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

Overclocking?

[wardomon]

I overclock my systems by running them on a 220 volt circuit. They're briefly very fast.

Re:I think I know how this works...

[Lord Bitman]

That's only 25% smaller, you jackass.

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.

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.

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.