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Unused space on hard drives recovered?

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Unused space on hard drives recovered?

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Updated Hidden partitions revealed


By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 09 March 2004, 14:33

READER WILEY SILER has sent us a method which he said was discovered by Scott Komblue and documented by himself which they claim can recover unused areas of the hard drive in the form of hidden partitions.
We haven't tried this here at the INQUIRER, and would caution readers that messing with your hard drive is done at your own peril and very likely breaches your warranty. Here is what Wiley and Scott did. µ

* UPDATE Does this work? We're not going to try it on our own machine thank you very much. Instead, we're waiting for a call from a hard drive company so we can get its take on these claims.

** UPDATE II A representative for large hard drive distributor Bell Micro said: "This is NOT undocumented and we have done this in the past to load an image of the original installation of the software. When the client corrupted the o/s we had a boot floppy thatopened the unseen partition and copied it to the active or seen partition. It is a not a new feature or discovery. We use it ourselves without any qualms".

*** UPDATE III See the letters column today, here.

Required items
Ghost 2003 Build 2003.775 (Be sure not to allow patching of this software) 2 X Hard Drives (OS must be installed on both.) For sake of clarity we will call the drive we are trying to expand (T) in this document (means Target for partition recover). The drive you use every day, I assume you have one that you want to keep as mater with your current OS and data, will be the last dive we install in this process and will be called (X) as it is your original drive.

1. Install the HDD you wish to recover the hidden partitions (hard drive T) on as the master drive in your system with a second drive as a slave (you can use Hard Drive X if you want to). Any drive will do as a slave since we will not be writing data to it. However, Ghost must see a second drive in order to complete the following steps. Also, be sure hard drive T has an OS installed on it You must ensure that the file system type is the same on both drive (NTFS to NTFS or FAT32 to FAT32, etc)

2. Install Ghost 2003 build 2003.775 to hard drive T with standard settings. Reboot if required.

3. Open Ghost and select Ghost Basic. Select Backup from the shown list of options. Select C:\ (this is the drive we want to free partition on on hard drive T) as our source for the backup. Select our second drive as the target. (no data will be written so worry not). Use any name when requested as it will not matter. Press OK, Continue, or Next until you are asked to reboot.

Critical step
4. Once reboot begins, you must shutdown the PC prior to the loading of DOS or any drivers. The best method is to power down the PC manually the moment you see the BIOS load and your HDDs show as detected.

5. Now that you have shutdown prior to allowing Ghost to do its backup, you must remove the HDD we are attempting to expand (hard drive T which we had installed as master) and replace it with a drive that has an OS installed on it. (This is where having hard drive X is useful. You can use your old hard drive to complete the process.) Place hard drive T as a secondary drive in the system. Hard drive X should now be the master and you should be able to boot into the OS on it. The best method for this assuming you need to keep data from and old drive is:

Once you boot into the OS, you will see that the second drive in the system is the one we are attempting to expand (hard drive T). Go to Computer Management -> Disk Management

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.

6. Select the unallocated space on our drive T and create a new primary or extended partition. Select the file system type you prefer and format with quick format (if available). Once formatting completes, you can delete the VPSGHBOOT partition from the drive.

7. Here is what you should now see on your T drive.

a. Original partition from when the drive still had hidden partitions
b. New partition of space we just recovered.
c. 8 meg unallocated partitions.

8. Do you want to place drive T back in a PC and run it as the primary HDD? Go to Disk Management and set the original partition on T (not the new one we just formatted) to and Active Partition. It should be bootable again if no data corruption has occurred.

Caution
Do not try to delete both partitions on the drive so you can create one large partition. This will not work. You have to leave the two partitions separate in order to use them. Windows disk management will have erroneous data 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.

This process can cause a loss of data on the drive that is having its partitions recovered so it is best to make sure the HDD you use is not your current working HDD that has important data. If you do this on your everyday drive and not a new drive with just junk on it, you do so at your own risk. It has worked completely fine with no loss before and it has also lost the data on the drive before. Since the idea is to yield a huge storage drive, it should not matter.

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
 
Meni to sve lici, na vec zaboravljen drivespace iliti kompresija hard diska.Posle ovakve akcije, sve radi primetno sporije, bar je tako bilo_Ovoga se secaju stariji memberi i oni koji su sve ovo radili u cistom Dos-u.Mislim u Disc Operating System.
 
Long Live Stacker Drive !!! Koje je to čudo bilo ? Pa ona kompresija RAM drajva ....
 
Mislim momci procitajte sta pise u postu, pa nakon toga komentariste... Mislim...
 
Igor je napisao(la):
Mislim momci procitajte sta pise u postu, pa nakon toga komentariste... Mislim...

Tacno tako, narocito procitajte i link koji je dat u gornjem tekstu ( pod Update III ) i gde je objasnjeno dosta toga, odnosno dosta su ili cak potpuno "prizemljene" ovakve senzacionalisticke stvari: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14608
 
Meni to liči na ono što su neki nekad davno bušili rupe na DD disketama da bi od njih napravili HD...
(sad će neko da pita "a šta su to DD diskete?" :d)
 
update na post:
link

With quite a bit of controversy being stirred by this article at The Inquirer, I was compelled to examine the claim of free space. Basically, the article claimed that there was a procedure available which made it possible to "recover unused areas of the hard drive in the form of hidden partitions". According to the author the the article, more than 100% of the drive's capacity could be unlocked.

Could these claims possibly be true? Armed with a copy of Norton Ghost 2003 build 775, I set to work on my test drive: a 10.2Gb Samsung SV1022D (9.49GB in Windows). I installed Windows XP Pro and Ghost on the Samsung drive, and proceeded to follow the instructions from The Inquirer's article.

After going through the article's procedure, I restarted my computer to find a new partition in Windows Drive Management. In addition to the original 9.49GB drive, there was a 9.02GB partition. So it looks like I almost doubled my existing hard drive capacity.


Could this really be happening? Let's perform some testing to see if it really worked...

From another hard drive in my system, I copied some large video files on to the 9.02GB partition and kept on adding files until the drive could take no more. It was all looking good until an error came up. Windows would refuse to copy anything more to the drive even though there was reportedly 2.13GB free space.

I then proceeded to do the same thing to the original 9.49GB partition. However, the 9.49GB partition did not have any qualms with being filled up. I was able to fill the drive up completely without encountering any errors. I then proceeded to take a look again at the 9.02GB partition. It still reported 2.13GB free space, so I tried to copy more videos to the drive. This time, I didn't encounter any errors and I filled up the partition.





So far, everything looks good even though the new 9.02GB partition was acting up.

Now the real test begins: do all of the video files on each partition work? Looking at the files of each partition in My Computer, I knew something was wrong when I couldn't see the previews for some of the movies. These movies didn't work either when attempting to play them in Media Player. Uh oh.

I then rebooted and ran Chkdsk on each of the partitions to see what glorious errors it would give me. Basically the same number of errors as files on the disk for the 9.02gb partition was reported, and more than 10000 errors were reported for the 9.49GB partition.






I neglected to record the number of files on the bootable 9.49gb drive, so I am unable to confirm if the number of corrupted files was the same as the total number of files on the drive, although I'd bet they were. After running Chkdsk, none of the files on either partition were there anymore, which makes sense since Chkdsk said it deleted them.

When I went to restart the computer, Windows did not start. I quickly came to the realization that when I wrote to the 9.02GB partition, I must have damaged some system/boot files.

I decided to check if the amount of free space on the drive initially would affect the size of the new partition. While formatting, windows setup reported that there were 2 partitions.





When one was deleted, the other remained along with the space freed up from deleting the other partition. However, when the last partition was deleted, the free space went back to the drives default.





Once in windows, the drive was filled to about 3.5gb (vs 2gb for the first test). Once the Ghost ‘trick’ was completed, I was greated with a new partition of 9.46gb; just 30MB shy of the original disk! (pic from diskmanager, shows ghost partition as well). This cemented the idea that the Ghost ‘trick’ is little more then a program bug.


Several forums have interesting discussions regarding the issue, with similar results.



They, as well as The Inquirer's follow up letters outline that there is some extra space on all hard drives for mapping bad sectors and replacing them. Also, some drives may be made, then, marked down for resale to fulfill supply and demand. Also, they may not pass quality checks for a certain size (in a similar manner to CPU’s; a 2.4ghz P4C is identical to a 3.2ghz P4C, but did not pass quality control testing). However, the Ghost ‘trick’ did not seem to take advantage of this hidden space on my Seagate drive and merely created overlapping partitions.

So what can you do with this trick? Well for one, you can show your friends what a wicked hacker you are and that you have a 500GB hard drive!

Basically, for my Samsung drive, there was no hidden storage capacity that was unlocked, and if I had any important information on my drive, it would have been lost. The trick did not work for me, and if you want to try it out on your drives to see if you get anything out of it, make sure you have your data backed up!

I would also doubt that it would have any tangable affects on any other hard drives, since it appears that Ghost merely creates another partition overlapping the original partition on the drive. The best way to go about recovering lost space, should there be any, would be a firmware hack.
 
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