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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.)
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!
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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
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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 :-)
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