ho ho fking ho

[Cynical Oracle]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14597

[Stew]

Interesting results to date:
Western Digital 200GB SATA
Yield after recovery: 510GB of space

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

Maxtor 40GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 80GB

Seagate 20GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 30GB

Unknown laptop 80GB HDD
Yield: 120GB

Was about all I understood!!

[Cynical Oracle]

It was a rather simple chain of tasks.. Anyways, I own an IT consulting company. Do you see the potential?

[Stew]

I understood the processes, just wasnt sure what the whole point was until then!

[JammyJim]

tell us if it works


and whether its worth the risk of corrupting everything.

[Cynical Oracle]

I'll try on two of my disks in a few houres.. I'll report back

[acropolis]

it sounds like a lot of work, and storage isn't that expensive:/

[Cynical Oracle]

It's more expensive than free. Also, it takes up a lot less space in the cabinet. I have 4 120GB disks and 2 160 GB disks in my server. Imagine what I CAN have..

[pablissimo]

Read the letters page, the various claims that this is just 'corrupting the partition table of the drive' seem more plausible than being able to access over 150% more drive space.

[JammyJim]

i just read that. whats the worst that could happen.....

[acropolis]

Originally Posted by Cynical Oracle

It's more expensive than free. Also, it takes up a lot less space in the cabinet. I have 4 120GB disks and 2 160 GB disks in my server. Imagine what I CAN have..

6 corrupted hard drives or...

lets see...120*4 + 160*2 = 800, say you double it, 1.6 tera,

3200 hours of porn?

or 300,000 mp3 s?

boy if i had a nickel for everytime i've said to myself "if only i had room for just 200,000 more mp3s..."

[nickhall]

If you read the forum on it ppl have tried it and it doesnt work, the 'new partition' is just a ghost once you start writing to it it fails and currupts stuff.

[Cynical Oracle]

I write alot in MS Office

[acropolis]

Originally Posted by nickhall

If you read the forum on it ppl have tried it and it doesnt work, the 'new partition' is just a ghost once you start writing to it it fails and currupts stuff.

the fools!

El Dorado is just over the next dune!

[Marilyn Manson]

This thread has no hos in it, despite three references in the title, as well as '****ing'.

Not impressed in the slightest. Not impressed at all.

[Cynical Oracle]

Tuff crowd.

[Marilyn Manson]

Originally Posted by Cynical Oracle

Tuff crowd.

Compared to you, Eminem is a veritable Cicero.

[Cynical Oracle]

I know you love me sweetheart

[djbass]

I thought it was going to be in reference to the rather excellent Kevin Bloody Wilson song.

Re the HDD mircales space though I daresay this is erronous

[Marilyn Manson]

Originally Posted by Cynical Oracle

I know you love me sweetheart.

Only if I get to assault your anus with a broom handle.

[Cynical Oracle]

Yeah, but it's worth testing. I'll try it on two smaller 20GB disks. I'm throwing them away anyways.

[Cynical Oracle]

Originally Posted by Marilyn Manson

Only if I get to assault your anus with a broom handle.

Is that what you call a good time in the UK?

[Marilyn Manson]

Originally Posted by Cynical Oracle

Is that what you call a good time in the UK?

I think I'm fairly atypical, actually. Don't tell the police, though.

[Ste]

I could do with a bigger hard drive... the two I have at the mo are 3Gb and 15Gb...

[JammyJim]

if scan give me the credit for the crap memory they send me hopefully ill be able to purchase a 120gig hdd and stop my pc from whining with its current slave (an old 40gig maxtor) + some other goodies. like a better cooling fan and maybe an air cleaner. its rather dusty in there...

[meglamaniac]

I don't understand what everyone's getting so excited up about.
Like the article says this is nothing new, especially if your PC is a prebuild from Dell, HP or the like.
Remember the days of so called "Rescue CDs", where instead of giving you the Windows cd they gave you a CD which would "reset" your machine back to it's factory state? All that CD had on it was an image of the "important" bits of the harddrive in the state it was shipped (ie. windows installed, drivers, any bundled applications etc).

So now as harddrives are so big, they figure you won't miss a couple of gb if they just section off a bit of the harddrive and put the image there instead, and that way you can't lose it like you'd lose a CD.
There's nothing secret about it. The partitions aren't even really hidden, windows just doesn't display any partition that isn't marked as FAT, FAT32 or NTFS (so if you have any linux partitions on a drive windows won't show them either).

Advising regular users that they can perform some uber-secret-l337-overclock move on their harddrive which really just ammounts to deleting a partition and expanding another one into the free space strikes me as a bad idea, and I bet the poor tech support desks at Dell and HP won't appreciate the influx of calls from all the muppets who got over excited and deleted the windows partition by mistake.

Oh well.

[edit]
I know some people claim there's space missing because a 120gb drive only comes out as 111gb once formatted, for example.
The space is not missing. The electronics industry thinks a gb is 1,000,000,000 bytes. The computing industry thinks a gb is 1,073,741,824 bytes.
The retailers go for the electronics industry rating because, obviously, it comes out bigger - nothing sells computers like having bigger numbers than your rivals.

[pablissimo]

Ther claims are more substantial than just using a hidden partition of a gig or so though. Only real explanation can be a ****ed partition table as far as I can see =(

Damned kids and their music.

[meglamaniac]

The solution is to buy harddrives direct from retailers like ebuyer or dabs then, before any dirteh PC suppliers get their hands on them.

[JammyJim]

purely out of interest

is there any way to recapture the space that ntfs wastes?

i have an 80gig hdd. yet it displays 74.5gig in my computer....


thats 5.5gig lost ....

[Structural Integrity]

Is this specific to pre-installed HD's then? I couldn't get that out of the text.
Well, whatever they do, be it corrupting the FAT table or fooling the BIOS with the drive space, it's most likely nonsense. Doubling HD space... right... "en toen ging de wekker en werd je wakker"

BTW, are there consumer disks with 500+ gb of data? Sounds interesting to have.

[MrL_JaKiri]

JJ you numpty

Originally Posted by meglamaniac

[edit]
I know some people claim there's space missing because a 120gb drive only comes out as 111gb once formatted, for example.
The space is not missing. The electronics industry thinks a gb is 1,000,000,000 bytes. The computing industry thinks a gb is 1,073,741,824 bytes.
The retailers go for the electronics industry rating because, obviously, it comes out bigger - nothing sells computers like having bigger numbers than your rivals.

[acropolis]

Originally Posted by meglamaniac

[edit]
I know some people claim there's space missing because a 120gb drive only comes out as 111gb once formatted, for example.
The space is not missing. The electronics industry thinks a gb is 1,000,000,000 bytes. The computing industry thinks a gb is 1,073,741,824 bytes.
The retailers go for the electronics industry rating because, obviously, it comes out bigger - nothing sells computers like having bigger numbers than your rivals.

also,

when people put 'quarter pounder' on their menu, they are referring to pre-cook weight.

while cooking some fat and water will leave the meat, and it will be lighter than 0.25 pounds.

[pablissimo]

Sure it's 80 'proper' gig and not 80 'decimal' gig? 80gig as per the manufacturer's claim is 76.3 gig of actual storage space.

Otherwise probably not, it does need to find your files and stuff.

Edit:
Beaten by so many people

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by acropolis

also,

when people put 'quarter pounder' on their menu, they are referring to pre-cook weight.

while cooking some fat and water will leave the meat, and it will be lighter than 0.25 pounds.

It's also why things can be over 100% meat.

[Ste]

Originally Posted by MrL_JaKiri

It's also why things can be over 100% meat.

"But Lawrence, You can't get more than 100%"
****ing Mcdonalds adverts

[Structural Integrity]

Originally Posted by JammyJim

purely out of interest

is there any way to recapture the space that ntfs wastes?

i have an 80gig hdd. yet it displays 74.5gig in my computer....


thats 5.5gig lost ....

That's not only wasted space due to NTFS or FAT overhead. Those bastards of HD making companies count one GB as 1000Mb instead of 1024MB. I don't know if they count a MB as 1000 kB, but it could well be.
So you actually get less space than they advertise.

[edit]
Poo... beaten
[/edit]

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by Ste

"But Lawrence, You can't get more than 100%"
****ing Mcdonalds adverts

What?

And why can't you get more than 100%?

[pablissimo]

Because 100% is everything, Lawrence.

[Marilyn Manson]

I'm 400% cotton.

[Ste]

Originally Posted by MrL_JaKiri

What?

And why can't you get more than 100%?

Heh - If you highlight a confused smiley it looks like a chinese person

Anyway - Mcdonalds adverts, Lawrence Dallalglio (sp?) very annoying.

[meglamaniac]

JJ, that's not "lost space" like i said in my other post - it's just the discrepency between the two different definitions of "gigabyte".

A re-read of that article suggests an even dafter explanation for the supposedly huge gains:
They're just fking with the free space counter.
It takes too long to calculate free space by reading the size of every file and then subtracting it from the total partition size, so nearly all filesystems keep a record of free space which is updated every time a file is created or deleted. Screw this up, and you can make the filesystem think it has more space than it does.

This is almost certainly the reason for reported data corruption as well. Again depending on the filesystem, the free space record can be used to calculate certain things to do with where files should be allocated etc so if it's wrong, this can have reprecussions - especially for applications like disk defragmentors.

I'd be interested in seeing the results of:
a) trying to fill all the space on any of these "modded" drives (I'd expect an "access denied / no write permission" kind of error when it ran out of physical space), and
b) a log from running "chkdsk /f" on any of those drives (i'd expect to see the free space counter corrected)

Oh well, seeing as I don't particularly fancy overwriting 200gb of data built up over several years, i'm not about to try screwing with my partition table by aborting sensitive operations on the drive halfway through.

[Marilyn Manson]

Originally Posted by MrL_JaKiri

And why can't you get more than 100%?

The engines cannae take anymore, captain.

[Dante Hicks]

Originally Posted by acropolis

boy if i had a nickel for everytime i've said to myself "if only i had room for just 200,000 more mp3s..."

It's depressingly easy to fill 800GB of HDD space.

When I've dug my out of the current financial pit I am in, I think I shall order 3 300GB HDDs.

[meglamaniac]

It's true
Series 3 of 24 = 6.3Gb so far.

Also, judging from what you lot are like:
a) it's a grey area whether copies of TV shows are illegal - it's not like i'm selling them on
b) i downloaded series 1 and 2 as they came out and then went and bought the DVD set, and will be doing for 3
c) i'm buggered if i'm waiting for them to air in the UK (also now that the BBC screwed up and they're on Sky, there's the minor problem of me not having Sky).

[Dante Hicks]

It's OK, property is theft anyway.

As quality get's better, HDD space is going to more of an issue. For some reason we have a 45GB directory of SG1 episodes on one of our drives atm.

[pablissimo]

17gig of SG1 eps, and that only covers series 6 and 7 =(

And this wee box has no more room for extra drives. And I have no money. Yadda yadda yadda.

[CjC]

I looked at the link from update three and found this:

Regarding article "Unused space on hard drives recovered?" at this URL.

I am the "Linux SATA guy".

First, users are usually amused to learn that the capacity of modern hard drives is _unknown_, until it goes through the factory's qualification tests. The 120GB hard drive you purchased may have been physically identical to a 250GB hard drive, but simply it only passed qualification at 120GB.

Intel does the same thing with processors. A 3.0Ghz processor may be sold as 2.4Ghz, simply because it didn't pass qualification at 3.0Ghz but did at a lower clock speed.

Second, in the ATA standard there is a feature known as the "host protected area". This area is accessible from any OS -- but it requires special ATA commands in order to make this area available to the OS.

Third, all hard drives reserve a certain amount of free space to use for reallocation of bad sectors. These "spare sectors" are free space on your drive... completely unused until your hard drive starts finding problems on the physical media.

So this is old news Although the host-protected area (HPA) can be used for insidious purposes such as DRM/CPRM that is completely hidden from the users, most of the "invisible free space" exists for a purpose -- either it's spare sectors for bad sector remapping, or its capacity that didn't pass factory qualification, that you don't want to use anyway.

Feel free to edit/reproduce/publish this email.

Jeff Garzik

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

sounds like a reasonable explanation but Im still not screwing up my hard disks

[Tomkat]

Originally Posted by Ste

"But Lawrence, You can't get more than 100%"
****ing Mcdonalds adverts

Pity the McDonalds worker didn't remember that for his GCSEs, then maybe he wouldn't have such a shit job.

[Nodrog]

Originally Posted by Structural Integrity

That's not only wasted space due to NTFS or FAT overhead. Those bastards of HD making companies count one GB as 1000Mb instead of 1024MB

Yeah damn them for sticking to standard metric prefixes rather than misapplying the terms!

On a sidenote, the standardised IEC name for 2^30 bytes is a 'gibibyte'.

[Structural Integrity]

Originally Posted by Nodrog

Yeah damn them for sticking to standard metric prefixes rather than misapplying the terms!

On a sidenote, the standardised IEC name for 2^30 bytes is a 'gibibyte'.

The state should make them!!!