Free extra space? check this!!!

[Agent]

The 510gb claim also certainly raised one of my eyebrows too.

[Stubzz]

Yeah I noticed that 500Gb claim, I'm not holding this out to be true but I'd love it to be so. Hard drives arn't even made that big AFAIK (for the home market anyway)

[Steve]

Originally Posted by Agent

I wish HD's have flashable BIOS's, for more than one reason. :\

HDD's have flashable firmware - but obtaining the flash tools and the binaries can be tricky.

As for the 510GB claim - that's why I said I'll be skeptical until I see it work.

[m2c4u]

Just did this on a Samsung SP1604N, gained an extra 7GB of space. I ran HDtach before and after and the performance did not degrade at all. It actually went up slightly.

One thing to note, the drive I did it on already has 2 partitions instead of one, although I dont think it would of made any difference.

[MrFlibble]

In the time it takes me to *parp!* about doing this, I could've ordered another drive, which let's face it, with the current cost of hdd space, ain't gonna break the bank!

Daftness

[Steve]

Cool - I'm still installing XP onto my nackered Seagate to give it a go.

Ultimately I wanna try it on my 2 80GB SATA Barracuda's. However, I'll lose RAID capability so I'm not sure whether to go with a possible 80GB more space and a loss in performance.

[Stubzz]

How do you get the right version of Ghost? Does anyone know which one you can buy of the shelf? 2003.xxx?

[rc55]

I've found the DOS version (supplied with PC) - however I'm assuming the indications on the inquirer require the windows version to be installed on an 2k/XP OS because they mention the Disk Management thingy, and possibly it does some partition editing prior to rebooting.

I am wondering though, is it just unhiding the bad sector relocation area and mounting it for use? This would be catastrophic for most of us!

Ruairi

[Steve]

Ghost doesn't run at all - just the partition editing program that comes with the package.

I too thought about bad sector relocation, but there's way too much space to gain compared to what you'd expect for bad sector relocation.

Things are going slow here, but I'll have results by the end of the night I hope.

[blockers]

So you need 2 hard drives to run this off then yes? maybe try it on a 15gb and a 20gb later on

[Swafe]

sounds like it could work

say a 120 gb hard drive 120 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8 = how many bits there are on a 120 GB hard drive, 1030792151040 bits

no matter how accurate they are i doubt they will get the number of bits exactly to that figure, any less and theyd get sued for false avbertising so i reckon they put it quite a bit over to make sure they get enuff on, then disable the extra.

[Steve]

I found 6GB extra on my 13GB Seagate. I'm gonna write some data to it now and test it because I have a funny feeling it's just the ghost repartitioner interpreting firmware in an odd way.

Red Alert 2 copied to the "extended" partition and run successfully from it.

I'm now going to fill the drive up to 19GB to see if there really is all that space there.

[rc55]

Nice work kez, keep it up!

Ruairi

[Agent]

Excellent Kez. Keep us informed

[phaeton]

I will be trying this later today or early tomorrow on an IBM Deskstar 120GXP 80gB drive, hoping to see some interesting results. If that works, I'm going to do it to 2 Western Digital 80gB drives. Interested to see in what Kez finds...

[Steve]

I'm still filling the drive up, lol.

Once it's full I'm doing the following:

Chkdsk of both partitions - if anything it going to go wrong chkdsk will soon notice erroneous entries in the MFT.

Extract a rar archive - I have a 2GB backup archive copied onto it that I'm going to extract. It will, of course, inform me of data corruption if any CRC errors occur.