and drive manufacturers don't make money by downgrading their product.

Ahh, but the trouble of testing and labeling each drive is much greater than crippling it in software.

As far as giving you less than advertised, it's false advertising

As far as giving you more than advertised it's considered an unfair business practice

Re:How smart u are..

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen to work in the processor inducstry

Processors for ducks?

Re:How smart u are..

[dj245]

though drives typically contain substantially more platters

good post, but the most amount of platters in drives today is about 5, in the biggest SCSI drives. More platters makes more heat. Consumer ATA drives typically have 1-3 platters, small and cheap have one, huge and near the beginning of the poduct cycle have four.

Re:How smart u are..

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

If it cost some hard drive manufacturer the same amount to make a 250GB disk as it did to make a 125GB disk, they'd just make the 250GB and they'd sell it for only half again what the 125GB costs, and put everyone else out of business.

No, that's simply not true. You are only figuring short-term and material costs. The company has to make up money for R&D, engineering, and a thousand other things too. So they develop a price structure that allows them to make the maximum money. If they sold a 250gb hard drive for less, that would just be less overall money that they could make.

The price of hard drives has nothing to do with the actual "value" of the drive, it is purely driven by what the market can bear. And thanks to competition, what the market can bear is typically sinking, so that the price structures for hard drive companies are slowly falling, and the amount of TOTAL money the companies are pulling in is just enough to keep them afloat, etc. But nobody can raise prices, or they'll go out of business for lack of customers. Similarly, nobody can lower prices, or they won't be taking in enough money to fund their operations. It's like an economic mutually assured destruction.

Re:How smart u are..

[AlecC]

Basically, the processor speed is set by the speed of the weakest link. If 99.9% of the processor clocks at 3.0 and the last bit at 2.4, the whole chip has to be sold as 2.4. Yes, processor manufacture is incredibly accurate - but there are some micro defects in any wafer, som tiny residual vibrations in the masking stages, tiny scourings in the chemical washes. Thes will make minute variations in the chip. Most will do nothing - but a few will, for example, minutely increase the resistance of a single trace. Given this suceptibility to a singel defect, it is suprising they get as many full speed parts as they do.

Re:How smart u are..

[AlecC]

ps: on a side note its interesting to see how the design of drives have changed over the years, from heads actuated by stepping motors to voice-coil actuators, and from the full-height monsters with 7 platters to single platter drives with 10x capacity, yet the platters have stayed the exact same radial size on every 3.5" drive I have taken apart.

The latest units from Seagate have smaller platters - about the same as the same as the 2.5" drives. This means they can make the enclosure thicker to reduce vibration and increases air circulation space.

Re:How smart u are..

[TO11MTM]

To a certain extent. But, Certain platter sizes aren't really made anymore. This is why a 40GB Drive isn't much less than an 80. Things like that... Although, the problem being, in most of those cases, they just never put a head on the other half of the platter.

Re:How smart u are..

[elrick_the_brave]

Actually.. the estimates I read were upwards of 20% of a hard drive was technically there.. I.E. a 120GB drive actually had 24 GB of repair space in case of bad sectors. This is in part to reduce the number of returns of 'bad' drives. Effective though.

Re:How smart u are..

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh well, that's what I get for listening to word-of-mouth on processor manufacturing. What was true 15 years ago may not be true today, or may not even have been true 15 years ago when word-of-mouth was passed down to me.

But since my response was targeted @ disproving the source of the thread, namely that you're not going to get 500GB out of a 200GB drive due to drive manufacturers screwing over consumers, I do feel a little vindicated. A little.

Thanks for the illumination.

Re:How smart u are..

[Arctic Fox]

the radial size had stayed the same because the width of a half-height bay hasn't changed. it would be wasteful the shrink the radius.... you got the space, might as well use it!

Re:How smart u are..

[mAineAc]

I would gladly educate you :)

Okay I've heard this allot about processors

it is a lot not allot.

Re:How smart u are..

[Gilk180]

Things that cannot be controlled. I am not an expert in the field, but I imagine one of the big things is the quality of the raw materials. In something as complex and tiny as a processors, small variations in purity of raw materials could have a huge affect.

Re:How smart u are..

[drinkypoo]

YOU are thinking short-term. Putting your competitors out of business is very good for YOUR business.

Re:How smart u are..

[Zeinfeld]

Sroll down the page. The instructions for how to do cold fusion follow.

Re:How smart u are..

[nyseal]

Precision is exactly the point. Think of it from a manufacturing standpoint....if a machinist is manufacturing a shaft and turning down the outside diameter to a specification of 1.000 +/- .020" (also known as a 'rough cut') the gage that he'll measure it with would most likely be a caliper with an uncertainty of +/-.001". Either way, the manufacturing process will NEVER produce the same product twice (based on the discrimination of the measurement being taken of the process) and the gaging method; which also has inherent flaws. Based on my limited knowledge of the chip manufacturing process I would suspect that the same principles apply; just on a micro level. Statistical analysis of any manufacturing processes has shown a margin of error (commonly known as 'tolerance'; an undesired but acceptable deviation from nominal) is inherent to all processes, which is also why we have Quality Assurance and testing. This margin of error obviously can affect the final performance of the item being manufactured. The fore-mentioned machinist would use completely different machining and test methods if the final cut were to 1.0000000 +/- .00000001", which is where we get to precision. Accuracy would be producing a part within tolerance while precision would be actually hitting the mark. The laser manufacturing process of chip building is probably not exempt from this variability.

Re:How smart u are..

[Anonymous Coward]

ROFLOMGUFI

Too busy at work to Google, but not so busy as to waste time reading and posting to Slashdot.

Better polish up that resume...

Btw, if you're using Mozilla, Googling for it is just typing "Ctrl+T, chip process imperfections, Enter", and cutting and pasting a bit. But I'm too busy whacking off to do that myself.

Re:How smart u are..

[dbIII]

I once toured a wafer plant and this is how it was done there.

The above is a bit offtopic - hard drive platters are not made of silicon, and semiconductor doping is not the way you make your hard drive platter magnetic - because it is not a semiconductor, and p and n doping works on charge and not magnetic feild. Electricity and magnetism are releated, but they are not equal - conduction and magmenetic fields are totally different things.

It's true!

[DeadlyEmbrace]

They are actually able to triple the amount of disk space by using holographic imagery that allows an additional 3 layers of bits to hover precariously above each platter.

I think IBM is already using this trick...

[greppling]

...and I suspect that's why their drives die an early death so often...

Stay Anonymous

[KalvinB]

I suppose we could blame Slashdot for not taking the initiative to do a little fact checking before letting this one in but then again the members are the fact checkers, spell checkers, dupe dectors, etc.

Whoever submitted this should remain anonymous. But, unless they were just seeing if they could slide one past the editors, we educated at least one person today.

Debunking bogus articles every once in awhile isn't a bad thing. Chances are, quite a few people, although they would never try it, probably thought it was a valid concept.

Ben

Damaged partition tables

[xihr]

This is obviously due to damaged partition tables, not actual "hidden" disk space. That this even got posted is really sad.

IBM Thinkpad (r-series) has hidden space

[Eudial]

The IBM Thinkpad (R-series atleast) has 4 Gb of hidden diskspace that you can enable for ordinary usage in BIOS.
It sounds fairly little, but on a 20 Gb drive that's 20%

Usually there is some kind of backup-image there, but it isnt really necessary (especially for us Linux people).

I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[SmallFurryCreature]

You see I have encountered numerous Dells wich has only a portion of their HD partioned. Not hidden or recovery partitions. Just 6gb of a 8gb disk used. Maybe the machine was sold as 6 but 8 was cheaper or they ran out of part but it still mean't an easy upgrade. (was the time of napster so everyone needed more HD space)

But yeah more then doubling the HD capacity sounds fishy and there are plenty of letters to the inquirer article explaining how and why it ain't true.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Short Circuit]

This is different. In your case, the HD controller told the OS that 8GB was available, but the OS checked, and only 6GB were partitioned so as to be available.

Partitioning is different from internal capacity. For more info, see the warning linked to in the article.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Anonymous Coward]

Score -1, Blindingly Obvious

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Shanep]

Dells wich has only a portion of their HD partioned.

A few months back (in Sydney at least), if you purchased particular uni-processor Dell rackmount gear (1650's from memory?), dell would send you dual-processors and charge you for the uni.

I guess they might loose more money throwing a spanner into "their high speed money making machine". Perhaps just selling the next closest thing up is more cost effective for them.

I saw this confirmed for other continents I beleive in the OpenBSD mailing lists, so it wasn't just a stuff up with our 3 orders.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Martin Blank]

Weren't some manufacturers (possibly including Dell) including a base hard drive image in a hidden partition to avoid shipping CDs with systems?

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[argStyopa]

Most of the Dell/Gateway/Compaq systems I've seen typically come with their drives partitioned so that 2-3 gigs are used exclusively for restore information.

Which totally fscks you when you have a drive error, repartition and format, and then try to run their 'restore' cd. :(

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[ePhil_One]

dell would send you dual-processors and charge you for the uni.

You sure they weren't just seeing Hyper-threading enabled? While I could certainly accept that this happened for any number of reasons, they are all something of a stretch (no second CPU messed up airflow, causing overheating of the one, the factory ran out of "terminators" and a 2nd Celeron was only a few bucks more? They were EOL'ing that lowest end chip and were blowing out stock, maybe somebody else canceled the order prior to shipment and it was cheaper to "upgrade" their order than sell them "refurbished") Some of the stuff Dell charges extra for cost them almost nothing (enabling RAID on a PE 2x50 usually means adding a 5 cent "jumper key" and a 128MB of RAM, yet they charge $300.

But what ever it is, I doubt its because Dell's production line can't handle the customization.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Shanep]

You sure they weren't just seeing Hyper-threading enabled?

No, the package contents revealed dual, so in absolute astonishement, I and another tech opened them up to find TWO CPU's.

I'll see if I can find the OpenBSD mailing list link if you like. Although it's past my bed time (Sydney, Au) and I've got work tomorrow, so you might have to wait for it.

I don't know what the reason was behind getting 2 for the price of 1 was, I was merely speculating there. But we most certainly did get 3 dual procs for the price of 3 singles. And a mailing message I saw described exactly our experience in this regard, within days of it happening to us, but on another continent outside of Au.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[lvdrproject]

Actually, on all the Dells we have, the hard drives come with an 8-meg (ish) partition (Windows recognises as an 'EISA configuration' partition), which basically stores the Dell Diagnostics. Dell uses this if you have to get something replaced under warranty or whatever.

You don't need it, though. I zero-filled my drive (so gone was the partition), and then needed it replaced, and Dell had been smart enough to include a disc which contained a bootable diagnostics utility. So... yeah.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has a page describing this (I don't feel like finding it now though).

The reason they don't always use the whole disk is because they use drives from different manufacturers which may come in slightly different sizes, but they want to have a common image that they can copy to all of them, so they just make it the size of the smallest one.

Simple repartitioning will fix that though.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[skiflyer]

I would feel pretty confident that it's an error in some part of their distribution/quality control... maybe something as simple as a barcode incorrectly put into the database or something of that sort.

Like the previous poster, I can't imagine a good reason to just throw in an extra processor.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Patik]

This sounds like what AMD did with its single (XP) and SMP (MP) Athlon processors. For a long while the XP and MP chips were the same except MPs were tested for SMP performance. A certain bridge on the surface of the board was cut to make a processor into an XP (though some weren't), so connecting this bridge turned your XP into an MP chip, which was a lot more expensive. The process was simple, and you could end up with a $121 MP2000 (according to pricewatch.com) for the price of a $48 XP2000.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Anonymous Coward]

At my old job, we recieved a few "free upgrades" from Dell -- not an extra CPU, but things like a 2.66Ghz system when we ordered a 2.4Ghz, or extra RAM/larger hard drive, or an upgraded video card.

The explaination was that there was a price cut or sale after we put in the order. Dell just shipped the upgrade because it would be cheaper than handling a return.

Also, while Dell can customize everything, it's obvious from their pricing that they like to mass produce certain configurations.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[HTH NE1]

Before people started installing LBA48 kernels in their TiVos, upgraders were buying 160 GB drives and formatting them to a 137 GB (128 GiB) to maximize their capacity. And some of them then added the remainder that was outside of the TiVo's access abilities as another partition to hold backup images, upgrading tools, and whatever else they wanted (23 GB is plenty of space).

This partition's presence in the partition table would not harm the TiVo's function as it would have no need to access the extra partition in its daily operations, so it would not be mounted.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[dgatwood]

KBase #11148.

The difference is typically at most single digit megabytes, though, not gigabytes.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Fishstick]

happens all the time -- they aren't just "throwing in an extra", they are supplying a different motherboard that happens to be dual-cpu. You run out of stock on the specific component, so you use the next best compatible thing, rather than putting the thing on backorder and having the customer potentially cancel.

I've had something similar a couple times. I bought a barebones kit that was supposed to include a 440LX board with a 333 PII. I discovered later that the machine shipped with a different board than the one I ordered, but it was better (a BX 100mhz bus jumpered down).

I went online again to the place that sold me the kit, and they no longer had the LX kit, but were selling the BX kits for less than I paid for the older board. I assume this meant that they no longer stocked the older boards, but had a glut of the new ones.

I later got hold of a P2/450 and jumpered the board to 100mhz fsb and all worked.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[orius_khan]

This sounds like what AMD did with its single (XP) and SMP (MP) Athlon processors. For a long while the XP and MP chips were the same except MPs were tested for SMP performance. A certain bridge on the surface of the board was cut to make a processor into an XP (though some weren't), so connecting this bridge turned your XP into an MP chip, which was a lot more expensive. The process was simple, and you could end up with a $121 MP2000 (according to pricewatch.com) for the price of a $48 XP2000.

This sounds like something Patik posted higher up on this same thread. Identical in fact. I guess some posters decided it was cheaper to write one comment and post it multiple times than it is to write a whole new comment each time.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Shanep]

I would feel pretty confident that it's an error in some part of their distribution/quality control... maybe something as simple as a barcode incorrectly put into the database or something of that sort.

I might beleive this for our single case. But having seen a post of it happening elsewhere, I would tend to beleive that their profit margins are good enough for them to occasionally just take a little less profit to keep the customer happy. Especially on something like a rack mount server (1650), which might indicate to Dell that this customer could potentially buy more server gear and maybe even pallet loads of desktop gear during the next desktop upgrade session.

What else do you think these companies use the company info forms that you fill out for? If you filled out that you are an "ISP" then they might be less inclined to "make you happy" as they would had you filled out "legal firm" with "500-1000 staff". Cha ching! To them, keeping the IT department and purchasing happy is merely an investment for their (Dell) future.

Here is that mailing list post that I promised...

"Thanks, turns out to be a usless question now though, Dell is throwing in second CPU's for free :) No doubt cleaning out stock for the new 3Ghz chips."

PS, I don't know why I thought this happened in another country, I don't seem to be able to see anything in that post to make me beleive that. I'm sure I read more than this but can find it right now. Perhaps it went off list, I can't recall.

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[Patik]

It was relevant to both threads where I posted it. Why rewrite it if it's the same info?

Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again

[orius_khan]

"both" threads?? You mean the first thread titled "Recovering Secret HD Space" and the second thread titled "Recovering Secret HD Space"?

It was the same thread. Twice. Double the Patik. Double the fun. Put down that Doublemint gum!

pen-knives

[ajs318]

A pen-knife is not so called because of any resemblance to a pen. Back in the days when people wrote with actual bird feathers, the "nibs" needed near-constant attention. If you were planning on doing a lot of writing, you would need to keep a small knife handy for trimming your quill. Such an implement became known as a pen-knife, and many fine examples were produced that became collectors' items in their own right. Of course, a knife can be a useful implement anyway, and the advent of metal nibs and internal ink reservoirs did not harm the secondary industry.

Got similar effect - but it is just an error

[Anonymous Coward]

I had similar effect playing with fdisk - it looked like I doubled my hdd space.

But when I started using BOTH partitions I noticed that writing to the 2nd corrupts data on the 1st one.

Do you ever tried it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am reading through all your /.er's posts here, but no one of you ever tried it???? How can you make conclusions before experiements...
Of course, I've not tried it yet. I am waiting for your results..

You did it wrong, or with the wrong disks

[SmallFurryCreature]

I did this a lot but I didn't drill. That is insane. All the plastic gets inside the disk and screws it up in the worst way.

No an old soldering iron was the way to go.

But yeah it depended a lot on the quality of th disks. Good brands performed excellent. Cheap brands did not.

Perhaps the samething is possible with HD's but this would have to be done by taking the platters out of an old low capacity drive and put them under higher capacity heads. Then if the old platters are good enough the new heads can write more data then the old heads could.

Possibly you don't need to go so far if you can somehow convince the drive to operate at the edge of its capacity instead of the "safe guarenteed" way it comes from the factory.

Overclocking is possible with most components since hardware makers use safe limits to avoid problems. of course with HD's so cheap and basically limitless who cares. A CPU overclocked to 4ghz gives you hardware that can't be bought. a 200gb disk doubled to 400gb just safes you a 3.5 inch slot at the price of higher failure.

Aha!

[Anonymous Coward]

See, turns out Linux is difficult!

Look how obscure this command is, compared to the easy Windows equivalent. CQD.

On a serious note, Windows fdisk is really different, because it does not work! I once had to lend a TOMSRTBT floppy to fellow Windows users, because fdisk refused to clean their HDs...

Re:Aha!

[Brandybuck]

On a serious note, Windows fdisk is really different, because it does not work!

Oh, it does work. In much the same way that a tricycle works as a mass transportation vehicle. DOS/Windows fdisk has got to be the stupidest fdisk ever created. Do you want to dual boot two different versions of Windows? Forget the native fdisk and go download a Linux or BSD LiveCD.

Re:Uh, you're wrong sorta

[nojayuk]

CLV is constant linear velocity and is what the first generation CD players used. That meant the data passed under the head at a constant speed, 150kbytes/second. The further out on the disc the slower the disc turned as each turn had more data than close-in.

Once the speeds went up the manufacturers moved to CAV or constant angular velocity where the disc spins at a predetermined speed and the data comes in at different rates depending on the head position over the disc. What really happens is there's a table of different CAVs stored in the drive's firmware depending on the absolute position on the disc. Close into the hub the disc spins faster, further out it spins slower. If there are a lot of errors it will slow down to try and read the data better. On a 48x drive there might be as many as 12 different CAV speeds available to the firmware.

Looks like something out of the AIT Times

[Anonymous Coward]

I could imagine the AIT Times reporting something like that. But The Inquierer? I don't know.

It is a bit like geeks turning away from Linux here

brought to you by...

[Anonymous Coward]

breakthrough communications... dot net.

Is it DoubleSpace from 1993?

[houghi]

As a lot of people have pointed out, it is not true.
It reminded about the program doublespace that came together with DOS 6.0. It would look what files where not or less used and archived them.

The archived files were zipped (or something like it) and put together. It took lesser space and could double the amount of space on your harddrive.

At least that is how I remember it. Memory is kind of fuzzy right now.

More info can be found on the net. Just search google for more info. Even back the M$ was stealing stuff. Who would have known?

Re:Is it DoubleSpace from 1993?

[vadim_t]

No, it was more like compression in Win2K (on NTFS only)

Drive/DoubleSpace is a driver that gets loaded at boot. Your data is actually inside one big .CVF file. The driver emulates a disk drive with this big compressed file. So your C: would actually be inside H:\whatever.cvf.

This was very good except for a few things:

1. Most people had no idea of how compression actually worked. They went into the config program and set the estimated compression ratio to 20x so that they could brag about having 20GB on a 1GB disk drive. Then they were surprised about how they had 15MB less after copying a 1MB file.

2. The system was naturally complex, and if something went wrong (crashes, bad sectors), it was very likely that you'd lose more data than if it was uncompressed.

3. I think in DOS 6.0 there were some bugs that caused serious data corruption. This is partly why 6.2 came out.

Overall, I like the idea a lot though. I wish more Linux filesystems implemented this. For example, documentation could be always kept compressed, and still immediately readable. Most distributions seem to keep most of the docs gzipped, but it's less convenient.

Re:Is it DoubleSpace from 1993?

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Drive/DoubleSpace is a driver that gets loaded at boot. Your data is actually inside one big .CVF file... This was very good except for a few things:

I used this utility both under MS-DOS and DR-DOS. It worked, but had a few issues. Like all compression schemes, you got better compression on data files than on compiled executables.

The important thing was to balance the risk with the gains. I used it happily when a new boss gave me a POS H-P with a 5MB hard drive in 1993. Now, given the extemely low cost of mass storage, I wouldn't mess with it on a bet.

This is your hard drive on drugs.

Re:Is it DoubleSpace from 1993?

[mikechant]

"Overall, I like the idea a lot though. I wish more Linux filesystems implemented this. For example, documentation could be always kept compressed, and still immediately readable. Most distributions seem to keep most of the docs gzipped, but it's less convenient."
The amount of space taken up by documentation compared to the capacity of even a modest h/d these days is such that it's just not worth bothering. I would think that mostly, the only files that take up a *lot* of space relative to modern drive sizes are already in compressed formats - mp3, mpeg, etc.
So I can't see much of a case for h/d based compression now.

A most enjoyable article!

[dacap]

I espcially liked the part about hacking your OS with a binary editor and changing the kilobyte constant to 256.

DaCAP

Jesus Christ!

[esme]

April first is coming earlier and earlier every year.

-esme

Re:Jesus Christ!

[No. 24601]

April first is coming earlier and earlier every year.

But on Slashdot, bad jokes are abundant year-round!

How it works

[FraggedSquid]

You get rid of all the zeros, the 1's take up much less space so you can fit in more.

Using unpatched ghost

[rackoon]

Notice how they say an unpatched version of ghost is required:

Ghost 2003 Build 2003.775 (Be sure not to allow patching of this software)

That's because the patched version fixes A BUG that allowed the "ever expanding miracle".

and didja know?!

[Asprin]

And didja know you can re-zip all your zip files to make the ONE QUARTER their original size?!?!

/smirks

Re:and didja know?!

[mythosaz]

Actually, .ZIP is pretty bad at a lot of compressions. If you have 10 identical files, all of which compress to 1 meg, you'll get a 10 meg zip (plus a bit of overhead). Under ideal conditions, rezip it, and you'll get a 1 meg file (plus a bit more overhead).

Winrar makes "solid" archives for just this reason.

The last LS120 floppy drives....

[DABANSHEE]

had the ability to format ordinary 1.44MB floppies to 35MBs

The 'trick' is to create a corrupt partition table

[Erik Hensema]

You should see an 8 meg partition labeled VPSGHBOOT or similar on the slave HDD (hard drive T) along with a large section of unallocated space that did not show before. DO NOT DELETE VPSGHBOOT yet.

What probably happens here is: ghost creates a special file, or at least writes to an empty part of your filesystem. Then, it writes a complete mini-os to this 8 MB region.

It backs up the original MBR (which is the bootsector, it also hold the partition table) and writes its own MBR. This MBR has a partition table which includes an 8 MB partion. The boundaries of the partition are the boundaries of the special file.

Since this MBR isn't meant to be used in any normal operation environment, it's not quite legal. Some (not all, the MBR can only hold 4) of the original partitions still show up in the new MBR. Therefore, the 8 MB partition lies inside a much larger partition.

This probably confuses fdisk, which lets you create a partition directly after the 8 MB partition, but inside your original partition.

When you subsequently delete the 8 MB partition, fdisk is probably confused again. The end of the original partition is probably obscured by the new, overlapping partition. So it lets you create yet another partition, from the beginning of the disk to the start of the overlapping partition.

The end result is: one large partition holding two small partitions inside it. This will exactly double your diskspace. Just don't try to use it :-)

this is hillarious, the reactions here

[Anonymous Coward]

Guys, they DID it, no amount of reasonning from your part will hinder the fact that they DID it. It is NOT impossible, they DID it.
They also are mentionning that it can lead to data corruption, a representative from Bell micro has even updated them to the fact that this isn't undocumented and that they were DOING it in their labs.

Watching people doing their best to look more informed than they obviously are is indeed hillarious. They DID it, whatever you might say or add keep in mind that this is possible, it has been done, might not be safe, but they DID it.

We'll have to face the fact, they manage to do it, this is NOT impossible.

back in the 1910s:
-look dad a chariot with no horses! and it goes forward!
-Son this is impossible, let me explain to you the laws of mechanics and motion, not to mention everything I know on entropy. You see my son[...]
-DAD, turn around, look! There is a chariot going down the road with no horses to pull it, and it makes a awfull lotta noise, can't you see it or hear it?
-Son what did I just told you! This is not possible, this is bullshit you are looking at! Only a mech-kiddie would try this, Lemme explain..
-BUT DAAAD, it's right there behind you...

Re:this is hillarious, the reactions here

[EddWo]

A corrupt partition tables does not equal a larger hard disc. No amount of "They DID it" will make it so.
If they havn't run into problems yet its only because they haven't written data to both partitions that ended up in the same place on the disc.
To the OS it might appear that there are two logical drives of a large size, but there is only the same amount of physical space.
Attempting to use this technique is a recipe for data corruption.

Get twice as much HD space, guaranteed to work!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a failproof method to expand your HD's free space:

1) Go to your root dir.
2) Locate a directory named "pr0n" (may also be callled "porn" or "xxx").
3) Delete it.
4) Enjoy your extra GBs ;-)

Attn Enterprise users with systems with RAID.

[jellomizer]

This actually work!
If your computer has more then one disk drive in it. and your turn off RAID x then format each drive separately then you can have at least doubled and perhaps more your storage ability. Save money on IT cost for the month. Wow your CEO. Get promoted. And when a drive fails then just blame the users.

"Please not I am being sarcastic for the sarcastically challenged. Don't turn off raid if you have it installed because RAID will save you pain in the future"

April Fool's?

[embedded_C]

Is it April 1 already?

Nope

[pcmanjon]

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.

Not possible at all

[pcmanjon]

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.

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!

How to do this in linux

[Eudial]

In pseudo-basic:

10: Make a n Gb large file.
Run mkfs.ext2 on this file.
Mount this file on loopback

20: Make a n-(iteration/10) Gb large file.
Run mkfs.ext2 on this file
Mount this file in the old file on loopback

30: Goto 20

Check out this article

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a article on this subject
http://www.digitaldecker.com/stories.php? story=04/ 03/10/5548185

Imagine a beowulf...oh, never mind.

[-kertrats-]

Not worth the effort.

Getting 5% more disk space

[Saiai Hakutyoutani]

From my own page:

When I created my Linux filesystems with mke2fs, I didn't know there was an -m option. This option specifies how many percent of your disk Linux will "steal" so that root can use it to fix your system when the disk is full. This defaults to 5%, which for a disk used to store files is obviously 5% too many. So for all your non-system disks at least, simply correct the file system with tune2fs:

tune2fs -m 0 /dev/hdX

Et voila. The disk is 5% bigger as if by magic. For a 120GB drive this gives you an extra 6GB. Hey, you never know when you might need it. Also, if you do this on your system disk, don't say I didn't warn ya.

Re:Getting 5% more disk space

[Junta]

Not quite true. This only affects how much the super user has reserved. You'll see that df reports the same for the 'size' column. The Avail column goes up simply because it reports with respect to what a normal user can write. System files owned by root could still be created when no space was available for user owned files. -m is not for file system repair, it is so that no user can make the system unusable for root. Don't set to zero. Even if your private workstation, if something goes awry and consumes your disk space as a user, your system can still log, can still write system tmp files and do that sort of thing allowing the user to fix the situation or else a super user to still log in, work with the system, and rectify the situation while still having persistant storage to work with.

Re:Getting 5% more disk space

[Saiai Hakutyoutani]

If you'd read my post, you'd have seen that this is exactly what it says.

Re:Getting 5% more disk space

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but not necessarily a good idea.. from the freebsd manual page (i presume a similiar story goes for linux):

• Note that lowering the threshold can adversely affect performance:
• Settings of 5% and less force space optimization to always be used which will greatly increase the overhead for file writes.
• The file system's ability to avoid fragmentation will be reduced when the total free space, including the reserve, drops below 15%. As free space approaches zero, throughput can degrade by up to a factor of three over the performance obtained at a 10% threshold.

Re:Getting 5% more disk space

[slapphappe]

About that signature "Please put this in your sig if you think /. should stop posting NYTimes articles."
Okay, I'm curious: What's wrong with linking to NYT articles?

Re:Getting 5% more disk space

[Saiai Hakutyoutani]

Oh, it's the free reg thing. Guess I could remove it now that bugmenot.com posts NYT passwords. What do you think?

Re:Getting 5% more disk space

[fifirebel]

Brilliantly BAD... Now you may have to use e2defrag on a regular basis...

These 5% are actively used by ext2 to avoid fragmentation. Sure, you may gain an extra 5% space, at the cost of some performance.

While you're at it, investigate the -i and -N options which control the number of inodes (who need so many inodes anyway, huh?), and if you're an ext3 user, also try a 1 MB journal with -J size=1 . This way you may squeeze the last byte of your hard disk.

Re:Getting 5% more disk space

[Saiai Hakutyoutani]

My journal size = 0 on my system disk. And I don't think I know what you're saying. My files drive contains mostly media files, so what you're suggesting would actually be a brilliant idea.

Why is everyone so skeptical

[Eagle5596]

I mean seriously guys, you can really do this! By the way, Slashdot is running a highlight on similar miracles, next up: Free Energy, Perpetual Motion Machines, and a method to turn lead into gold!

Re:Why is everyone so skeptical

[AndroidCat]

Based on all those TV shows like Crossing Over, I'm working on a contact manager for afterlife contacts. It's going pretty good, but I'm having problems getting TAPI to dial the calls.

Increase ebay resale value

[smoon]

For sale: P4 1.4GHz, two 3,000,000GB hard drives (6PB (petabyte) total). See below for a screenshot of the hard drive size. This is an unusual item used for secret cryptography research. Hard drives seem to have some sort of encrypting file system. Boots OK but I'm not all that bright so sold as-is. Own a piece of NSA history today!

Re:Increase ebay resale value

[shadowofdarkness]

I think he was going for funny not offtopic

Re:Increase ebay resale value

[smoon]

Yes, I was going for funny. I had the mistaken impression that a 3 petabyte harddrive would be considered funny. Oh well...

Even better results

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 40 GB Western Digital and have successfully written 80 TB to /dev/null on it. But like most clever hacks, there's a trick -- I read the data back from /dev/zero.

RPM

[soloport]

No. No. No! As I recall, RPM was available for 1.0, right from the get go. And it was available on both cdrom AND floppy versions of redhat.

Hey, I've done that before.

[Junta]

Yeah, its amazing.... I changed the partition table without updating the vfat table and put an ext2 filesystem in the second partition.

The vfat partition stayed the same and the ext2 partition was non-zero size... woah....

Its just pesky random file corruption on both partitions you have to worry about...

In all seriousness:
*THIS IS VERY VERY VERY DANGEROUS* DO NOT DO THIS *PERIOD*. It may give neat apperances at first, and both filesystems may appear fundamentally functional, but it will *CORRUPT DATA* when the first partition is populated enough to creep into the partition overlay.

Hidden partition?

[cybermint]

If there was a hidden partition, wouldn't linux fdisk be able to see it? Wouldn't using "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda" to wipe the drive completely, erase this hidden partition and free up that space?

If it's real....

[jacoby]

It seems sorta unstable, but if your HD's just a high-level cache between the CPU and MP3 and pr0n servers, then there'd be nothing on the megagig disk that isn't replacable anyway.

Re:If it's real....

[Lord Bitman]

Everything is replaceable, the trick is it's not very easily replaceable. I've spent years filling my disks with porn, and to lose all that would be devistating.

Re:If it's real....

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't you tired of jerking off to the same pics year after year?

Re:If it's real....

[Lord Bitman]

Bah, find me ONE good pornographic image made in the last five years. I'll stick with my archive, thanks.

Aureal units

[Z-MaxX]

You can measure aureal density in nipples per cubic furlong.

seen something similar years ago

[rkoot]

eons ago, I owned a 80286 w/ 640 kb Ram and an EMS expansion board w/ 1 Mb.
if I used norton's SI, the available RAM was about 64 Mb....
couldn't use it of course...
A memory test tool would see the 64Mb too, but if it tried to allocate it, very interesting stuff happened ending in a *CRASH*
It seemed that if programmes used not more than the actual 1 Mb EMS, everything was fine, but the memory reported to applications was 64 Mb !

r.

ATTEMPT TO CLEAR UP MISCONCEPTIONS RE ATAPI/PARTG.

[gd23ka]

(Most) ATAPI-4 and later hard drives have a way dividing up drive space in user-addressable space and host protected space (Host Protected Area). The "user" in this context is the bios of your computer or your operating system of course.

The Host Protected Area is space on your hard drive that your bios, your operating system or even your applications can be set aside for certain management information. I take it that some backup programs (ab)use it to "hide" compressed boot images on hard drives. I wouldn't be very surprised if companies like Dell or IBM stole some of your hard disk so you can restore a windows installation.The "Host Protected Area" has nothing at all to do with the drive-internal handling of bad sectors or other drive-interal.Drive-internal information as well as sectors used for replacing sectors gone bad are not accessible through the ATAPI commandset for accessing the HPA.

The ANSI T13 Standard Document for ATAPI-6 (current) are overprized at $18.00 but you can download a draft of upcoming ATAPI-7 from the T13 working group's site at http://www.t13.org. There you will find in Section 4.9 of the document: "A reserved area for data storage outside the normal operating system file system is required for several specialized applications". Systems may wish to store configuration data or save memory to the device in a location that the operating system cannot change. The optional Host Protected Area feature set allows a portion of the device to be reserved for such an area when the device is initially configured. A device that implements the Host Protected Area feature set shall implement the following minimum set of commands:"

READ NATIVE MAX ADDRESS

SET MAX ADDRESS ... ... I take it that READ NATIVE MAX ADDRESS tells you how many sectors of user addressable space have been configured on the drive and SET MAX ADDRESS lets you adjust that.

The way I see it there may be a lot of preinstalled hard drives out there with a compressed windows installation images on them "hidden" in the HPA. Maybe a new version of hdparm will allow linux users to reclaim that dead space.

Rice rice baby

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone, upon reading this, think that perhaps slapping some stickers on the side of the disks and putting a spoiler on it might "bump it up" to at least twice as big?

Aw yeah, my ST 20 gig can way out-store your Maxtor 250 - let's store man, let's store.

Overclocking?

[wardomon]

I overclock my systems by running them on a 220 volt circuit. They're briefly very fast.

Sure there are.

[Inoshiro]

On a 200GB disk, the density of the data's pretty high. One tiny spec of dust could take out 20-30gb of data. The percentage of reservered space is always a percentage of the total rated drive capacity. It's not 100% (510gb from a 200gb disc? hah), but it is enough to give several gb for a 200gb disc.

Re:Sure there are.

[specialized_sworks]

Call me crazy, but if a tiny spec of dust takes out 10% of your drive, thats a new meaning for the term "tiny".

-Walter

Re:Sure there are.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if the head was the size of a jumbo jet, the tiny speck of dust would be the size of, um, Mars.

Maybe not quite but you get the idea - "tiny" is by nature a relative term.

Re:Sure there are.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no dust in the drive. They're sealed and air-tight. If a piece of dust hits the head, the drive is likely toast anyways. It's not a concern.

This worked back in the day

[MicroBerto]

I'll be the first NOT to call shenanigans, at least kinda. I did this way back in the day when I had a 1 gig hard drive (very top of the line at that time), which had 32kb cluster sizes.

I used a program which partitioned my hard drive into 2, one being an 11 meg partition with some goofy cluster size, and then it reduced my current cluster size to 8kb on the main partition! Recovered TONS of space!

The 32kb cluster size was killing me because I had tons of files that were very very small, but were wasting 32kb each anyway. Lowering that waste did save this.

Maybe that's what this program is doing, although I think it'd work less anymore

Re:This worked back in the day

[Quill_28]

I thought fat32 took care of the cluster size thing. Remember when win98 came out and they one reason claimed it was better than 95 was you got more hard drive space.

Of course fat32 worked with 95 at the least the later versions.

Re:This worked back in the day

[SuiteSisterMary]

Win95 OSR2, as I recall.

Back in the Old Days

[SirLanse]

Back in the old days, drive makers came out with RLL drives. They had to pass stringent QA to be sold as RLL drives. RLL was faster and had more density. Then we found out how to hook up a plain old drive to it. Amazing 10 meg slow drive in now 20 meg fast drive!!! They usually blew up in a year. Just before the service agreement ran out. You can also put nitrous oxide into your car and make a 4 cyl jap box go 150mph. It still won't run like a porche.

Re:Back in the Old Days

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, maybe if you kick the dogs out from unner yur porch it'll run faster!!

I think you meant Porsche.

Whatever.

[dcm1101]

It annoys me that I wasted time trying to decide if the original article was genuine, but wrong or a case of the writer lying because they thought that was funny. It's not even April yet!

April Fool's Day

[Anonymous Coward]

This couln't to be a April's fools joke?

I think I know how this works...

[BloodyBuffalo]

I had an idea for increasing the size of your hard drive by on average 50%. See, everything is stored in binary, 0's and 1's. But maybe, just maybe, you could use the lowercase o instead of a 0. Check it out, it's smaller: o0. About 50% as far as I can tell. So use o's instead of 0's and voila, more space.

Re:I think I know how this works...

[Lord Bitman]

That's only 25% smaller, you jackass.

Re:I think I know how this works...

[Lord Bitman]

That wasnt flamebait, damnit. Look at this:
01
vs
o1

HOLY FUCK D00D IT'S ONLY 25% SMALLER NOT 50% SMALLER11111

God fucking moderators need a good fucking in the eye.
HINT:
Use of the word "ass" doesnt make you a flamebait.

This post is also not flamebait, because I am certainly NOT trying to get a reply. Hear that? DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. I wasnt shooting for a flame reply in the parent, either. Therefor: Not a flamebait.

Flamebait == Baiting a Flame. There is no flame being baited here, You are merely a fucktardish shitfucker. Yes, the shit is also retarded.

There may be some truth to this

[Guspaz]

For example, take 120GB drives. That are made with 80GB platters. Two platters at 80GB is 160GB, with 120GB viewable. You've got at least 40GB "hidden" space there. However nowhere near the hidden space the article is claiming.

Re:There may be some truth to this

[SuiteSisterMary]

Hard drives do have a fair chunk of extra space so that when they identify bad blocks, they can just sub in some new ones; the figures I seem to remember, though, are an extra ten percent; an 80 gig drive will have around 8 gigs of 'hidden' space.

I think i know what's going on...

[Transcendent]

I haven't used Ghost, but I think I know what's going on...

It's probably some little trick the program is doing like SUBST (look it up for DOS). All you need to do it make an empty folder, go to your command line and type in "SUBST [NEW DRIVE LETTER] [FOLDER PATH]"

And WHAM! You doubled the capacity of your hard drive! Go ahead and look at the size of the new "partition"!

On a more serious note, I believe the article is bull hucky. How could you think otherwise if the article is coming from the Inquirer?

This does not make sense

[kju]

Testing only one processor for a whole batch won't make sense and be dangerous. What would be if you happen to test the one processor of a dozen which can run with 3.0 GHz, while the others only can do 2.4 GHz? You would sell a bunch of overrated processors. Therefore EACH processor is tested.

Re:This does not make sense

[nyseal]

Technically, if the manufacturing process is stable enough and the results of initial testing show statistical capability, 100% testing shouldn't be required; it's a waste of resources. No company in their right mind wants to test final product 100%. I'd be more interested in the failure rate of this testing and concentrate my efforts on some problem solving methodologies to eliminate the root causes.

On a related note...

[mynameis (mother ...]

To hack root:

1. telnet 127.0.0.1

1. login with
2. your username/password

1. run 'rm -rf .'

Back in 95 when I worked for an ISP, one of the admins wrote 'fixload.sh' for one of the older support techs. It was so hard not to laugh and give it up as he would run it a couple times to fix 'the server' when the LA would hit 10, 20... The perpetrating sysadmin was also the owner/wielder of the 'axe of knowledge'...

Oh and somewhere around puberty, I could increase the size of my disk by 50 or even 100% :) MFM->RLL or MFM->DD Controller... I was krad l33t with my 130mb for the price of only 2x40mb (?$700?) drives. GoGo Gadget-bar-mitzvah-money...

Does 'hb2a' have [damaging, if not nostalgic] meaning to anyone else??

Sorry...

[neogeek]

but, just becuase the FAT table says that the partition is (x) size does not mean once you get past the true phyical limitation of the hard drive does not mean the whole house of cards is not going to come down.
I too could use Norton Disk Edit to make the FAT table say lots of other intresting things...
Like I had a 300 gig drive on a 20 gig.
It's called a currupt FAT table.

To the Ghost Developer

[zoloto]

I know this is offtopic but google doesn't help much lately.

I have a Serial ATA 150 drive, 80 gigs with WinXP loaded on it (sans 700mb hidden partition). I've used ghost to create an image. Here's the question:

Taking the second 80gig sata and creating a 700MB partition (hidden, primary.. end of disk), is there a way I can keep this **.gho file in the partition, give that hidden partition it's own boot instructions (ie. off the ghost 2004 cd) and setting up the first partitions boot loader (whatever works) with a password protected "reimage drive" option that I can use to reimage my first partition of the same hard drive?

Or am I not able to take the xx.gho file from the same physical disk and image the first partition meaning I have to load the image file from a foriegn disk?

Let me know, google hasn't been much help and my ghost 2004 documentation is limited i.e. I can't find it

Re:To the Ghost Developer

[Dravik]

I am not a Ghost developer. I have spent a significant amount of time playing with every damn imaging solution under the sun recently. Ghost currently will not pull an image from the same physical disk that you are putting the image on to. Nobody else that I know of will do that currently. I would suggest you use ghost to create a DVD or CD set with your image on it, Or you could grab a real cheap bottom size HD to store your image on. ***Begin shamless plug for place of employment*** Or better yet if you happen to have a Naval ship in your backyard you could buy a ruggedized disaster recovery server to store your images.

Re:To the Ghost Developer

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ. It is very much possible to use a single drive and Ghost and restore a .gho to the drive. You just need two partitions. Then have Ghost load from image and clone to partition.

Its been awhile, but command line, I think you end up using pload (for partition) as opposed to load (for disk).

http://ghosting.netfirms.com/switchesal.htm

Very skeptical

[Stonent1]

To me, all this sounds like is that they screwed up the partition table to make look like it is larger than it really is. I don't see anything about them actually storing data in that extra space. It is very possible that they use the same platters and heads in these drives, but the logic boards are what the computer talks to and if they say 200gb then that is what it will format out to. Also on voice coil drives (all modern drives) there is one side of one platter that contains the track information that the drive uses to align itself (unlike stepper motor drives which used physical steps in the actuator for alignment)

Sometimes they do...

[barc0001]

Not always is their goal to make a profit, but rather market share...

The best example of this is the Celeron 300A debacle for Intel. Switch back to those days of yore for a moment...

Intel introduced the Celeron line to help blunt AMD's advance into the low end post-Pentium I market. One problem: The Celeron 233 and 266 with NO L2 cache suck so much ass nobody wanted them, but they couldn't just change over the production line to a new Celeron design at the drop of a hat. What to do, Andy? Easy. That production line in Malaysia that's pumping out the Deschutes 450 PIIs to the rescue! So Intel took a whack of those chips, gave them a lower L2 cache, dropped their "rated" bus speed to 66MHz and branded them Celeron 300As. Which is why pretty much every Malaysian Celeron 300A runs just fine at 450 MHz with the stock Intel cooler, no adjustment required.
Intel actually lost money doing it, but they didn't lose the low end market. But the damage the current batch of crap they call a Celeron is doing to their reputation down there seems to indicate they will lose it soon...

Re:Sometimes they do...

[smittyoneeach]

Coudn't disagree more. Their strategic goal is always profit, but that may be obscured by tactical goals, e.g. market share.
I submit that a commonplace, bad assumption in statements like

Not always is their goal to make a profit, but rather market share...

is that there is only one goal driver at a time. Such thinking rarely models the real situation.
Hope this doesn't sound a flame. ;)

Re:Sometimes they do...

[barc0001]

Sorry, I gotta start a flame :)

Maybe I should have been a bit clearer by stating
"Not always is their goal to make a profit *THIS MINUTE*, but rather longer term make more by locking up market share and inflating prices once you've got the market share"

The world is full of examples of companies eschewing short-term profits in favor of long-view profits from market share:

- Gilette made it famous "Give away the razor, make it up on the blades"

- Microsoft and a ton of other companies sell their "academic" versions of software to college kids for pennies on the dollar compared to the stuff in the computer shop down the road. If they didn't the little bastards would probably use something like that pinko OpenOffice and Linux. ;). Instead they "hook" them using the stuff now so it's harder to change later.

-Let people pirate your graphics software easily so they get used to screwing around with it *Cough*Photoshop*Cough*. When it comes time to get a job doing graphics, and the company asks what software to buy you for your workstation, well, it's a one-horse race, isn't it?

-Microsoft execs including Steve Ballmer himself, have said repeatedly that if people in asia were to pirate software, Microsoft would prefer that it was their software that was being pirated.

Short term loss, long term gain because of.. market share.

Re:Sometimes they do...

[Rich0]

I believe they did something like this with the 486's as well. I believe that their manufacturing process started getting so good that they weren't turning out enough 20 and 25MHz chips - just lots of 33's and up. However, people weren't willing to pay for the higher-end processors. So, Intel segmented the market by selling the same product at two different prices - albeit rebranded in the one case.

In that case they probably weren't afraid of Cyrix/AMD so much as maybe the Mac - I don't think that Intel had a whole lot of competition on the 486.

Re:Sometimes they do...

[dupper]

People piarting software in Asia? *gasp* Never!

Re:Sometimes they do...

[ameoba]

'lost money'?

uhh... Even then, Celerons weren't exactly the kind of thing you'd find in a box of Crackerjacks. They may have made less money than they would've by selling the chips as 450s but, short of creative accounting, they were making enough money off of them as Celerons to at least break even.

Re:Sometimes they do...

[barc0001]

A report I saw which I can't find now to save my life stated that Intel actually lost money doing the Celeron 300a thing. Not a lot, but a loss is a loss...

Re:Sometimes they do...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Their strategic goal is always profit, but that may be obscured by tactical goals, e.g. market share."

Not true. For all too many companies the goal is executive bonuses, which is not always aligned with the goals of profit.

Re:Sometimes they do...

[runderwo]

Actually Celerons with L2 are more similar to Mobile PII than PII "Deschutes". They have on-die L2 cache running at full clock speed, whereas the Deschutes (and Klamath) had off-die L2 running at 1/2 clock speed.

Re:Sometimes they do...

[barc0001]

Mmm. At one point they did, but the very first A's were practically identical to the Deschutes design. They were far more concerned with squelching the horrible press at that point, so speed was of the essence. A redesign did come later, with the characteristics you mention. I can't recall if it was done before the Mendocino line or not.. In any case, you are correct, the vast majority of the Celerons were produced exactly as you way.

Re:Sometimes they do...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice story, except the PII/450 (Deschutes) and the Celeron 300A (Mendocino) have different cores with *major* architectural differences, including a full core-speed cache on the 300A versus a half-speed cache on the Deschutes 450.

The 300A handily beats the 450 on all benchmarks except a few large-cache benchmarks where the Deschutes, with its 512k cache, prevails.

STACKER!!! :)

[DR SoB]

I just thought "STACKER'S BACK" when I read this!! haha! Seriously, want to double your space? Install Stacker!! Ahhh, how I long for the DOS days! Stacker worked at expanding your HD too, if you didn't need your data all that much cuz it would corrupt all the time, and it was slower access due to everything on HD being compressed, and it would take up RAM because it was running all the time (not a big deal today though!)..

Re:STACKER!!! :)

[Carl_Cne]

Man, I remember running my *cough borrowed cough* copy of Stacker on my Acer 486. Turned it on one day, and my 2.5 gig "stacked" drive was gone, and my original C: was back, with 5 meg of free space, and a whole bunch of 512 meg files. Bummer. Thats ok, it was just another reason to *cough borrowcough* stacker and start fresh!!

Tonite I'm gonna Ghost my xbox's hd, so I can rip even more DVD's to it with EvoX! Now I dont need to buy a new hard drive for it, I can just use magic ghost to double, maybe even triple it!!

C

Avoiding Recovery CD's

[the_bard17]

HP, Compaq, & Sony are doing it... that's as far as I know. They slap the restore cd's on a partition, create another option on post to restore the unit from that partition, and allow the user to create their restore cd's (usually only once, too).

Re:Avoiding Recovery CD's

[Short Circuit]

I'll attest to that. I once wanted to reinstall Windows on my Compaq Presario, but it took a while to make them understand when I told them that no, the base material that was on the HD was gone.

Re:Avoiding Recovery CD's

[DavidTC]

I have an HP laptop that doesn't have that.

It did have a few megs empty space at the end of the drive, that I kept, but have since learned that was for the goofy XP logical drive thing you can turn on, so I need to run partition magic and delete it.

OTOH, they did make a goofy decision to have four restore CDs, instead of one restore DVD. (I mean, it's a laptop with a DVD built in. What am I going to do, swap it out for a CD?)

And then there are gigabits.

[soramimicake]

Computers use base 2. They are born without fingers.

I used to hold the same view as yours. But then I learned how fast a gigabit per second is.

But yes, I think the HDD marketing people are scum to have deviated from the "standard" usage of the megabyte...

I JUST REALIZED WHERE IT COMES FROM.

[Ayanami Rei]

Any Norton engineers want to back me up on this?

Okay, here's the thing. If you're familiar with Solaris, you'll know that the 2nd "slice" of your disk is always set to map to all the visible sectors of the disk. This is used for backup purposes. So all you'd have to do is tell your backup software to copy the "#2" slice of your disk to tape, and you get all the other partitions at the same time!

But if you add up the total size of all your slices, it'll be way beyond the reported capacity, twice the capacity, at least, since the 2nd slice will be, by defintion, as big as all the others combined.

Ghost2003 must be creating a parition that's the size of the whole disk that covers all the other ones for the purpose of copying it to the target disk. This way it can get all of them at once using simple BIOS calls dealing with only "one" partition (which happens to save the data from all of them). That explains why it's an unlabeled partition that's roughly the size of the whole disk, thus doubling the capacity, and it only appears right before you do the backup after a reboot (and it disappears later).

This makes a lot of sense from a programming perspective.

But it's totally useless, because if you try to format it, it'll format into the special VSGHOST partition. So it'll "work" if you do a quick format.
But let's say you had a D: drive too.
If you WRITE in the new E:, and thenit walks over parts of the disk that may be occupied by the D: drive, YOU'RE SCREWED.

So effectively you gain nothing, except a huge headache down the road. You can't store more than the capacity. You can be tricky and try to have two, or even three filesystems share the same sector space, but then, why would you do that? It'll work, until you step all over yourself and all your filesystems are hosed.

Oh, let me emphasize...

[Ayanami Rei]

Even if you have three file systems sharing the same space, you still can't store more than the new, magic E: drive, total. This is because the new partition is the size of the WHOLE disk that the system can directly address.

So if you had an 80GB disk, you still can't store more than 80GB of stuff, and now you've got a FUCKED set of partitions and file system tables.

I'm maybe not as old as you...

[Ayanami Rei]

but I remember ALWAYS having trouble with floppy disks. It's just that back then (early 90s) there was nothing else, so it didn't seem so bad. So you carried them around in protective boxes, and you made two copies if it was REALLY important (and never deleted the original).

Nowadays they are totally unacceptable.

Re:I'm maybe not as old as you...

[adamjaskie]

Probably not, as I am only 19.

But I still remember the general rule being that if I put something onto a floppy, it would work 90% of the time. Making two copies almost guranteed that I would still have my data. Now, the general rule seems to be if I put something on a floppy, it will NOT work 90% of the time. I have to make three or four copies, and cross my fingers, and even then, there is a good possibility my data will be gone.

this is nothing new

[savetz]

Every Atari DOS disk had a hidden sector, keeping 128 whole bytes of storage out of your grasp.

Tried it, broke it.

[Anonymous Freak]

Okay, I have an old 540MB hard drive lying around, so I decided to try it, just for kicks. (And to silence those who are saying that either those who don't try it are cowards, or who actually think it works.

I followed the directions to the letter. I ended up with a 1GB drive! (On a supposedly 540MB drive. In the end, FDISK claimed 965 MB.) I filled up the first partition (with mp3s, naturally.) I then started filling up the second partition...

Surprise, surprise. It crashed halfway through copying the mp3s. Reboot? BZZZT! Windows 98 crashed a quarter of the way through loading. Starting up from a DOS disk, and my directory structure is all frooed up on the C partition. Filenames with random ASCII characters in them, inaccessible directories, all sorts of data corruption goodness. The D partition had correct names, though. (So my second batch of mp3s was probably fine.)

** DO ** *** NOT *** ** TRY ** ** THIS ** !!!!!!!

(Or, more specifically, do not try this on a hard drive you want to keep, or with data you want to keep.)

Re:Tried it, broke it.

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone whos worked with tons of old 540mb drives recently (cleaning up the parts room at my work), i can tell you, most will have the same problems... Chances are the drive was already bad.

Another possibility is, I think i remember reading that HD makers block bad sectors from the factory, so that 80gig drive you have may be programmed to use sectors all over the platters that extend into areas beyond 80 gig.. but using this ghost technique will now link it all together, meaning you'll be writing on bad sectors

So im not saying it isn't dangerous, but using an old 540mb drive isn't really the best way to test this

Re:Tried it, broke it.

[Anonymous Freak]

Well, it's been pretty much proven that this technique is just creating a false partition table, which is what I was out to test.

The drive was thoroughly low-level formatted, then 'full' formatted during the first partitioning. Any bad sectors SHOULD have been found then.

Blaming my choice of hard drive (I have four other equally old 540MB drives of the same make and model that are happily in use in older computers,) doesn't magically make this technique valid. I just wasn't willing to sacrifice any important data by testing this on anything newer.

Not a bug, but feature.

[Ayanami Rei]

You make an a new partition covering the whole drive, and then Norton instructs itself to back THAT up to another drive using the same code that it uses to back up any other single partition.

So they use the same backup code for ghosting a single partition or whole disk by using a little partition mangling before the reboot.

Makes sense to me.

FDformat did this

[gr8_phk]

I downloaded a utility FDformat that did this back in 1993 or so. It gave you 1.72Meg on a 1.44Meg floppy. I know it worked because I had a zip file that wouldn't fit on a disk until I used this program. The file was transfered and successfully unzipped on another machine. Some of the Gateway computers at the university could also read these by default, but didn't format that way.

Re:FDformat did this

[Experiment 626]

I used to use the program the parent speaks of, and it really did work. The format tool let you adjust the number of tracks and sectors on a floppy, with the 1.72 Meg combination working well but anything beyond that not working right. The space gains were quite real, back when my hard drive was a mere 40 megs I used this to offload things and make room. It used a small TSR program (i.e., a memory-resident driver) which had to be loaded, or you would get errors trying to read the disks.

Re:FDformat did this

[cp5i6]

if you had to load a tsr it might be a compression reading scheme like what ms dos had way back..
but then again i don't know enuf to really say =)

Re:FDformat did this

[Shanep]

if you had to load a tsr it might be a compression reading scheme like what ms dos had way back..

Ahhh, the good old DriveSpace/DoubleSpace, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22 fiasco's!

True, a TSR might indicate a compression scheme being used, however it's worth noting, to avoid any confusion to others who don't know, that DMF did not use compression. MS did however use their .cab files on these larger DMF formatted disks.

Microsoft just keep pushing the boundaries of law and moving well past moral boundaries and still there are MS fanboys willing to stick uo for them, in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Sometimes they do

[macdaddy]

ATI is a perfect example I think. Ya'll remember the various mods to convert their otherwise identical top-of-the-line video card into their top-of-the-line 3D rendering graphics pro card? Sometimes the designs are basically identical for good reason. Cost savings comes to mind. They simply use software and/or a few well-placed jumpers to differentiate between the two.

Re:Sometimes they do

[darkmeridian]

I had this ATI card. It was the Radeon 32 DDR. The cheap LE version I had simply had software support for a feature disabled. I enabled it using a utility and it was FINE!

Re:Sometimes they do

[Warhaven]

ATI is a perfect example I think. Ya'll remember the various mods to convert their otherwise identical top-of-the-line video card into their top-of-the-line 3D rendering graphics pro card? Sometimes the designs are basically identical for good reason. Cost savings comes to mind. They simply use software and/or a few well-placed jumpers to differentiate between the two.

You could also flash the ROM with a Mac ROM and save yourself $80.00 by paying for the cheaper PC model. Now ATI uses a larger ROM for the Mac version and slightly bigger ROM chip so that you can't flash the PC versions and save yourself money. Same with Adaptec and their SCSI controller cards.

I talked with an ATI developer at MacWorld about flashing the PC cards with Mac ROMs, and he said the reason ATI changed it is because the programmers get royalties based on the number of cards sold. They can't keep track of the number of cards sold for Macs if people are buying the PC version and flashing it for their Mac, so they started a completely seperate production line for their Mac cards (identical to the PC cards, except for a larger ROM chip). In addition, to keep pay equal among their programmers, they charge a premium for the Mac cards to compensate for the lower sales compared to the PC cards. That way, their Mac and PC programmers get fair-pay.

Fiscally, this makes sense, but I don't think it's a nice thing to do to the consumers. I think they should raise the price on all their cards by $2.00 instead of charging an extra $80 on every Mac card.

Re:Sometimes they do

[macdaddy]

The cards I was thinking of was the 9600 and FireGL I think. It was about that time. It required a few minutes of soldering and reflashing the card. Nice hack.

Re:Sometimes they do

[macdaddy]

I never tried to do that with an ATI product. I always assumed you couldn't do it. I once tried to do that with an Adaptec 2940UW PC version. I tried it in my 8600/300 before the G3 upgrade. I flashed card from OS 9 and tried to boot. The machine wouldn't boot. I stuck it back in a PC, reflashed it twice (didn't work the first time) and all was well again with the card. I ended up dropping damn near $500 on a Mac version of the 2940U2W. Pricey as hell but nice card. SCSI kicks ass, no doubt about it.

I really wish ATI would wise up and use the same HW for PC and Mac. There really is no reason for them not to. I contend that few Mac people buy their cards directly. I suspect that few Mac users upgrade their video cards. I bet that the only ones that do upgrade are gamers. All the other Mac users 1) aren't willing to pay %50 more to for a Mac version of the ATI card, and 2) don't have a need to upgrade their video card and will get an upgrade when they buy a new Mac in a few years anyway. However if ATI made the price half-assed reasonable AND didn't short the Mac versions on RAM then I think they'd see a fair amount of new income in the form of upgrades. They should make a single version of the hardware and then have driver development groups for the OSs they support. That would be ideal anyhow. Oh if only.... :)

Wasn't there a movie about this?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Remember what happened to Keanu when he tried to use a RAM Doubler to temporarily increase his storage space?

It happens everywhere

[rip_1956]

I have a friend who works in a Toyota engine plant. A while age he told me that they began cutting costs by only making 6-cylinder engines, even though the Corolla I purchased was supposed to have a 4-cylinder.

Don't tell anybody, but if you get a couple of extra spark plug wires, and use them to connect the evaporative fuel cannister to the glove compartment, guess what? Now you have 6 cylinders purring in harmony under the hood.

Be aware, though, that it will lower your mileage a bit.

And don't tell your insurance agent. Your rates will go up.

Everything is built to tolerances

[Anonymous Coward]

And a measurement (such as 12.3mm) means nothing without 'tolerances' (or as they are referred to in the metrology world uncertainties).

So chip manufacturers try to make the tolerances as small as possible, but they still exist.

Semiconductor manufacturers are lucky because if a chip doesn't meet the top rated product spec it usually will work as a lower rated product.

correct me

[Anonymous Coward]

... cause I didn't rtfa.

But, IIRC, each bit stored on *any* HD is actually a cluster of bits (my terminology is probably borked though). So when you store a '1', you actually stored '1111', or '1010' or whatever corresponds to '1'. This allows for the degradation of the film not to impact the data stored immediately. Otherwise, every time a bit degraded, you'd be hosed (unless you're RAIDing or have some other integrity preservation going on.)

So in response to all the people who said "that's impossible", I'm just pointing out that it is *possible* although at the same time, I don't know if the article itself is true. Or even if that's what they're doing.

So, you can turn a 100 gig into a 200 gig, *if* you're hardcore enough to trust all your data to a program you're probably going to have to write yourself, and don't mind reducing your ability to identify corrupted data in exchange for more room. Applications: Photography? magenta 93 turning into magenta 92 might not be a problem (although data degradation in the filesystem would probably suck). But I can't think of a good reason someone able to make the modification wouldn't prefer to just buy another d*mn hard disk.

Re:I call a giga

[RadarMan]

Or you can change your units to get more gigabytes instantly. Just redefine a gigabyte as 10^9 bytes (rather than 2^30 bytes) and suddenly you've got 7% more gigabytes! No disk formatting required!

Simple

[Andy Dodd]

Great amounts of precision are needed, but the fact is that the feature size is so small that what seem to be miniscule variations in the manufacturing process have HUGE effects on the operation of a chip.

Do you realize that many fabs consider 60% yield to be incredibly good? i.e. 40% of the chips on a wafer MAY NOT WORK AT ALL.

The machinery used is extremely precise, but the wafers are also EXTREMELY sensitive to errors. On tiny speck of dust can ruin a chip - And there's only so much dust even the best filtration technologies can remove, for example.

trial and error

[jedi_odin]

aside from all the opnionated people out there saying yes it will work or no it won't work (to me they sound a bit like useless political pundits); is there anyone out there that have actually DONE it? what was the outcome? I thought the scientific community was based on peer review, well, has anyone tried to replicate the results in the article with useable harddrive space? or is everyone just content to sit back on their rear-end and pretend to wax intellectually about the subject? I'd just love to know if a slashdotter did this and the outcome, I can't b/c I'm leaving for the bahamas in a few hours (time to start packing :)).

My secret to recovering secret space...

[Anonymous Coward]

is to clean out my secret pr0n collection now and then. It's amazing how much free space you can get from doing that alone! For those of you who are worried about losing so much valuable pr0n I can only say.. don't worry they'll make more! They always do.

And before anyone has a chance to say it..

"You insensitive clod.. I don't have a pr0n collection!"

"In soviet russia the pr0n collects you!"

"Needs more cowbell!"

"Imagine a beowulf cluster of pr0n!"

$80 drive?

[metamatic]

I recently bought a brand new 200GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive for $99. Stuck it in a $45 USB 2.0/Firewire fanless aluminium enclosure. Hard drive space is so cheap it's insane.

/dev/null

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Ah heck, I can store terabytes of data onto my new disk I mounted from /dev/null.

I'm just having trouble finding it again.

RAID?

[Pan T. Hose]

This is just a method of corrupting your partition table so the same disk sectors appear more than once.

Are you saying that we could use that space for software RAID1 solution?

Manufacturing Tolerances

[caveat]

the tiniest variation, beyond any manufacturing control, will affect the chip's speed. 90 nanometers is an incredibly small distace - it's impossible to create an arbitrary number of perfectly identical chips. the tolerances don't allow any defects that will affect the overall function of the chips, just how fast they can be reliably run - sort of like putting engines together with parts from the bin, then rating them to a certain rpm. if you get crap parts, your engine will only go so fast, but if you luck out and get all really good parts, you end up with a 15,000 rpm engine.

Could this simply a BIOS limit issue?

[Stavr0]

Way back when, I had an Pentium mainboard that had a 8.4GB BIOS limit on drive parameters. The last drive I bought was a 10GB and of course would show up as 8.4 in the FDISK panel.

About a year later I ran GDISK (GHOST's FDISK equivalent), which ignored the BIOS settings and behold--I had 2GB available for an extended partition all this time! Caveat, it was not visible under MSDOS but Win98 had no problems with it, perfect for the WIN386.SWP pagefile and TMP directories.

Fast forward to today. Older BIOSs have a 120GB limit on capacity. Get a 160GB drive, and it shows up as 120G. But, once again, GDISK will tell you you got 40G unused.

Lightning Strike!

[kcdoodle]

I had lighting strike my house several years ago and the data on my HD was lost.

Lo, and behold, when I re-formatted the drive it worked fine. Better than that, a 250M drive was now a 330M drive.

This drive never ever failed after that, and is still operational inside one of my dinosaur computers.

From personal experience I can verify that some drive do have more Megabytes than the manufacturers allow consumers to use.

TTFN!

How old am I?

[scalveg]

I wonder how many slashdotters (including me) hooked their MFM hard drive up to an RLL controller to get that extra 50% out of it?

Now that's kickin' it old school.

60MB out of an ST-251, baybee!

Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA

OEM Tricks

[Anonymous Coward]

Large OEMS like Compaq often provide warranty spare HDDs with custom flashed firmware.

Resulting in the HDD reporting a lower capacity than the original manufacturers capacity.

E.g. 20gb drives as Compaq spare 8gb drives to replace all those dud Fujitsu drives from a few years back.

Dumb corporate politics and inflexible MRP in action.

Try it

[Forcelite]

It does sound crazy for a firm to sell a product that has double the capacity avalibe, when in fact they can cut costs by useing less plates(unlike processor compaines). But, why doesnt someone try it, then run some Symantec disk tests and report the results. Its like anything else, you dont truly know until you try.

point of order sir

[LifesABeach]

ALL procesors, and chips of ANY kind are tested. testing is done with a machine called an 'intergrated circuit handler' used in conjuction with an 'intergrated circuit testor'.

but here's something funny. first ALL circuits are tested to military specifications for pass/fail. then to business specifications for pass/fail. then to 'hobby' specifications for pass/fail. if the chip cannot work at all, its more times than not recycled. what makes this kind of funny is that its cheaper to sell military grade than any other because the cost of testing is less.

Stop being a naysayer

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe a "80GB platter" is 240GB of extremely unreliable media with a 3-to-1 error correcting scheme on top of it, and this replaces the error correcting scheme with a better one. You have to be very knowledgeable about HDs to disprove this. Especially since HDs in the future are expected to work like this.

Aureal Density vs Areal Density Aureal Density

[seawall]

Maybe that is a good term after all.

I mean if the disk has a denser "Aura" maybe it could hold more data.

Moderators get to decide if that's a joke or not because I'm not telling.

Re:The 'trick' is to create a corrupt partition ta

[gurudyne]

As someone who QA'ed Ghost 2003 for Symantec, I agree with you. The VPSGHBOOT stands for Virtual Partition Symantec Ghost Boot. Notice the word Virtual.

The bits actually reside in a contiguous sector file in the root of the primary partition. This file may be 8-100MB. If your disk is too fragmented, Ghost cannot create it.

The real reason for this stunt file is to eliminate the need for a boot floppy to launch Ghost (a PC-DOS 7 program compiled with DJGPP)

Re:bad for the hackers and good for the FBI-CIA.

[WNight]

This is actually true, in some sense. Modern HDs remap bad sectors and some do this a lot. My IBM drives slowly died and if they had 10% extra space that was 7GB of almost-functioning sectors of data that they hid away, out of touch of any format tools. What data was in there would be random and would probably contain frequently written stuff like swap, but those memory dumps could contain something interesting.

It's a reason why even a "military grade" overwrite and wipe routine can't be considered secure. Who can say you're wiping the same blocks you put your data on? Even tinfoil hat people have valid ideas.

Teoric geekness

[Anonymous Coward]

The geeks of today are pure theory, where are that good ol'tester geek with tons of ol' hard drives to test?

Cds also spin the other direction down there..

[jeoin]

Like my pocket toilet, it just reverses once your over the equator. I think its because of gravity. Some people have reported cd roms locking up entirely if your balanced exactly on the line. You can test your location with an egg.

Mod parent funny, darnit!

[s13g3]

"I don't care you ya are... That's funny!" -Larry teh Cable Guy Forgot to note in parent post... I saw this t-shirt at a convention here in Atlanta, nearly hit the floor laughing, and just had to have it: GothNIX: "nice boot. wanna fsck?" Made by SighCo. Graphics.

Famous Joke

[The_Dougster]

It's really not too difficult fixing your own hard drive, if the problem is a head crash, or the infamous Seagate "stiction" problem, if you know what to do. You will require #4/0 steel wool, paint thinners, WD-40, a few hand tools, and about 45 minutes.

- First, you need a clean room, so make sure the garage door is closed before you begin. Move those old lawnmower parts off the bench. Disassemble the sealed unit and carefully wash all parts with paint thinners. Bend the read/write heads out of the way, and then disassemble the platter stack.

- VERY CAREFULLY buff the platter surfaces with the #4/0 steel wool. This will remove any existing data, level out any surface defects, and help to redistribute the magnetic media and fill in those pesky "bad sectors" that most drives have.

- Reassemble the platter stack, and using a .015" feeler gauge, bend the read/write heads back to the platter surface, using the feeler gauge to set the gap. This is slightly higher gap than the factory uses, but it reduces the chance of head collisions with any flotsam you neglected to remove.

- Give the heads and platters a good shot of WD-40 and reassemble the unit. If your drive has a filter, replace it with a clean section of gauze pad.

All that's left is to low level and DOS format the drive, and you're back in business. I haven't tried this myself, but my friend's wife's sister-in-law's husband knows a technician that does it all the time....

maybe, but probably not

[SpacePunk]

If it were true, I wouldn't trust it. There was a way back in the old Apple days where you could modify the apple dos where you could control the head movement on floppies and do 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 tracking. problem with that was the closer you moved the tracks the more magnetic overlap you would get that would cause corruption. 1/2 tracking could theoretically double the amount of stuff you put on a floppy.

Now, hard drive control is a different matter.

Re:maybe, but probably not

[Nynaeve]

Heh. I loved those days. Most Apple 5.25" drives could physically access more than 34 tracks even though that was the standard DOS 3.3 limit. A simple poke statement followed by a format gave you access to an extra one or two tracks for free!

My favorite trick was to increase the number of tracks by one and place the (volume table of contents) VTOC on the extra track (35) with one other poke statement. A standard disk copy program would not copy the VTOC on the extra track. If someone were to boot from a normal DOS 3.3 disk and try to access the modified disk, it would look for the VTOC on track 17 instead of 35.

How can I use ReiserFS on fedora?

[Adolph_Hitler]

I'm trying to get reiserfs to work on fedora core 2, how can I do it? I'm interested in using the new ReiserFS, got any URL?

INFINITE space off 1.44 meg floppy!

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

My coworker had some downtime a few years ago, so he thought it would be cool to mess with the FAT of a floppy. He changed it so there was one directory. Inside that directory there was a 30k file and another directory. He changed the FAT so that the inner folder pointed back to the outer folder. So essentially it was a recusive file that had a 30k file in it. He had some fun asking various OS how much used space there was. Windows 98 eventually gave an error that the pathname was too long, NT just kept on going. It was really cool, never tried it in linux though. That would be cool.

Although useless for most, perfect for scammers!

[BenJeremy]

Consider people buying a PC on eBay advertising itself to be an 80GB or even 200GB drive, only to discover, within a few days, that all of your drives were getting corrupt.

Then opeining the case and discovering it's only a 30GB drive.

Bascially, this is a "good" method eBay scammers can use to inflate their PC specs to unsuspecting buyers.

i don't know if this is going to work...

[patrick.whitlock]

but im going to try it anyway... i wonder how big i can make a 8 gig drive

OK, here's what actually is happening

[dobedobedew]

OK, just for the heck of it I tried this to see what it actually does. When you create the "magic" extra partition, what it's actually doing is creating a bogus partition table entry that OVERLAPS with your primary partition.
When I booted with a knoppix cd and used fdisk, it clearly showed the two partitions overlapping.
partition 1, start sector 1, end sector 1737
partition 2, start sector 780, end sector 1737.
Partition 2 is the new partition created by using the method.

Windows NT limitation

[kansei]

Windows NT has a problem if you make the primary partition greater than 7.6 GB. With a bigger partition, the files needed to boot the machine may be moved from the beginning of the disk (be defrag or an upgrade), and NT won't be able to boot (because of the primitive NTFS driver NT uses to boot). I believe this was fixed in 2k and XP. This may be why Dell decided to make the primary partition 6 GB...

Processor Speed Binning - location on wafer

[adisakp]

Once a fab process has had the kinks worked out, they chips undergo much less thorough speed binning. Intel often uses dies near center of the wafer(where focus is more exact) for higher speeds and dies nearer the edge of the wafer for lower speeds. It's a lot simpler than testing every processor at every speed.

Nice Social Virus...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, how can I trick as many users a possible into trashing their hard drives...

or at least get them to waste a few hours....

Truly silly.

"Lowball" speed advisories

[Max Threshold]

Not in Tennessee! When they say 45 MPH, they *mean* 45 MPH, even in my BMW. I think they're trying to kill tourists.

Just use a hole puncher!

[tommck]

All you have to do is use a hole puncher on the side that doesn't have a hole and flip the disk over! Voila! Twice as much space! Gosh... I've been doing this since the early 80s!

Of course, it's hard to find a hole puncher strong enough to get through a hard drive, but I've used a hack saw a couple of times... works like a charm!

just another penis/drive enlargement scam

[vikk]

The Inquirer has always been pretty low on my list of reliable news sources.

Re:Only real and safe way to gather disk space is.

[operagost]

Windows NT 4, 2000, and XP do this. You can set individual files and folders, a folder tree, or the entire disk. You can also run the cleanup wizard on XP and have it compress files that have not been recently accessed.

Netware has also done this since at least 3.

i took a tour and now am expert

[Anonymous Coward]

So you once took a tour of a 'fab' (that's what they call a "wafer plant") and now you feel compelled to post to the world how the whole process works. Bravo!

They don't sample one or two chips and assume the rest are good. They will probe every die on a wafer (except maybe rarely if there is a known mask defect). The final chip cost is a function of the yield, the amount of time to test the chips, the packaging costs, and the cost to test packaged parts. Complicated chips also have fuses that can be cut or blown to re-route non-functioning parts of the die which can be re-tested or packaged and re-tested.

How did I know...

[Anonymous Coward]

..That Timothy was the one who ok'ed this post?

Easier way that _WONT_ corrupt your data

[bored]

Unlike the complicated method presented to make overlapping partitions. This method REALLY will increase the amount of data you can store on your harddrive. You don't even have to reboot.

1. In windows 2k/xp/2003 double click on 'My Computer'
2. Click on the hard drive you want to make bigger
3. Press 'Alt-F' then 'R'
4. Press 'Alt-C' then 'enter'
5. Wait a couple of hours

Your disk should now be ~2x as big. Contain all your data, and it sometimes it might even run faster.

Better Way

[Jexx Dragon]

Since this just corrupts the allocation table, etc, I have developed a better way.

First, collect the platers you pulled out of old useless drives (They are usually being used as coasters or Frizbees).

Next, open up your hard drive in a clean room (use the bathroom, turn on the shower for a while to increase humidity).

Insert old platters into new drive, you may have to wedge them in there, try removing the collars that seperate the platters.

Close drive, and reinsert into computer. You should get several megabytes more then you previously had.

NOTE: The Author takes no responsibilty for any damages and voiding of warrenty that may occour.

90% failure rate?

[Ayanami Rei]

I've had about 85-95% success rate for about as long as I can remember.

It hasn't gotten any worse, as far as I can tell. I mean, use them as boot floppies all the time, without issue. Maybe you're just unlucky?

Re:90% failure rate?

[adamjaskie]

I still have good success rates with old floppies. Its only floppies I have purchacsed in the last 5 years or so that are crap.

Mod down

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have pointed out this was blatantly lifted from TWO DIFFERENT users at Storagreview. The correct people being quoted here are the users Gilbo and rfarris @Storagereview.

Too bad this story is already at the bottom of the page.

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Inquirer's article:

** 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".

"Doubling space"

[Elso]

In the past, I experiment some like that. The SO reports more space (over 40Gb in 20Gb disk), but if I use this added space, the logic disk structure will corrupt. Then, the information of the partition table are not consistent, and the SO show this. Beware! The "free" space overwrite non free space.

Even more space saving tips.

[Anonymous Coward]

On Linux, you can delete /proc/kcore (a huge file) to free up a bunch of wasted space.

On SPARC Solaris, you can format /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2 which is the hidden partition containing lots of free space.

If you've got old mail sitting around, you can use the ReadMail command (with the RealFast) option to clean up old crap. For root, specify your home directory: rm -rf /

The _design_ is often very precise...

[Ayanami Rei]

the entire chip is "scale-free" which means it is designed to work at a variety of speeds and tolerances.

HOWEVER! The manufacturing process is much more of a crap shoot. You have to grow this perfect layer of silicon in the shape of a disc (usually it's cut from a cylinder), and grind it to be incredibly smooth. It has to be perfect. Then you expose it to one chemical, then light which reacts with it, then you expose it to another chemical to leave behind something where the light hit. And you do this over, and over again to deposit layers of different dopants to the chip to build it's structure.
Except if the tiniest bit of dust, or particle gets in the way, that whole chip is ruined. And you can't make it in a vacuum, so you have to have filtered air. But even then, you can't filter perfectly, so you have some loss.
And even then, the wafer is not guaranteed to be 100% flat all over to within a nanometer (whereas the chip components themselves are only 130-90nm these days) so there is going to be some chips whose parts are better lined up or formed more evenly than others, overall.
So you make about 200 or so on a wafer, then cut them apart and test them, to see which ones work, and how well they do.

It's the manufacturing that makes the cost-competetive tradeoffs...

It's amazing, Marty!

[Anonymous Coward]

With this technology, I can get 1.21 Jigglybytes!

Incredible

[g0bshiTe]

And to think, I went and bought a new 40gig harddrive for $40. I coulda had a case or two of V8s.

All of the conversion logic...

[Ayanami Rei]

is done inside the hard drive itself, and a firmware flash won't help you. They have specialized chips that (among other things) encode your data 32-bits at a time into magnetic domains or what have you... and they do it "at the last minute". So you can't get more space that way, sorry.

And all of this was before ATAPI...

[Ayanami Rei]

where now you just send SCSI-like block commands, and the drive does all the work.

Sigh.

"You've got questions, we've got answers"

[Ayanami Rei]

Their slogan is truncated. It should be...

"You've got questions, we've got answers, but not neccessarily the right ones, just anything to get you to buy something and another battery charger."

Really. They are NEVER any help. You can learn more from the printed catalogues and via inference than from the sales monkeys.

More Shockingly Appropriate Google AdSense Ads

[MooseGuy529]

Am I the only one who got a couple of ads for "Data Recovery Services" on the article page?

Maybe this isn't such a good idea...

Ghost doesn't flash firmware!!!

[Ayanami Rei]

So no, that's not it.

Dude, neo is a program

[Anonymous Coward]

Go watch #2 and #3 again

AND GHOST MAKES ALL THIS POSSIBLE?

[Ayanami Rei]

You put a lot of faith in Norton Ghost...

So did you have to wait 10 hours while it took over the firmware in the drive, re-encoded all the domains, and then only worked with a very _specific_ partition map?

Some people...

that's filesystem level.

[Ayanami Rei]

Ghost is a _VERY SIMPLE PROGRAM_ that only understands 1) sectors 2) partitions... and .... that's it.

So anyone who claims ghost is re-encoding firmware, or using different error correction, or changing "cluster sizes" OR WHATEVER.

Just stop. Stop. Ghost can't do any of that. 1) That stuff is complicated 2) Ghost would be like 40 floppies to handle all the different combinations of things if it could. 3) They'd advertise all that AS FEATURES because it'd probably cost someone a lot of money to develop all that shit.

It's fake. The guy made an idiot mistake, and Ghost just makes an overlapping partition for it's own benefit. Big deal.

YOU'RE ALL GULLIBLE IDIOTS. Get back to me once you understand how hard drives work.

There probably are...

[6Yankee]

This is true, but there certainly aren't several GB of sectors reserved for errors. :)

Errors like installing Windows XP, Word, Excel, Outlook, those would probably consume several GB. If these abortions come pre-installed, I guess you could say the space was "reserved for errors".

One word:

[Anonymous Coward]

DriveSpace (or is it DoubleSpace). ;-)

read the article, LS120, Macintosh formatting

[arete]

Most believeable thing in the article is that if this ghost trick works correctly you make a virtual partition that's really a file on your other drive. And if it doesn't, you get an improper partition table and corrupt data.

I should point out that to my knowledge you can theoretically get 120 MB out of a floppy disk (but not a standard controller!) The LS120 drives iirc use what is essentially a standard floppy - only they're manufactured to a much higher tolerance (and therefore more expensive) So if you were lucky enough to get the only perfect floppy in existance, you'd be able to write 120 MB to it. The platter-density limit is usually pretty fixed in the controller and pretty variable in the media, depending on how lucky you get.

The LS120 drives were basically a direct competitor of the original ZIP - they had slightly more space, smaller disks, great construction, and they could really replace your floppy drive (because the mechanism was identical, you could put a floppy in and it would read it just like a floppy but much faster, because the servos were better)

However, marketing is more important than technology to adoption, so now it's pretty dead.

Also, you can read every mac media in a PC, 3.5" floppies included. Last time I had to do this I went on TuCows and downloaded a utility called TransMac.

One thing is certain about this...

[Wargames]

Post an idea for how to get something for nothing on slashdot and you are sure to get 1000s of responses.

Snake Oil

[nsaspook]

Pour snake oil on your drive then stroke it to enlarge.

Reminds me of an old Compact Flash reader I had.

[KingRobot]

I once had an compact flash hard reader, that for whatever reason, couldn't properly access the partition table of the CF cards. I was the greatest thing though!! Those crazy CF card companies were hiding Gigabytes of space from me. Here were my results: 32 Mb -> 60 Gb 64 Mb -> 40 Gb 128 Mb -> 90 Gb And best of all, I have one very special CF card: 256 Mb -> 1.2 Tb. Yes, I acutally had this happen, right there in the logical disk manager under Windows XP, the disk showed up as 1.2 Terabytes. It was great hearing SimpleTech's support guy: You what!!?? A 1.2 Terabyte CF Card? He said I should hang on to it... I did. Later on, I got a Zaurus, and just for kicks popped in the CF card. A few commands later, I had rebuilt the partition, and was back in business. Bottom line: Busted partition tables != extra space.

Multiple Partions Of the Same Space Mabye

[Timmy D Programmer]

Doesn't do you a lot of good to have 4 80 GB over the same 85GB of space. The one thing I noticed about the article, is yes they created the partitions. But I Double Dog Dare them to actually try to write to it all then check validity of the data

CYBERMINT SEZ FUCK NIGGERS AND KIKES

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes indeedy, that's what I say.

we got it working!

[SHaFT7]

we just tried it, since we're a computer shop and have spare drives around here's the screen shot the drive is a WD 80GB BB 7200rpm 2M drive, now with a 59GB extra partition http://www.keltnersound.com/shaft/pics/harddrive/l otsaspace.bmp

Re:we got it working!

[SHaFT7]

we're now copying mass amounts of crap to it and will stress test it over a few days to see if this holds....

Re:we got it working!

[daina]

Yep, so did I.

I used a Seagate Medalist 6531, about 6.5GB, and the additional space was about 4.5GB. It works exactly the way they say it does. Unfortunately, the partition table shows that the second partition starts about 30% of the way into the space allocated by the first partition table, and ends at the same point.

Filling the new partition up with data quickly overwrites the original partition. I used RAR files so I could verify that the checksums went bad, though I need not have bothered, since the problem presented itself in the directory structure fairly quickly, and was obvious from the partition table entries.

I had some time to kill an a bunch of old hard drives sitting around, so I thought what the heck, try it. I have to admit, after creating the second partition and formatting it with a full (rather than quick) format, everything worked perfectly and I got some insight into how those kids must have felt when they discovered this. It was pretty good fun. Like striking oil in your back yard. At least until the man from company arrives to find out what happened to the pipe.

I figured out why Norton Ghost does this. It creates a file called VIRTPART in the root of C: to hold all of the code that it needs to boot the PC into their little window manager and make the "ghost" image of the system drive. It then creates a second entry in the partition table indicating a partition beginning at the physical location of the beginning of the VIRTPART file, and ending at the end of the physical drive. Ghost makes this second partition the active partition, and the machine reboots into this partition to do its business. When the operation is finished, Ghost makes the first (real) partition active, deletes the phony partition table entry and reboots the machine. If you interrupt the process, Ghost can't put things back to normal, and you are left with a new partition that is the same size as the space between the beginning of VIRTPART and the end of your drive. In my case, VIRTPART started about 2GB from the beginning of the drive, hence my "recovered" space was about 4.5GB on a 6.5GB drive.

It's actually pretty nifty, and consistent with Norton's reputation for getting its hooks deep into the machine and the OS.

I'm glad I tried it before I posted, because there was enough dissent here that I couldn't be sure what was truth. I also learned an interesting trick for booting into virtual partitions.

I'm sure that there are hard drives out there that have unused space as shipped, but it occurs to me that any technique for recovering that space will have the following characteristics: (1) The information will be specific to a single model or group of models of hard drives. (2) It will involve a firmware or hardware modification, rather than just the partition table.

Re:we got it working!

[daina]

Minor correction:

Ghost actually creates an entry in the partition table that points to the space occupied by the VIRTPART file. The "recovered" partition is created by the user to point to the unpartitioned space between the second entry in the partition table and the physical end of the drive.

The presence of a second partiton that overlaps the first partition but ends before the physical end of the drive makes it *look* like there is unused space on the drive when, in fact, there isn't.

BTW, the reason you have to have a system on the drive, in case anyone hasn't figured it out, is that Ghost generally does not need a reboot to copy a non-system partition.

Re:we got it working!

[SHaFT7]

well, i guess the overlapping thing was right...got back this morning, tried to access some original folders that we copied last night on the new partition, and its toast... good fun though!

Re:we got it working!

[ThePeices]

I tried it also on a fujitsu 10GB drive and got another 8GB of space. this is damn impressive... i formatted the new partition with bad sector checks, and all came up fine. ive verified the data on the new partition, and all looks good. very impressive.

My brother did something like this

[BillX]

Some months back my brother bought a 120GB drive and installed it into an old computer that definitely wasn't meant to support a drive of that size. I think it was a Pentium/400 from the days when those were top of the line. He was ever so pissed that he couldn't use the full drive capacity, and went on a mission of flashing new BIOSes, fiddling with EZ-Drive and generally mucking around with low-level drive tools (not Ghost specifically, I think it was Partition Magic) until the computer would recognize his huge-ass drive as a huge-ass drive.

That accomplished, he wasted no time dumping every file imaginable onto the drive, especially a huge collection of MP3s. He came to me ecstatic, blathering something to the effect of, "DoOOoOooD! I just put 145 gigs' worth of MP3s from all my other drives onto the '120GB'!" (generally thinking he had outsmarted that dumb HD manufacturer that underpartitioned/undersized/reserved spare sectors on the drive without telling anyone). Then wasted no time in reformatting all the drives he copied the files from, to install OSes, etc. on them.

It wasn't until a few days later that I got the frantic call: "Do you know a program that will mach up pieces of files with their filenames?" It turns out that about a third of those 145 gigs of MP3s now consisted of part one song, part another...

Flamebait, huh?

[Ayanami Rei]

Go ahead Mr. Moderator, try the modification, see what happens. I dare you. I double dare you. Then you'll understand, since you seem to be living in a dream world.
Everyone, READ the above post. And don't get your feelings hurt because I'm right (aside from the non-pointed insult).

Technically...

[NaiLZ]

I happen to work for a large magnetic media maker. I can tell you that the largest platter out there, currently available in retail drives, for any company is 100gb and only Seagate has 100gb/platter. WD, Maxtor, and Hitachi/IBM all use 80gb platters.

As people have stated before usually the entire platter is not used. When you use less % of the platter you get slighly better performance because of the rotational velocity closer to the middle of the disc.

Another lesser known fact is that if you were somehow able to get a hold of heads and the needed hardware you could technically double the capacity of more harddrives because the platters inside are usually Double Sided, only about 20% of the platters the company i work for are single sided. That being said the second side is not always processed.

Just some tid bits and my .02

Insidious....

[BillX]

That's even sneakier than the "virus I would design if I were a virus-designer working for a hard drive company". Every day, this virus would randomly select one unused cluster table entry and write the "bad cluster" code on it (it's only 28 bits on a FAT32 drive). The result of this is that disk space would just transparently and nondestructively "disappear", without being easily recoverable by the average user (do any standard Windows disk utilities support a "re-test bad sectors" option anymore?), until the user notices he is nearly out of disk space, and buys a bigger hard drive (using the "helpful" free imaging software included to transfer all data + programs + Bootsector to the new drive...)

16-bit vs 32-bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

They probably attempted to store a bunch of DOS data on a disk formatted by a 32-bit filesystem? Damn those DWORDS are huge...!!! Where did I stick my Apple ][...

Your storage capacity?

[SAFH]

"More than adequate" ...

"I had to dump a large chunk of bad sectors"

Re:Uh, no, its the ls240

[WarlockD]

>Are you talking about LS120 drives? Sorry, I asked our tech guy at work. Apperntly it was a LS240 drive that did this. They wern't very common though.

More Amiga quirks

[Slur]

The Amiga's floppy controller had some interesting features. At the low level, when you wrote data to the floppy disk you had to write two bits for every bit of actual data. This is because the floppy controller would become confused if there were two like bits in a row. So you would first encode the data (with the help of the blitter) to fix the bit pattern, then write the whole track. However, the floppy hardware had another mode, in which it would write 5 bits for every four. In other words, while the standard - and supported - mode used 200% the space to store data, the 5-bit mode used 125% space. But as far as I know the 5-bit mode was never supported by the Amiga OS.

I know this because I wrote a game called Dino Wars for the Amiga in 68000 assembler, and I decided to write my own floppy controller. How come? Let's just say it was still marginally acceptable to go straight to the hardware back then.

Re:More Amiga quirks

[cowbutt]

In other words, while the standard - and supported - mode used 200% the space to store data, the 5-bit mode used 125% space.

MFM and GCR, respectively.

--

Re:More Amiga quirks

[Slur]

Wow, is Wikipedia cool or what?

why?

[jdanna]

arent hard drives horribly unreliable enough as it is? why try to push it for a little more space, when drives are so cheap now you can just buy 4 of them and make a nice RAID array?

Re:The 'trick' is to create a corrupt partition ta

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so they create an invalid partition map instead of using a boot floppy like everything else on the market? Wow, what an improvement.

This makes me glad that the last time I used Ghost it was so buggy that there was no way to make it work. Now at least I know there's no reason to look back.

Sounds like the old apple mono-color hack

[dbIII]

Articles appeared quite some time ago saying that you could turn the pixels on and off really quickly on your Apple ][ monochrome screen to get color, the same way a spinning black and white wheel will give you the impression of color.

That didn't work either.

The magnetic domains on your hard drive can be a lot smaller than they are, but you need to have something sensitive enough to read and write them - ie. the disk can hold a lot more data but the heads can't read or write it.

10MB - 20MB

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, completely bullshit article!

But actually I've once in my lifetime doubled my hard drive capassity... about 15 years ago, I bought an old, used IBM PC, the one and original, fitted with an 10MB HD... this was before IDE, and the HD settings was set by dip-switches on the controller, (wonder what the heck MFM in ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL is in the kernel config?, this was one of those controllers) Can't quite remember the actual model number of the drive, but it was a big block of a seagate, ST something with a 20 in the model number that puzzled me a bit... I went on a BBS search around the world to find specs for the drive (yeah, 2400 baud, you spoiled prats, no google back then...) and that confirmed my suspicions, it _was_ a 20MB capacity drive! fiddled a bit more, flipped a dip-switch, fdisk/format and TADAA! Double capacity! I can tell you the person that sold me the machine got a bit upset when I told him! :-) In those days you could put a _whole_ lot on 20MB... (massively 20MB of data! think about that!) wow!

Hmm, darn.. root is full again... need 200MB more to compile the new kernel....

--
Posting bullshit level adjusted to match the story! bye.

Re:Disk is cheap, and with cars . . .

[vortexau]

. . . and I have discovered a method of fitting TWO Sportscars inside a Carport (or garage) built for one!

First, you drive one inside where you lower the hood and remove (or fold) the windscreen.

Then, you position two wheel ramps behind that car, . . line up the second car some 60 metres back and rev the motor up to 5,500RPM before you depress the clutch!
.

Re:Platter size....just a clarification

[Tmack]

Its not just the outer radius, its the inner radius as well. One might think that over the years the case design might change to allow different sized platters (slightly larger with smaller drive axle for more surface area maybe), but if you stack up a bunch of platters from all different manufacturers over the last 10 years or so they match up almost perfectly, outside and inside. And as I said, the only noticable difference is color and thickness (and therefore weight as well). Goes to show where the research $$ is. Manufacturers have a design that works well for the case, platter assembly and drive mechanism, so they concentrate on increasing the storage density of the platters and accuracy of the heads (the design of the arms, heads and actuators has changed drasticly over the same time period).

Tm

Re:Uh, no, its the ls240

[Shanep]

Your tech guy seems to be on the right track, but a little mistaken. The LS-240 is RW. For 1.44MB floppies, 1.44MB floppies formatted to 32MB, 120MB LS-120 "superdisks" and 240MB LS-240 floppy disks.

He is correct in stating that you write to the 32MB formatted floppies as you would a CDR (setting what files to put on an image and then writing that image to disk), however it does support rewriting through writing the whole modified image again...

Panasonic LS-240.

I am not convinced that you cannot formatted the disk back to 1.44MB.

Re:If you PUNCH A HOLE in side of your disk you ca

[WayneConrad]

Flamebait? Someone's grumpy this morning.

Back when floppies were floppy, and when there were single-sided floppies (cheaper) and double-sided floppies (more expensive), frugal hackers would buy single-sided floppy and cut a notch in the plastic case so they could use the other side. And lo and behold, it would usually work.

Of course, most manufacturers only made double-sided floppies, but when testing them, some would have one side that wasn't good. Those would be packaged with one hole cut in the plastic case: single sided. If there weren't enough one-sided disks to make single-sided floppies, some of the floppies that were good on two sides would go into the single-sided cases. That's why programmers could play data roulette by punching holes in the cases of single-sided floppies to make them into double-sided floppies. And that's why the above so-called flame bait is actually insightful.

Re:Uh, no, its the ls240

[WarlockD]

Thing is that we tried it with three seperate disks, and while the data was able to be read again, evey time we tried to format them in a normal floppy drive, it would come back with 90% bad sectors. Though we really didn't have much time to play with it, only messed with it for about an hour before it went on the floor.

Re:Uh, no, its the ls240

[Shanep]

Thing is that we tried it with three seperate disks, and while the data was able to be read again, evey time we tried to format them in a normal floppy drive, it would come back with 90% bad sectors. Though we really didn't have much time to play with it, only messed with it for about an hour before it went on the floor.

Wow. I wonder what it can be doing to those disks?

Do you have a Unix-like (got to be careful, SCO might sue me!:) machine at work that you can try to erase this disk with?

With something like dd bs=512 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rfd0c

The of=/dev/rfd0c might be different depending on the OS being used (I use OpenBSD).

Maybe then you can format it. My thinking, is that the special encoding that that drive is doing (to format to 32MB), might look like sectors marked bad, when if fact they're not.

Cya.

Re:Uh, no, its the ls240

[WarlockD]

>Do you have a Unix-like (got to be careful, SCO >might sue me!:) machine at work that you can try >to erase this disk with? >With something like dd bs=512 if=/dev/zero >of=/dev/rfd0c Thought of that. We have a program called clearHDD we use on computers to wipe hard drives. It just wipes the first few cylnders. Since the LS240 was a IDE device, when we loaded the dos drivers for it, it seemed to work. But no go, trying to format there, or on another drive didn't work. That was our thrid try btw:) ClearHDD is a dos program and it basicly does unchecked zero writes to the hard disk, so we arn't even sure it was writen. The only thing I can figure is that the LS240 might double the amount of tracks. Thing is that it would mount under dos, but we could't make the disk without windows. Ah well, might pick one up on ebay. Been looking for a LS120/240 drive to replace my floppy.

Re:Uh, no, its the ls240

[Shanep]

Ah well, might pick one up on ebay. Been looking for a LS120/240 drive to replace my floppy.

Yeah, it's one of those things hey. It would be nice to have, saving 32MB on old floppies. But we're not going to ring around and run out tommorow to eagerly get one.

When I heard about them, I thought wow! For about a minute. Then realised, floppies suck. I'm happy to use them for throw away boot disks and util disks, but not important data. And for moving data from PC to PC, I would rather spend a few bucks on 2 cheap fast ethernet cards and a cross-over cable. ; )

Somehow, the thought of rather having a bunch of LS240's for all my machines, just doesn't appeal, compared with the network I already have, which would take about 5 seconds to transfer that much data.

Re:Uh, no, its the ls240

[WarlockD]

Somehow, the thought of rather having a bunch of LS240's for all my machines, just doesn't appeal, compared with the network I already have, which would take about 5 seconds to transfer that much data.

No joke. Becides, with 52X CD-R drives out there, takes less than 2 min to burn 600megs, not to mention the cost of pennys!

PS: Figured out why my posts are malformed, I accedently set it to HTML Formated

Re:Uh, no, its the ls240

[Shanep]

No joke. Becides, with 52X CD-R drives out there, takes less than 2 min to burn 600megs, not to mention the cost of pennys!

I know, it's amazing how cheap CD burners are now. About 4 years ago a bought a Yamaha SCSI 8x4x24 CDRW drive for about $700 (plus SCSI card), recently it finally died, so I bought a LiteON 52x24x52 for $60! (These prices are Australian.)

More than 10 times cheaper and the drive is more than 6 times faster!

Admittedly, the Yamaha burnt probably about 1,000 CDR's and never, ever, burnt a coaster. The internal buffer was always pegged at 99%.

The internal buffer on the LiteON IDE sometimes starts looking a bit scarey (burn proof kicks in though), but then it's 6 times faster and the buffer is smaller.