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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[blackbear]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[Shanep]

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

DMF.

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

[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

[AndroidCat]

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

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

[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

[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

[rew]

No, the head would be missing.

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

[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

[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

[Jaywalk]

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

Really? I thought they only had floppies.

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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[Makarakalax]

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

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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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....

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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

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...

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.)

Everybody that tries this

[Sivar]

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

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.)

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

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..

[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.

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!!!

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.

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.

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

Don't believe them

[ObviousGuy]

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

riiiiiiiight

[goosebane]

while(people == stupid)

anything = believable;

Thats all I have to say.

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: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.

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)

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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...

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!

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!

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: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.

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 ?

[Uninvited Guest]

Wait, can you give me more information on this so called "hammer" approach? How much more storage would I get?

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.

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

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?

[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.

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

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)

utter bull

[rev_karol]

CHECK IT OUT before you rape your hd

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.

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...

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..

[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]

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..

[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..

[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.

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.

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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.

Jesus Christ!

[esme]

April first is coming earlier and earlier every year.

-esme

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

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 :-)

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!

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.

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.

Aureal units

[Z-MaxX]

You can measure aureal density in nipples per cubic furlong.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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!

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.

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: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.

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?

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

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)

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....

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.

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.

"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!

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.

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...

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.

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: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